Gen Z ’s Mid-Life Crisis
By KIM BELLARD These are not happy times in America. Now, I’m not thinking about the increasing cultural wars, the endless political bickering, the troubles in the Med-East or Ukraine, the looming threat of climate crisis, or the omnipresent campaigning for the November 2024 elections, although all those play a part. I’m talking about quantifiable data, from the latest World Happiness Report. It found that America has slipped out of the top 20 countries for the first time, falling to 23rd – behind countries like Slovenia and the U.A.E. and barely ahead of Mexico or Uruguay. Even worse, the fall in U.S. score...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 27, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Happiness Kim Bellard Mental Health Social Media Source Type: blogs

Disability Activist: Take Great Care When Seeing Bias Toward Disabled Citizens
By RANDY SOUDERS During the years I served as Chairman of the Board for Jean Kennedy Smith’s Arts and Disability program, Very Special Arts (VSA at the Kennedy Center), I had there opportunity to meet a wide range of remarkable and courageous disabled Americans. Among the lasting friendships is a painter and visual artist, Randy Souders, who was rendered quadriplegic at the age of 17 in a 1972 accident. His concerns of late have been heightened by Trump and MAGA Republicans. I share his communication with his permission here in the hope that tech designers and others will be alert to the fact that great care is requir...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 20, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Disability eugenics Holocaust Mike Magee Randy Souders Trump Source Type: blogs

Microplastics, Major Problem
By KIM BELLARD It’s been almost four years since I first wrote about microplastics; long story short, they’re everywhere. In the ground, in the oceans (even at the very bottom), in the atmosphere. More to the point, they’re in the air you breathe and in the food you eat. They’re in you, and no one thinks that is a good thing. But we’re only starting to understand the harm they cause. The Washington Post recently reported: Scientists have found microplastics — or their tinier cousins, nanoplastics — embedded in the human placenta, in blood, in the heart and in the liver and bowels. In one re...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 19, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Kim Bellard Microplastics Source Type: blogs

The Latest AI Craze: Ambient Scribing
By MATTHEW HOLT Okay, I can’t do it any longer. As much as I tried to resist, it is time to write about ambient scribing. But I’m going to do it in a slightly odd way If you have met me, you know that I have a strange English-American accent, and I speak in a garbled manner. Yet I’m using the inbuilt voice recognition that Google supplies to write this story now. Side note: I dictated this whole thing on my phone while watching my kids water polo game, which has a fair amount of background noise. And I think you’ll be modestly amused about how terrible the original transcript was. But then...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 18, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt abridge AI Ambient Scribing Anthropic clinical care Coding Google Microsoft Nabla Nuance OpenAI Suki Source Type: blogs

What could we do if GLP-1 weight loss drugs were free? Would our obesity epidemic be solved for good?
By CECI CONNOLY and SAMI INKINEN Unless you have been living under a rock, you likely have heard the names Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro. Or perhaps been humming the jingle. Rarely has a class of drugs (in this case, GLP-1s) achieved such widespread attention in popular culture and the media, which has people clamoring for them in every doctor’s office in the nation. And for good reason. What we know is that the efficacy and safety profile of these medications is substantially better than any weight loss drug in the past, while our obesity epidemic has only ballooned. As organizations committed to sound science and h...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 13, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy ACHP Ceci Connoly GLP-1s Obesity Sami Inkinen virta Source Type: blogs

Wait Till Health Care Tries Dynamic Pricing
By KIM BELLARD Nice try, Wendy’s. During an earnings call last month, President and CEO Kirk Tanner outlined the company’s plan to try a new form of pricing: “Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and day-part offerings along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling.”  None of the analysts on the call questioned the statement, but the backlash from the public was immediate — and quite negative. As Reuters described it: “the burger chain was scorched on social media sites.” Less than two weeks later Wendy’s backtracked – e...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 12, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: The Business of Health Care Kim Bellard pricing Private equity Wendy's Source Type: blogs

Roy Schoenberg, CEO, AmWell
AmWell is a now veteran telehealth platform. It used its IPO money to re-architect its entire platform and add companies like Conversa AI chat service and mental health service Silvercloud, as well as integrating deeply with EMRs & more. That change hit its earnings….so can they recover? Roy Schoenberg, CEO, tells you why this is good for AmWell and what happens next.–-Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 11, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt THCB Spotlights AmWell Roy Schoenberg Telehealth Source Type: blogs

The ‘Barbie Speech’ – How Much Has Really Changed For Women in America?
By MIKE MAGEE In our world where up is down, and black is white, there is a left and a right – it’s the middle we appear to be missing. Does it exist, or was it make believe all along? Into this existential despair enters Britt Cagle Grant, the 47-year old Federal Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The Stanford Law graduate, blessed by the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo, and former clerk of Hon. Brett Kavanaugh, was nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate on July 31, 2018. Now six years later, her words in rejecting DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” (otherwise kno...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 11, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Barbie De Santis feminism Mike Magee Terry Sciaivo Source Type: blogs

What Scares Healthcare Like EVs Scare Detroit
By KMI BELLARD I’m thinking about electric vehicles (EVs)…and healthcare. Now, mind you, I don’t own an EV. I’m not seriously thinking about getting one (although if I’m still driving in the 2030’s I expect it will be in one). To be honest, I’m not really all that interested in EVs. But I am interested in disruption, so when Robinson Meyer warned in The New York Times “China’s Electric Vehicles Are Going to Hit Detroit Like a Wrecking Ball,” he had my attention. And when on the same day I also read that Apple was cancelling its decade-long effort to build an EV, I was definitely paying attention. ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 6, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Biden Detroit EVs Hospitals Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs

Fee-For-Service: Predominant, Winning & Stupid
By MATTHEW HOLT In recent days and weeks, there have been three stories that have really brought home to me the inanity of how we run our health care system. Spoiler alert, they have the commonality that they all are made problematic by payment per individual transaction—better known as fee-for-service. First, several health insurers who sold their reputation to Wall Street as being wizards at understanding how doctors and patients behave had the curtain pulled back to reveal the man pulling the levers was missing a dashboard or dial or three. It happened to United, Humana and more, but I’ll focus on Agilon becau...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 4, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt Change Healthcare Colorado fee for service Humana UCHealth United HealthGroup Source Type: blogs

Are AI Clinical Protocols A Dobb-ist Trojan Horse?
By MIKE MAGEE For most loyalist Americans at the turn of the 19th century, Justice John Marshall Harlan’s decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). was a “slam dunk.” In it, he elected to force a reluctant Methodist minister in Massachusetts to undergo Smallpox vaccination during a regional epidemic or pay a fine. Justice Harlan wrote at the time: “Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” What could ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 1, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion AI Dobbs Forced Sterilization Mike Magee racial bias SCOTUS Vaccination Source Type: blogs

We Freeze People, Don ’ t We?
By KIM BELLARD Perhaps you’ve heard about the controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling about in-vitro fertilization (IVF), in which the court declared that frozen embryos were people. The court stated that it has long held that “unborn children are ‘children,’” with Chief Justice Tom Parker – more on him later – opining in a concurring opinion: Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing...
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 27, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion Frozen Embryos IVF Kim Bellard Pro-life Source Type: blogs

Putting the ‘value’ in value-based payments
By JOSH SEIDMAN Like Matthew Holt, I have also been ranting about the fact that “We’re spending way too much money on stuff that is the wrong thing.” As Matthew said, “it’s a rant, but a rant with a point!” And that’s a lot better than most rants these days. In addition to having a point, I’m also bringing a lot of data to my rant. More specifically, we’ve known for a long time that clinical care only drives 20% (maybe less) of health outcomes, yet we continue to spend more and more on it. We do that despite the well-documented fact that the U.S. performs worse than most OECD countries despite sp...
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 23, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy clubhouses Josh Seidman SDoH Serious Mental Illness Source Type: blogs

Lucienne Ide, Rimidi
Lucie Ide is a physician running Rimidi, a company helping health systems manage patients with chronic conditions. They extract data from EMRs and transfer this into workflow for care teams, predominantly at ACOs and other risk bearing organizations, but also increasingly with FFS groups using RPM to manage those patients. Their current moves are to continue to extend from their first patient group (diabetes) to all types of chronic patients. We chatted about her company, but also about the wider move (or lack of it) to better manage patients in the US system–Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 22, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt THCB Spotlights chronic care Diabetes Health Systems Lucienne Ide Rimidi RPM Source Type: blogs

So what can we do about health care costs?
By MATTHEW HOLT Last week Jeff Goldsmith wrote a great article in part explaining why health care costs in the US went up so much between 1965 and 2010. He also pointed out that health care has been the same portion of GDP for more than a decade (although we haven’t had a major recession in that time other than the Covid 2020 blip when it went up to 19%). However, it’s worth remembering that we are spending 17.3% of GDP while the other main OECD countries are spending 11-12%. Now it’s true that the US has lots of social problems that show up in heath spending and also that those other countries probably spend ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 20, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt Buzz Cooper Datmouth health spending Jeff Goldsmith John Wennberg Medicare Price controls Source Type: blogs