Redesign Healthcare

[redesignhealthcare]

"Put the data into the hands of the people who can use it to make a difference." Like all the new data that is being recorded and analysed the possibilities are massive but the ethical and privacy issues surrounding our personal information will not go away quickly.

Every step you take: Who owns our mobile health data?

[redesignhealthcare]

I realized that many of the true money-making businesses in healthcare really aren’t about optimizing delivery of primary care. This is a longer discussion but I realized, essentially, that we had no customers because no one was really interested in the model we were pitching. Doctors want more patients, not an efficient office.

No survivorship bias here. A compilation of startup failure post-mortems by founders and investors.

[redesignhealthcare]

What research exists on wellness programs does not support this optimism. This is, in part, because most studies of wellness programs are of poor quality, using weak methods that suggest that wellness programs are associated with lower savings, but don’t prove causation. Or they consider only short-term effects that aren’t likely to be sustained. Many such studies are written by the wellness industry itself. More rigorous studies tend to find that wellness programs don’t save money and, with few exceptions, do not appreciably improve health. This is often because additional health screenings built into the programs encourage overuse of unnecessary care, pushing spending higher without improving health.

Do Workplace Wellness Programs Work? Usually Not

[redesignhealthcare]

Surprisingly, the organization that calculates pricing for almost all of U.S. healthcare is a little known cabal. Aside from trying to get more pricing uniformity (definitely a good thing), what are we hoping to achieve with this new wave of “pricing transparency?” Assuming every healthcare price was published tomorrow – what then? Will that, in turn, magically influence supply and demand? Will it have any affect on rates that are often cost-shifted to support larger influences (uncompensated care and more lucrative downstream services to name two big ones)? More importantly, how will pricing transparency help us in our ultimate quest for healthcare value? The list of unanswered questions is long – including this last one. Do we really need more healthcare pricing transparency, or do we need to get the RUC out of the business of secretly fabricating healthcare prices for the whole system?

The RUC: Healthcare's Pricing Cabal (in the US)

[redesignhealthcare]

The health care issues commonly considered most important today — controlling costs and covering the uninsured — arguably should be regarded as secondary to innovation, inasmuch as a medical treatment must first be invented before its costs can be reduced and its use extended to everyone.

Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation

[medicalschool]

"Hard Doc’s Life" (Hospital Anthem) | A parody of Jay Z’s Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) in honor of the hospital doctors on the front lines representing. 

[redesignhealthcare]

Hard Doc Life

[redesignhealthcare]

The ruling raises the question of why, uniquely in the industrialized world, Americans have for so long favored an arrangement in health insurance that endows their employers with the quasi-parental power to choose the options that employees may be granted in the market for health insurance. For many smaller firms, that choice is narrowed to one or two alternatives – not much more choice than that afforded citizens under a single-payer health insurance system.

The Illogic of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

[redesignhealthcare]

We start by changing the payment system.

Healthcare, Meet Capitalism 

If transparent competition can drive the reinvention of U.S. healthcare, some creative thinkers stand to become unabashedly wealthy—and improve the quality of care in the process.

[redesignhealthcare]

To do this, Ms Morone and a group of computer-geek friends are developing a multi-sensor device that she will wear almost all the time (“it’s not yet waterproof,” she muses), and a software application known as the Database of Me, or DOME, which will store and manage all the data she generates. JLM’s eventual goal is to create a software “platform” for personal-data management; companies and other entities would be able to purchase data from DOME via the platform, but how they could use it would be limited by encryption or data-tagging. The software, then, would act as an automated data broker on behalf of the individual.

Who owns your personal data?

[fastcompany]

[redesignhealthcare]

fastcompany:

Searching For The Hidden Health Heroes Whose DNA Prevents Disease

The Resilience Project is looking for the rare people who have genetic mutations for certain diseases—but who then never get sick.

Read More>

[redesignhealthcare]

When you do business with Google, as a consumer, you strike a deal. In return for free search you get ads and for those ads you agree to your data being collected, stored and sold on. The way Apple sees business up ahead, when you use an Apple health service, Apple manages data for you, on your terms. That is a revolution.

The Revolution Hidden In The Apple Health Kit

[redesignhealthcare]

If we want to make progress in healthcare interoperability we need to train the next generation of leaders that proper systems engineering approaches are required, better interoperability is possible because some of it already exists now, and that you shouldn't wait for standards to get started on anything that will benefit patients and caregivers. Health IT integration woes can be overcome if we get beyond anecdotes and complaining and start doing something about it.

Anecdote-driven systems engineering and complaint-based interoperability design will not solve health IT woes

[redesignhealthcare]

Healthbook will reportedly aggregate and track everything from heart rate and blood pressure to nutrition, sleep patterns, and general activity. Third party apps will be able to plug into this app, much like ticketing or coupon apps can integrate with Passbook now. Considering the number of leaks we’ve seen so far, Healthbook will likely be one of the key iOS 8 features Apple demonstrates on Monday.

Apple's WWDC

[redesignhealthcare]

Almost every German belongs to one of some 160 nonprofit "sickness funds," or nonprofit insurance collectives. The sickness funds cover both medical visits and prescription drugs. Drug prices there are already lower than in the U.S. because sickness funds negotiate with both physician groups and drug manufacturers to set costs of all treatments across the board. In the U.S., Medicare isn't even allowed to negotiate lower drug prices.

Why Medicine is Cheaper in Germany

[redesignhealthcare]

Add water and the circuits simply melt.

Vanishing Medical Implants

[redesignhealthcare]

A lot of the web services allow unauthenticated or unencrypted communication between the devices, so we’re able to alter the info that gets fed into the medical record … so you would get misdiagnosis or get prescriptions wrong. The physician is taught to rely on the information in the medical records … [but] we could alter the data that was feeding from these systems, due to the vulnerabilities we found.

It’s Insanely Easy to Hack Hospital Equipment

[redesignhealthcare]

With respect to health care, given our common mortality, all of us have at least three fundamental jobs that arise in our lives: 1) Tell me what’s wrong - I think I might be sick, please diagnose me and figure out what’s wrong, 2) Fix what’s wrong - I know I’m sick, please give me the treatment I need to get better, and 3) Keep me well - I have a chronic condition to manage or just want to avoid getting sick again in the future, help me stay well. Historically the way most people have satisfied all of these health care jobs is by going to the doctor or the hospital. These venues have tried to fulfill all health care jobs for all people for centuries. In most industries an attempt to satisfy all jobs for all people typically results in a ‘one-size-fits-none’ product or service failure. However, in health care the hospital-centric business model has defied this law to date due in large part to a lack of viable alternative ways to satisfy the jobs to be done. With the advent of digital health technologies, however, we see an opportunity for new business models to rise up and nail individual patient jobs-to-be-done.

Satisfying the patient’s jobs-to-be-done, Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation