By MIKE MAGEE

In the fog of the Covid pandemic, many are wondering what ever happened to prior vocal support for universal coverage and Medicare-for-All. Expect those issues to regain prominence in the coming months. A bit of recent history helps explain why.

The January 6th insurrection, followed by the past weeks two mass shootings, have served to remind our citizens that we must address a range of issues while continuing to confront the pandemic threat.

Modern civilized societies rely on a double-armed approach to maintain order, peace and security. The first arm is laws. But laws are of little value without even and unbiased enforcement.

The second guardrail of civility is culture. MIT professor Edgar Schein described it this way: “Culture has three layers: the artifacts of a culture — our symbols and signs; its espoused values — the things we say we believe; and, most important, its underlying assumptions — … Read the rest

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Anyone who follows me knows that I’ve been questioning whether digital therapeutics are real and more importantly whether the people building and trying to sell them are simply trying to replicate the American drug pricing model–patent, protect, prescribe & price gouge. So who better to have this conversation with than the person in charge of explaining and selling the notion of digital therapeutics to the world? Megan Coder is Executive Director of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance. She graciously and bravely agreed to talk to me. Who won the argument? You’ll have to watch to decide, but I found our discussion to be a lot of fun and very interesting and I hope you will too – Matthew Holt

The transcript is below

Matthew Holt:

Hi, it’s Matthew Holt with a  THCB spotlight. I’m here with Megan Coder. Megan is the executive director of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance. And we’re here … Read the rest

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By HANS DUVEFELT

The faxes keep coming in, sometimes several at a time. “Your (Medicare) patient has received a temporary supply, but the drug you prescribed is not on our formulary or the dose is exceeding our limits.”

Well, which is it? Nine times out of ten, the fax doesn’t say. They don’t explain what their dosage limits are. And if it isn’t a covered drug, the covered alternatives are usually not listed.

So the insurance company is hoping for one of a few possible reactions to their fax: The patient gives up, the doctor tries but fails in getting approval, or the doctor doesn’t even try. In either case, the insurance company doesn’t pay for the drug, keeps their premium and pays their CEO a bigger bonus.

First problem: This may be in regards to a medication that costs less than a medium sized pizza. And the pharmacy generally doesn’t even … Read the rest

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By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

What’s better than being the CEO of one blazing-hot disruptive health tech company that’s raised $450M to build “the internet of healthcare”? How about becoming the CEO of a second company – a new managed Medicaid health plan company – that’s to be built on top of your first company’s machine learning platform, which is chock-full of hospital data and learning how to automate healthcare admin expertise? So is the fate of Sean Lane, CEO of Olive and now, also CEO of Circulo.

What does a built-from-scratch, tech-first Medicaid plan look like? Sean talks through the strategy behind the new health insurance co, which is aiming to use Olive’s tech to automate every aspect of the way a payer functions in effort to 1) strip away health plan admin costs and 2) create a never-before-seen relationship between patient, payer, and provider. On this latter point, … Read the rest

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By KIM BELLARD

The Ever Given is free! 

Admit it: you’ve been following the story about the huge container ship stuck in the Suez Canal.  It’s about the size of the Empire State building laid flat, and somehow ended up blocking one of the busiest waterways in the world. 

As serious as this was for global shipping and all of us who depend on it, much hilarity ensued.  Memes exploded, using this as a metaphor for almost everything, healthcare included.  Once there started to be hope for getting the Ever Given free, people started new memes that it should be “put back.” 

Well, I’m a sucker for a funny meme and a good metaphor too.  Our healthcare system is that canal, and we’re the unfortunate ship.  Only it doesn’t look like we’re getting unstuck anytime soon.

The Ever Given got stuck a week ago.  It is one of the world’s … Read the rest

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By HANS DUVEFELT

The hackneyed windows phrase, about what a domestic employee will and will not do for an employer, represents a concept that applies to the life of a doctor, too.

Personally, I have to do Windows, the default computer system of corporate America, even though I despise it. But in my personal life I use iOS on my iPad and iPhone and very rarely use even my slick looking MacBook Pro. I use “tech” and machines as little as possible and I prefer that they work invisibly and intuitively.

In medicine, even in what used to be called “general practice”, you can’t very reasonably do everything for everybody. Setting those limits requires introspection, honesty and diplomacy.

In my case, I have always stayed away from dealing with machine treatments of disease. But I do much more than just prescribe medication. Since the beginning of my career, and more … Read the rest

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By MERLE BUSHKIN

I recently asked my Primary Care Physician’s Medical Records Department for copies of my records covering the last eight months during which I had four office visits, five blood draws, and nine brief email exchanges. I should add that my PCP uses one of the two most popular EMR systems.

To my astonishment, I received 274 pages of digital records (PDFs).  I’ve heard of “record bloat” but this was an explosion!

When I analyzed their contents, I found that 59 pages were legitimate documents containing “original” information and data.  22 Pages were Office Notes — or what are often called Progress Notes —applicable to my four visits; 14 were reports of my five blood draws; 23 included my nine email exchanges. In short, they were “normal” — what you’d expect from the number of contacts I had with my doctor and his lab.

But the remaining 212 pages shocked … Read the rest

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By JON BLOOM

The rate of adoption for virtual care and remote monitoring solutions has skyrocketed over the last year as access to in-person appointments has been limited, but despite the uptick, we’re still drastically underutilizing their potential. These solutions often focus on treating a singular episode or chronic condition, when in fact they can open the door to more wide-ranging proactive monitoring and care that can have huge benefits in the long term. 

By simply offering a touchpoint for patients to interact with the health care system through solutions like remote monitoring, providers can detect and address all sorts of problems before they escalate and require more intense, expensive interventions, even if the problem isn’t related to the primary purpose of the solution. 

The downstream effects of these solutions are significant, both in terms of reducing the financial strain by eliminating unnecessary ER visits and hospitalizations, and in the … Read the rest

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By KIM BELLARD

Nanoparticles are everywhere!  By that I mean, of course, that there seems to be a lot of news about them lately, particularly in regard to health and healthcare.   But, of course, literally they could be anywhere and everywhere, which helps account for their potential, and their potential danger.

Let’s start with one of the more startling developments: a team at the University of Miami’s College of Engineering, led by Professor Sakhrat Khizroev, believes it has figured out a way to use nanoparticles to “talk” to the brain without wires or implants.  They use “a novel class of ultrafine units called magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENPs)” to penetrate the blood-brain barrier. 

“Once the MENPs are inside the brain and positioned next to neurons, we can stimulate them with an external magnetic field, and they in turn produce an electric field we can speak to, without having to use wires,” Professor Khizroev … Read the rest

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