It's difficult for Digital Health startups to find alignment between their innovations and the complex business realities of healthcare. That is why this show exists. We discuss it in nearly every episode.  Today's guest has a novel approach to solving that alignment problem.  Alex Yarijanian and the team at CareNodes have decided to build their ideal customer. That's right. CareNodes is an MSO and accelerator of sorts. They find promising digital health innovations and then build a market for them. They'll start a medical practice, put their own clinicians in it, negotiate contracts ..read more

Price transparency and healthcare consumerism are top of mind for many operators and observers of the healthcare industry. On the surface, these topics sound great. Of course, we want to enable patients to be good consumers of healthcare. However, as we’ve seen so often on this show, aligning the obvious with the realities of the business of healthcare is no small feat. Today we’re talking with Dr. Steve Ambrose about healthcare costs, pricing, and consumerism. We discuss what these terms mean and why they are important. Then we dig into examples of companies that are already making an impact ..read more

There are many ways to innovate within an existing organization. However, it can be difficult to move as fast as you’d like within the constructs of an established business model and culture. For one, it’s difficult for your team to innovate on top of their “day job”. Second, it can be difficult to hire and incentivize the right people to drive the innovation within your existing constructs. These are the types of issues that the folks at Cleveland Clinic identified as reasons for not innovating fast enough in telemedicine. They decided that if they were going to pick up the pace, they were go ..read more

When it comes to billing codes there are many processes and solutions that focus on the backend. They support the coders and help ensure the codes are “bill ready”. However, as today’s guest points out, there are very few solutions that exist solely to help providers put those codes in the EHR accurately and efficiently in the first place. Abboud Chaballout created Diagnoss to untether the clinician from a clunky EHR interface when it comes to coding. Chaballout describes it as a provider assistant that reads the free-text clinical narrative as they record it and uses AI to suggest the appropr ..read more

The pandemic has exposed many weaknesses in our healthcare and public health systems, and our disjointed public health data infrastructure is certainly one of them. Like much of our healthcare data, public health data tends to be manually compiled, Excel-reliant, and lacking in critical detail needed to make good decisions. Today we talk with Prashant Natarajan, VP of Healthcare Life Sciences and Health Insurance at H2O.ai about reimagining the collection and use of public health data.   Public Health Data Topics Discussed   The current state of our public health data infrastructure ..read more

We planned to discuss quality measures but shifted to address a very important piece of listener feedback after the preview and Episode 1. The comments came from a doctor in the audience and I know there are many more doctors and healthcare administrators who feel the same way. The feedback, in short, is that we’ve been hearing about the move to value for 10 years. We’ve invested in it through several evolutions and it still hasn’t come to fruition. The key is to rebuild trust between the government and those delivering the care- whether hospitals, payers, providers, or innovators. Otherwise ..read more

There’s a lot of unknowns as we head into 2022, but one thing is certain: Health Equity will be a major focus for CMS and CMMI. Gail Zahtz, CEO of PropHealth, tells us that “value-based payment models have failed to deliver on the promise of health equity” and that is a major reason why CMMI paused so many models earlier this year. When the next iteration of value-based payment arrives, you can bet that health equity will be front and center. And for that, we prepare. “Fee-for-service says you get paid to fix a broken arm. Value-based care says everybody's tripping on the sidewalk and breaking ..read more

Direct Contracting is a new model from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI, or the CMS Innovation Center) aimed at reducing expenditures and preserving or enhancing quality of care for beneficiaries in Medicare fee-for-service (FFS). At a minimum, it’s an opportunity for providers to change the way they care for Medicare FFS patients. And if the Geographic Direct Contracting Model is launched (it’s currently under review by CMS), it will be a sea change in the 10 targeted “Geo” regions. Either way, it’s worth paying attention to. We covered the Direct Contracting model and ..read more

Healthcare orgs share large amounts of PHI with 3rd party vendors. They share it for analytics, rev cycle management, call center services, and more. It's a necessary part of the business. But you know what isn't necessary? Sharing everything!  There is a very disrespected requirement in HIPAA called minimum necessary. It means exactly what it says... you should share only that which is needed to do the job (typically under treatment, payment, or operations). In my experience, the default is to just send everything. It's lazy. It's wrong. It's risky. And it's completely unnecessary.  ..read more

Early in the pandemic, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) to help organizations around the world accelerate diagnostics research and development. In the first phase of the initiative, AWS awarded $8 million in computing credits and technical support to 87 organizations in 17 countries. Some of the highlights include:   Stanford University School of Medicine’s smartwatch app that detects early signs of COVID-19 Ilumina’s identification of viral mutations through next-gen sequencing Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub used Machine Learning to estimate the num ..read more