Amanda Goltz

Abt Global evaluated The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Oncology Care Model's (OCM) effectiveness in reducing care costs while maintaining quality. To examine OCM's impact on #HealthEquity, we assessed four historically underserved populations: Black and Hispanic patients, those with dual eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid, and residents of resource-poor neighborhoods. Our findings showed that, before OCM, these groups had higher acute-care use and episode payments, but were less likely to receive timely chemotherapy after surgery, adhere to oral treatments, or receive hospice care. While OCM improved oral treatment adherence for all groups, care quality was not consistently improved and only the treatment of Hispanic patients showed reduced payment costs. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/ebAxbyMx #HealthDisparities #HealthResearch

16

AI is only as good as its input and training data, as well as the questions we ask of it. When we build new systems, it’s easy for existing limitations to elicit a suboptimal solution for a diverse population. #aihealthcare #aihealthequity #healthequity #ai #datadisparity #healthdisparities

6

2 Comments

I always read Rock Health's digital health reports as they give a nice pulse feel for what is happening in the digital health funding space. Good to see funds raised in H1 2024 suggest funding in the sector seems to have stabilized at 2023 levels. Its no surprise the report emphasis the buzz around AI and healthcare. There have been clear winners in the AI healthcare space in the area of process and cost optimization and the R&D space. The impact of AI in care and treatment delivery is so far much more muted. One area I never though to look at AI was in its ability to bring together multiple healthcare pathways and digital point solutions into a more holistic seamless experience for the patient. There is a clear trend away from using stand alone digital health point solutions, and could AI address this challenge by facilitating the efficient integration of disparate processes and technology into unified care programs. I can see this happening with digital health products but this will be more tricky to do with physical care programs involving clinicians and HCPs. “AI is helping us combine multiple parts of the care journey, across all care experiences. In the future, benefits navigation, clinical guidance, and care delivery won’t be delivered by separate companies or point solutions within the healthcare ecosystem. They’ll be features that work in concert within products, and they’ll happen in under 90 seconds for a seamless patient experience.” – Glen Tullman, CEO, Transcarent and Managing Partner, 7wireVentures

11

Good question Prof. Georgi Chaltikyan, MD, PhD, I think worldwide this could be already the case but not in Germany. We need to do a lot of work I would say. #digitalhealth #digitalization

3

3 Comments

Newest episode of #HealthAndVeritas with guest, Mitesh Rao, MD, CEO of OMNY Health talking about democratizing access to healthcare data and improving health through more reliable information. Harlan Krumholz talks about "The business case for quality: estimating lives saved and harms avoided in a value-based purchasing model" an article in Health Affairs Scholar that returns us to the uncomfortable domain of asking why our "system" doesn't do more to save lives and improve health outcomes. I talk about Marijuana. I am concerned that we are watching a slow moving catastrophe due to the desire to decriminalize and reduce controls over Cannabis and THC-containing products (which is good) while paying too little attention to quality and regulations. Listen to the pod and tell me what YOU think. And please post your comments, tell a friend, and rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. Yale School of Management Yale School of Public Health Yale School of Medicine https://lnkd.in/ezj8qVqy

40

I’ve been given advice that the fastest way to monetize HER Heard without charging the end user (woman) is trackers and selling data. Instead, I’d like to build something more trustworthy. I don’t want to be in a headline like this. If you are not paying, then you are the product (you/your data are being sold). There are newer ways to deindentify data or even to aggregate things women search for that can be of interest to various stakeholders. In theory that could be okay to sell, but in a post-Roe world with laws encouraging bounty hunting, I am vetting the choices ahead. I am all for moving fast, without breaking things.

6

Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🗞️ Notable partnerships 🤝 • Kaiser Permanente is partnering with Innovaccer to incorporate their population health and AI platform        • MUSC Health adopted Andor Health’s ThinkAndor in its ED to reduce wait times and “leaving without being seen” rates.      • Upperline Health is partnering with Navina to improve clinical workflows and improve the accuracy of patient histories.      • Intermountain Health deployed Nuance Communications DAX Copilot, an AI ambient scribe solution.      • PA Clinical Network is partnering with Guidehealth  to improve outcomes and care quality while improving physician efficiency. Product updates 👩🏼‍💻 • Klara released a new patient intake product for athenahealth users.    • Baton Health released Universal Primary Source, giving users access to hundreds of primary source databases for credentialing.    • InsightRX released InsightRX Apollo, an analytics platform that provides insights on clinical performance.    • Trovo Health launched with a $15 million seed round, offering specialty-specific AI combined with clinical experts to help practices add to their capabilities.    • Quest Diagnostics acquired PathAI’s diagnostic laboratory business (PathAI Diagnostics) to improve Quest’s oncology services.    • GenHealth.ai launched its Automated Prior Authorization platform.    • Veradigm® is partnering with MedEvolve, Inc. to make its suite of products available to Veradigm users.    • CLEW announced availability of a newly FDA-approved patient surveillance platform. Posts we enjoyed 👏 • Eric Topol, MD shared a compelling piece reviewing the state of research on AI in medicine. In short, we’re seeing our first early evidence that AI can reduce mortality as a research endpoint, but large language models are not yet the panacea we’ve been promised. (https://lnkd.in/e6hK-4mr)    • Nikhil Krishnan of Out-Of-Pocket shared a deep dive on Stedi, which converts X12 EDI into JSON-based APIs for healthcare tech developers. (https://lnkd.in/eqS9V5zW) --- Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for the Elion Briefing to get all of the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox 📬 👉 https://bit.ly/49z6AUW

70

5 Comments

Has the era of "Digital Health Integrators" begun? "Kaiser Permanente announced a significant AI partnership this week aimed at enhancing value-based care. The West Coast-based health system is deploying Innovaccer’s healthcare AI platform and population health management tools — starting with its Washington market and potentially expanding to new markets in the future. "San Francisco-based Innovaccer was founded in 2014. The healthcare technology company specializes in data-driven solutions that help providers enhance patient care and operation efficiency. "Its healthcare AI platform helps simplify patient care by bringing together data from various disparate sources. By combining all this information, the platform provides a complete and detailed view of each patient’s health, explained Innovaccer CEO Abhinav Shashank. “This helps doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals get a clearer understanding of each patient’s situation and deliver better care. Therefore, it is not just a point AI application, but a holistic approach to healthcare AI that helps the healthcare ecosystem journey from data to data-driven decisions,” he remarked." #digitalhealth #dataintegration #digitalhealthintegrators #digitalhealthtwin #10phealth #digitaltransformation #ai #ai4h #artificialintelligence #artificialintelligenceinhealthcare #health #healthcare #healthsystem #biomedicine #medicine #telemedicine #telehealth #ehealth #medtech #medicalinnovation #healthtech #healthtechnology #healthtechinnovation #bioinformatics #genome, #phenome #10ph #systemsbiology #genomics #omics #precisionmedicine

21

Elon Musk’s xAI, Which Just Raised $6 Billion, Has Significant Potential To Disrupt Healthcare via Sai Balasubramanian, M.D., J.D. "The most obvious entry point for xAI is similar to what other large, technology companies are attempting to do: increase task automation, improve clinical workflows, and optimize clinician productivity. Technology giants are investing billions of dollars creating and training foundation models so that they can easily fit into the day-to-day healthcare workflow."

17

1 Comment

I’m excited to share what we've been obsessing over for the last six months! Introducing Threshold Health, a unique patient engagement platform that puts healthcare operators in the driver's seat of modern care gap closure campaigns. Shockingly, only 1 in 20 US adults is up to date on their recommended preventive care, such as cancer screenings or blood pressure testing. This statistic is paradoxically low, especially given the increasingly direct financial incentives tied to increasing population-level care quality. When my longtime friend and now cofounder, Dr. Doug Murad, and I started exploring why patient engagement is so low, we quickly discovered a recurring pattern. Time and again, we heard from passionate operators across diverse healthcare organizations who struggled to mount effective patient engagement campaigns, often waiting until the last few months of the contract year to close important care gaps in their patient populations. In almost every case, these operators seemed to be building campaigns from scratch, deploying blunt tools like bulk SMS, physical gift cards, and manual call centers, and relying on lagging indicators of success. Unsurprisingly, these efforts were operationally expensive and often fell short of their targets. Dr. Doug and I aim to empower healthcare operators level up their patient engagement with campaigns that are cheaper, better, and faster than building something themselves. To do this, we’re building a self-serve platform that makes it easy for operators to rapidly launch and iterate on modern campaigns that integrate well with their existing care coordination workflows. If we’re successful in this first step, we will have a vehicle to deliver an increasingly sophisticated library of campaign templates and next-generation patient engagement technology. So far, we’ve developed a prototype that allows operators to go from zero integration to a modern deployed campaign in fewer than 10 clicks. We’re excited to run our first pilot in mid-July and continue developing the product with 2-3 launch partners through the rest of this year. There's a lot left to learn -- I plan to post regular updates and lessons here. Reaching this level of conviction took a lot of time—not just from me and Dr. Doug, but from numerous experts across various fields who have been extremely generous in sharing their expertise and feedback. I especially want to thank our network of advisors: Daniel Croymans, MD, MBA, Benjamin (Benny) Axt, Indira Gowda, Ivo Vlaev, Suruchi Kothari, MD, Melissa G., Christian Spier and many others; our investors Jane Wang and Saumitra Thakur at MedMountain Ventures; and our first full-time employee Joe Bonneau. Also, shout-out to Shirley Mao and rvnway for designing and building our new website: https://threshold.health With all that said, we’re open for business! Let’s chat :)

146

14 Comments

90% of startups fail. So why do healthcare initiatives at large corporations fail at about the same rate? Many of these were launched with great fanfare but announced closures a few short years lateer. A few reasons might be: 1. Mission but no strategy: it's not enough to have a mission to treat a specific population or group of employees, you have to be in it for the long haul with a strategy that will evolve over time. 2. Misunderstanding of healthcare complexity: many executives believe they understand the problem and use tools from other industries to solve healthcare issues. You can't always bring things that work in banking, finance, retail for example. 3. Execution: rarely does leadership hire people who have a track record of execution in healthcare. I'm talking about people who have been able to gut through the losses. This is probably the biggest misstep. You agree with these reasons? What would you add to these? #healthcare #failures https://lnkd.in/etzZywnK

60

15 Comments

One key reason why healthcare technologies like AI, telemedicine, and software haven't structurally lowered costs or broadened access for the entire system after decades of experimentation (excluding pure financial engineering of payer contracts) is the limited reimagining of care delivery itself, with asynchronous telemedicine as a notable exception. In the same way that digitizing physical paper failed to exploit the capabilities of a new computing medium for word processing, hosting physician-patient conversations over video does not transform the actual delivery of care. In telemedicine, many of the inputs (e.g., clinician time) and therefore cost structures of in-person care persist, which is why we often see fee-for-service telemedicine companies struggle to achieve economies of scale (i.e., growing revenues non-linearly while growing costs linearly). Until we deconstruct the components of a medical appointment – from intake and triage, to chart review, history gathering, physical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up – we will continue to be underwhelmed by the disconnect between the transformative potential of these technologies and real-world patient/system impact. I’m optimistic that the emergence of reliable and performant medical AI agents will urge us to perform this deconstruction and redesign the fundamental building blocks of a “medical appointment.”

215

39 Comments

We all have seen by now that AI holds the promise of reshaping healthcare delivery, and this goes particularly for marginalized communities. Its widespread adoption, however, necessitates careful navigation of potential biases and ethical concerns to ensure equitable outcomes for all! As we embrace AI's transformative potential, we must continue to actively address issues of access, transparency, and workforce readiness in order to promote a future where technology enhances, rather than hinders, health equity initiatives. #HealthEquity #Healthcare #AI

8

1 Comment

Few would argue against keeping bad actors out of healthcare. Some (including me) would argue that heavy handed legislation that lacks subtlety and nuance often produces unintended consequences. California is already facing a shortage of healthcare providers, and it's unclear if this legislation does anything to address that problem. If the bill stifles innovation (which these seemingly well-intentioned but often overreaching efforts do), things could be worse. Anyone who is pushing healthcare forward in a novel, sustainable, and innovative way should be supported, not hamstrung by unsophisticated, catch-all legislation. There has to be a mechanism for good actors to prove they're good actors. It's incumbent upon them to bring evidence, and it's incumbent upon decision-makers to give that evidence credence. Absolutism, narratives, and echo chambers in healthcare discourse are counterproductive, and we'd do well to move past them. We can and must pursue any viable avenue of change if there's any hope to make progress. (Consider the amount of money spent on CMS/CMMI programs that have produced few meaningful results.) Bad actors should be held accountable -- this includes corporate backers and venture capitalists. They shouldn't be allowed to shrug or feign ignorance when their companies misbehave. They should be subject to the same penalties levied on wayward clinicians when things go sideways. We need careful resection, not wanton excision. (Side note: Where is the legislation that addresses the underlying causes of consolidation? Where are the efforts to support physician-led healthcare?) #medicine #healthcare #health #healthcarepolicy #healthcareinnovation

9

1 Comment

As I read through this article from Becker's Healthcare, outlining top trends from 82 healthcare executives, common themes rise to the top: #AIinHealthcare: Executives are closely watching the impact of AI on healthcare, including data networks and EHR-agnostic deployment technology. (AI is on the minds of all of us!) #HealthcareTrends: Leaders are following various trends such as multi -omics, and immunotherapies. They are also watching GLP-1’s closely, both from a treatment perspective and cost perspective. Costs and #Sustainability: There is a focus on the escalating costs of care, inflation, labor costs, and the challenges of financial sustainability in healthcare. #Cybersecurity and Labor: Cybersecurity threats and labor shortages in healthcare are significant concerns for hospital executives. #HealthcareOnLinkedIn #provider #healthcare #KOLs #HealthcareLeaders

22

2 Comments

~50 of the most brilliant healthtech innovators gathered at the 3rd annual Vive Collective Summit recently. I was honored to speak on the "Healthcare AI Panel" and share some lessons along with my co-panelists: - AI is revolutionizing healthcare in various ways, both intentional and unforeseen. Its integration has been largely without patient input, leading to concerns about its potential. - Patients need to trust AI for its full potential to scale.  - The industry needs specific health AI governance or increased tech governance to address liability, safety, and efficacy.  - Over the next 12 months, AI is predicted to make operational leaps, change the makeup of engineering teams, and potentially increase or decrease provider burnout depending on the allocation of extra time for patient care. Thanking Ritesh Patel for fantastic moderation! Read more about the summit here: https://lnkd.in/gy7_A3PJ Shout to my friends at Vive Collective for hosting and elevating these discussions: Cheryl Cheng Hillary Frank Rebecca Mitchell, MD Kathy Ku

58

2 Comments

A whirlwind of activity last week at the America's Physician Groups conference. Lots of solid insights shared by health system leaders. Some notable thoughts: +++ Artificial intelligence is intelligent in different ways: By now, we all know ai has a diverse set of use cases, incorporated in different applications and tools. But there are fundamental differences in how the intelligence itself is brought to life. Examples include: - Predictive AI, used to forecast future outcomes by leveraging historical data. Shout out to UCLA’s CKD/ESRD early intervention protocol (Joycee Berin) and Diagnostic Robotics’ intelligence care post-dicharge journeys (Kira Radinsky) - Protocolized AI, used to automating a user’s administrative load by using a set of detailed, pre-defined rule sets. Thanks to ARC for sharing their experience using Elaborate 's automated outpatient lab summaries (Manish Naik) - Generative AI, used to create new content. Great overview of ambient documentation at MGB as well as Cedars’ Sinai talking through its medical ontology model powering acute triage (Caroline Goldzweig) Across system leaders and experts, there was clear agreement that the first step to implementing intelligence intelligently is defining the ‘jobs to be done’. That way, internal and external stakeholders are clear on what they're solving for when they architect the solution.  +++ Scaling AI takes time and rigorous observation: Market leaders describe a phased pilot approach that allows clinicians to build confidence and system leaders to measure ROI before deploying systemwide. Loved hearing Rebecca Mishuris outline MGB’s novel approach of piloting two solutions against one another, to pressure test implementation, workflow, and value creation. +++ Proving ROI continues to be challenging: Lots of vendors using lots of different metrics to prove value, but the majority of leaders agreed that estimating the ROI of these new tools today is part science, part art. Demonstrating the ROI of the “soft” metrics around provider burnout and retention seemed to be a big opportunity, especially for investment in more efficient primary care and PCP wellbeing. After all, PCPs drive referrals to specialty-level care (and higher reimbursements) for health systems. Appreciated Anurang Revri's overview of how working team setup can also impact ROI estimates. +++ Value-based care = tools + humanity: VBC will require not only implementing tools to support clinical documentation, risk capture, upcoding, etc, but also humanizing interactions to engage patients. Countless examples, but one that made me smile was a depression focused chat bot responding in the following interaction: - Context: post-discharge check in Bot: Hi Freida, how are you feeling today after your surgery?  Patient: I’m having a tough time, am in a lot of pain.  Bot: Well, it can’t be that bad, I’m sure it will get better with a positive mindset!    🤣 🤣 🤣 Can't wait for next go-around!

22

2 Comments

On Monday nurses from across California picketed outside Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center to protest the use of AI. In the past year I’ve presented my views on AI and its impact on nursing to America’s largest nursing association, one of the largest unions representing nurses, leadership from top provider organizations and at a number of nursing conferences. Regardless of the group my message is always the same: ·      AI is one of the greatest issues impacting the future of work for nurses. (let’s figure this out together). ·      Done right AI is not about technology. It’s about empowerment. The rub here is defining “done right.”  This is at the heart of why nurses hit the picket line in California and why I have predicted for some time that AI would become a bargaining issue. ·      Nurses are among the most important constituents to guide AI-driven workflow change and shape Responsible AI principles. Period. If you are a nurse or health leader reading this here’s the question: Are nurses actively involved in your organization’s efforts to plan/deploy/measure the value of AI applied in care settings? I’ve had the privilege of working with some great health and medical organizations around the world in planning and implementing AI. A key difference between organizations that use AI to create value-at-scale versus those that spin up a few pilot use cases comes down to this: Repeatable value comes by involving those on the front lines who drive any process to be improved with AI. These are people who know what isn’t working and are almost always the smartest to know what will. Comments, different points of view encouraged.   I’ve added/modified a few slides to amplify my message. T. #nursing #futureofwork #nursinginformatics Kathleen McGrow, DNP, MS, RN, PMP, FHIMSS, FAAN Valerie Serwicki MSHI, BSN, RN Olga Kagan, PhD, RN, CIMI, FHIMSS Sophia Brown PhD, DBA, FACHE, CPHIMS, PMP Robbie Freeman Gil Bashe Evan Kirstel B2B TechFluencer Irma Rastegayeva✨Influence Through Storytelling™️ Rachel Woods

87

24 Comments