Category Archives: data saving lives

data saving lives, policy, politics, rapid learning health systems

Singapore appoints first Chief Data Scientist

this is a brilliant move….

http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2014/aug/14/singapore-governments-first-chief-data-scientist-p/

ANALYSIS, CONNECTED GOVERNMENT, GOVERNMENT ANALYTICS

SINGAPORE GOVERNMENT’S FIRST CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST PRABIR SEN ON HIS NEW ROLE AND GOALS

By Kelly Ng | 14 August 2014 | Views: 689

From traffic updates to tax returns, cities and countries have more data than ever before – but how can they manage it?

FutureGov has exclusively interviewed Prabir Sen, Singapore government’s first Chief Data Scientist. He was appointed by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) in January, and spoke on why his role was created, what he wants to achieve and the challenges he faces.

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Vision to be a global analytics hub

Singapore aspires to be the world’s centre of data science and analytics. This vision required a dedicated team to guide the development of skills on data sciences and advanced analytic across the government and industry. The role of the Chief Data Scientist and his supporting team, called the Data Sciences Group, were created to drive the private and public sectors’ adoption of data analytics, said Sen.

Sen is excited about the potential for expanding Singapore’s work in this area: “I wonder if it is possible to invite the international sports and games industry, such as the Olympics Association, to collaborate with Singapore-based tech companies and talents on sports analytics right here in Singapore? Is it possible to attract aerospace and logistics companies here to do machine-to-machine data analytics? Is it possible to drive the multinational consumer good corporations to work with local small tech companies on advanced consumer insights?”

Using analytics to improve quality of decisions & lives

The government believes that data analytics has huge opportunities to impact government services and improve citizens’ lives in a wide range of areas, such as healthcare, transportation, education, retail and waste management.

A large volume of data is being generated from sensors and mobile devices today. This includes communication between person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine, added Sen. He and his team are tasked to evaluate and apply advanced analytics techniques and models that can help organisations get a “360-degree view on people, technology and policies to improve the quality of decisions and improve citizens’ lives and journey of experience at various touch points.”

Cross agency data analytics

The greatest opportunity for using analytics within government is what Sen calls “cross data analysis”, where one agency can use data of another agency to solve their problem. “For example, the Ministry of Manpower can analyse healthcare data from Ministry of Health to determine skill gaps and future talent development requirements, or, transportation use environment to determine impact of weather in commuters’ behaviour” he said. “Such cross data analyses also require greater attention to and better governance of data protection, privacy and anonymity,” he added.

Some agencies are currently using this strategy and are achieving great results, he said, and the Singapore government is now encouraging them to explore more cross-agency data use.

Innovation therefore requires agencies to be even more ready to experiment: “Data analytics is fanning the flames of entrepreneurship in the Singapore government, to adopt a philosophy called ‘start up’. Government is obviously not a start up but initiatives to effect change are best thought of as start-ups where we should be more ready to trial and be comfortable with small failures.”

“Compare a project that takes months and costs a lot of money; with one that takes two persons and a couple of weeks of effort. If the former fail, it will be catastrophic, while a failure of a small trial is still acceptable. We can adopt a risk management methodology where the cost of failing becomes exceedingly tiny,” he said.

Developing analytics talent

One of Sen’s key performance indicators is to strengthen data talent locally. According to a recent IDA release, “McKinsey forecasts that there will be a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 data sciences and analytics professionals by 2018 in just the US alone”.

Sen shared that the need to increase the local data talent pool is a real challenge. Most organisations are struggling to recruit enough candidates with the right skills. “We are shorthanded in several areas: data scientists who have both computational experience and business acumen, data visualisers who are skilled in both analytics and graphic design, analytics consultants who hold domain knowledge besides their analytics experience, and data engineers who can source and integrate data from disparate systems.”

Retaining this data talent is even more difficult, he continued. “Most of these data professionals are creative people. They require space and freedom and a stimulating environment to explore new approaches and insights that challenge them. So we need to facilitate and grow this local community, to drive engagement with them, pulling together users, data analytics companies, cloud providers to form an ecosystem to exchange ideas.”

To this end, IDA has launched a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on data science and analytics this month, offering locals the chance to develop the vital skills to respond to the growing demand for data professionals. The class has attracted more than 350 registrations from both the private and public sector.

Chief Data Officer vs Chief Data Scientist

Sen also clarified how his role is different from a Chief Data Officer. “A Chief Data Officer typically has responsibility to govern and protect data, and find ways to use data across the agencies. My role, on the other hand, is to find ways to build transformative products using data sciences, analytics and insights; drive rapid development and adoption of analytical techniques, and develop the local data and tech talent.”

The skills and experience that make a good Chief Data Scientist, Sen added, is not limited to quantitative and computation proficiency. The candidate must be good at understanding human behaviour, how people go about solving their problems and making decisions, and able to think laterally to engage in cross-cutting strategic dialogues. Most importantly, he must be able to learn, unlearn and relearn.

Learning will be vital as Singapore seeks to become a global hub for analytics. Agencies are being challenged to work together on trialling new approaches, while the government is seeking to build greater scientific communities and talent in the city state. Ultimately, though, these efforts could lead to greater personalisation of citizen services – a new way in which the government engage and does business with its customers.

data saving lives, entrepreneurship, health market quality, healthcare, healthy habits, nutrition, policy, quantified self, rapid learning health systems

What Uber for healthcare might look like

Interesting take on imagining the future of healthcare.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/08/uber-health-care-will-look-like.html

What the Uber of health care will look like

 | POLICY | AUGUST 5, 2014

For a very long time, one of the most valuable business assets in New York City was a yellow cab taxi medallion. With recent value in the $1 million dollar range, ownership of the medallion was a virtual cash annuity, combined with equity growth (in 2004 medallion prices were in the mid $200,000 range and have increased in value 15% year over year in the 9 years since). As one owner once put it, “it even makes money for me while I sleep,” since the cars can be rented when the owner is off shift.

 

Medallion owners tend to fall into two categories: private practitioners and fleet owners. Private practitioners own their own car, have responsibility for maintenance, gas and insurance, and tend to use the cash flow to live while allowing the medallion to appreciate over the course of their career. They then cash out as part of their retirement plan.

Fleet owners have dozens of medallions; they lease or buy fleets of automobiles and often have their own mechanics, car washes and gas pumps. They either hire drivers as employees or, more often, rent their cars to licensed taxi drivers who get to keep the balance of their earnings after their car and gas payments.

In London, taxi drivers have to invest 2 to 4 years of apprenticeship before they can take and pass a test called “The Knowledge.” However, like NYC, finally getting that a licence to operate a Black Cab in London is a hard-working but stable way to earn a living.

Now imagine that someone comes along that can offer all the services of the NYC yellow cab or the London Black Cab directly to the general public, but does not have to own the medallion, own the car or employ the driver. With as much as 70% lower overhead, they provide the same service to the consumer; in fact they are so consumer friendly that they become the virtual gatekeeper for all the taxi and car service business in the community.

How, you ask? Outsourcing the overhead and just-in-time inventory management; they convince thousands of people to drive around in their own cars with the promise of a potential payment for services driving someone from point A to point B. All these drivers have to do is meet certain standards of quality and safety. This new company does all the marketing and uses technology to make the connection between the currently active drivers and those in need of a ride; they provide simple and transparent access to a host of cars circulating in your neighborhood, let you know the price and send a picture and customer rating of the driver, all before he or she arrives, and they process the payment so no money ever changes hands.

This is the premise behind Uber, a very disruptive take on the taxi business. As a recent article in Bloomberg noted, the slower rate of growth in medallion value is already attribute to the very young company; a recent protest by Black Cab drivers in London resulting in an eight-fold increase in Uber registrations.

Now imagine that a new health care services company comes to your community offering population health management services on a bundled payment or risk basis. They guarantee otherwise inaccessible metrics of quality and safety to both large employers and individual consumers. They employ only a handful of doctors, but do not own any hospitals, imaging centers or ambulatory care facilities.

However, they are masters at consumer engagement, creating levels of affinity and loyalty usually found with consumer products and soft drinks. They use a don’t make me think approach to their technology, seamlessly integrating analytics and communications platforms into their customers lives, and offer consumers without a digital footprint a host of options for communications, including access to information and services via their land lines or their cable TV box. They leverage high-level marketing analytics to determine who will be responsive to non-personal tools for engagement, like digital coaching, and who requires a human touch.

Care planning is done based on clinical stratification and evidence; population specific data is used to determine the actual resources required to achieve clinical, quality and financial goals. (A Midwest ACO has more problems with underweight than obesity, do they need to maintain their bariatric surgery center?) Physicians serve as “clinical intelligence officers,” creating standing orders across the entire population, implemented by non-clinical personnel; they also create criteria for escalation and de-escalation of services and resource allocation based on individual patients progress towards goals. They employ former actors and actresses as health coaches and navigators, invest heavily in home care and nurse care managers and use dieticians in local supermarkets to support lifestyle changes (while accessing and analyzing the patients point-of-purchase data to see what they are really buying).

The primary relationship between patients and their health systems is with a low cost, personal health concierge: Primary care physicians are only accessed based on predetermined eligibility criteria and only with those physician who agree to standards of quality and accountability are in the network. Multi-tiered scenario planning for emergencies is built into the system. For professional resources only required on an as-needed basis, such as hospital beds, surgeons and medical specialists, access is negotiated in advance based on a formula of quality standards and best pricing but only used on a just-in-time basis.

They are not a payer, although a professional relationship with them is on a business-to-business basis. They are a completely new type of health system, guaranteeing health and well being, transparent in their operations and choosing their vendors based on their willingness and ability to achieve those goals. In doing so, they significantly reduce the resources necessary to achieve goals for quality of care and quality of health across the entire population; they treat quality achievement as an operational challenge and manage their supply chain accordingly.

Am I suggesting this a new model of care? No, I am personally an advocate for physician-driven systems of care. But this kind of system is very possible, and there are companies working on models of national ACOs using many of these principles.

The Uber of health care will have much less to do with the mobile app; and far more to do with creating value by minimizing overhead, designing flexible operations, supporting goal-directed innovation and bringing supply-chain discipline to the idea of resource-managed care delivery. It will involve embracing models of care delivery that leverage emerging evidence on non-clinical approaches to health status and quality improvement, and focusing on designing goal-directed interactions between people, platforms, programs and partners.

I can hear more than a few of you creating very good reasons why it wont work (“You can’t put an ICU bed out to bid!”), but these scenarios are very doable. If we want to revitalize the experience of care for patients and professionals, we must be willing to acknowledge and embrace dramatically different, often counter-intuitive, new operating models for care that will require new competencies, forms of collaboration and reengineering the roles and responsibilities of those who comprise a patients’ health resource community.

Steven Merahn is director, Center for Population Health Management, Clinovations. He blogs at MedCanto.

data saving lives, health market quality, healthcare, policy, rapid learning health systems

Intervention kills

Excellent article on over-servicing in healthcare.

Includes reference to this Berwick/JAMA article (PDF): Eliminating-Waste-in-US-Healthcare-Berwick

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/19/patients-hospital-care-over-intervention

Too much intervention makes patients sicker

A culture of over-investigation and over-treatment is now one of the greatest threats to western health
The Observer, Jump to comments (209)

Hospital theatre

Patients should be treated ‘according to clinical need’, not a focus on medical, pharmaceutical and financial targets. Photograph: PA

A few weeks ago my mum was admitted to hospital with a life-threatening pneumonia, induced by an immuno-suppressive medication she was taking for her rheumatoid arthritis. When the chest x-ray revealed infection in both lungs my father and I, both doctors, understood that her condition was serious. But we also knew that if anyone could fight this, it was one of the toughest and inspirational individuals, a woman who 10 years ago survived a brain haemorrhage.

But after several days into her stay, once the markers in her blood and oxygen levels started to improve, I was particularly concerned when she became uncharacteristically negative and tearful saying: “Just let me go. I’ve suffered enough.” Several days of eating unpalatable hospital food and sleeping poorly had started to have an adverse effect on her physical and psychological condition. Despite starting to recover from the acute cause of her admission she was now being put at risk of an affliction that affects thousands of hospitalised patients daily.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, Dr Harlan Krumholz, professor of medicine at Yale, described a syndrome that starts to develop close to discharge from hospital. Physiological systems are impaired, reserves are depleted, and the body cannot effectively mitigate health threats. It is instructive to note that this syndrome – created by the stressful hospital environment – is a significant contributor to hospital re-admissions. It is estimated that 10-20% of patients discharged from hospital in the UK and US will be re-admitted within 30 days, often with a condition entirely unrelated to their original admission.

Poor sleep and inadequate nutrition have an adverse effect on physical performance and co-ordination, cognitive function, immunity, and even cardiac risk. The elderly are particularly vulnerable to being re-admitted with falls and infection, with one study revealing that a fifth of hospitalised patients over 65 had an average nutrient intake of less than 50% of their daily requirements.

Within days of feeding my mum home-cooked food, which we’d brought in, and asking the nurse to not wake her up in the night for unnecessary “routine” blood pressure checks, insisting that she didn’t need to be jagged with a needle for blood every day and getting her to wear her own clothes, my mum was smiling again and was able to regain enough strength to be discharged a week later.

A culture of over-investigation and over-treatment is now one of the greatest threats to western health. In the US it is estimated that a third of all healthcare activity brings no benefit to patients. Examples include excessive use of antibiotics, imaging for non-sinister headaches, use of surgery when watchful waiting is better and unwanted intensive care for patients at the end of life who would prefer hospice and home care. In the US, a fee-for-service model encourages high volume and expensive procedures. But we should be alert to similar possibilities here: the UK’s “payment by results” – which in reality is a payment-by-activity model – potentially incentivises “doing more” on the part of physicians.

As a profession we have also been guilty – unwittingly or otherwise – of exaggerating the benefits of medications often perceived as magic pills by patients when their benefits are often modest at best. This also detracts from more meaningful lifestyle interventions by giving the public the illusion of protection. One recent study revealed that those taking statins consumed considerably more food and ended up heavier after several years compared to those not taking statins. Our over-obsession with cholesterol-lowering by any means has become “the end in itself” says Rita Redberg, professor of cardiology at the University of California San Francisco: “Who cares about cholesterol lowering if it doesn’t benefit the patient?”

Even respected medical guideline panels appear to be influenced by corporate interests. The National Institute of Clinical Excellence has, in successive weeks, issued statements expanding the offer of weight-loss surgery to up to a million more obese patients with type 2 diabetes and suggested statins could be given to millions of healthy people.

At best, this is a contribution to over-medicalisation; at worst, this can seem like the behaviour of a sort of lobby group for the device and pharmaceutical industry. (On Friday Nice’s director of clinical practice, Mark Baker, said that allegations that eight of the 12 members of the guideline panel on statins had direct financial ties to the industry were unjustified.)

 

 

Political interference often worsens the situation. Jeremy Hunt’s recent criticism tainting all GPs for not referring patients early enough for cancer diagnosis is totally unjustified, fuelling more defensive medicine through encouraging over-investigation. This is the worst kind of medicine and goes against what I remember being taught in medical school – which was to treat patients according to clinical need.

But there’s a solution. In an effort to curb the unsustainable healthcare costs, estimated to reach a staggering $4.6trn by 2020, a campaign known as Choosing Wisely is gaining momentum in the US. Part of the campaign involves communicating with patients that more expensive medicine doesn’t necessarily mean better medicine. And this is reflected by the evidence that four fifths of new drugs are later found to be copies of old ones – not surprising perhaps when pharmaceutical companies spend twice as much on marketing new medications as on research.

We need a more informed decision-making process that gives greater empowerment to patients. Encouraging patients to ask specific questions will also help them understand that sometimes doing nothing is the best approach. Questions such as: do I really need this test or procedure? What are the risks? Are there simpler safer options? What happens if I do nothing? And even how much does it cost? The Academy Of Medical Royal Colleges – led by Professor Terence Stephenson – will report by the end of the year, its recommendations building on this theme. We may discover billions of NHS money that does not add value to patient care.

Reflecting on my mum’s care and how she should have been treated from the moment she entered hospital, I’m reminded of the words from the visionary American physician and social activist Hunter Adams: “When you treat a disease, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But I guarantee you, when you treat a person, whatever the outcome, you always win.” It’s time for real “whole person” care.

 

Aseem Malhotra is a cardiologist and consultant clinical associate to the Academy of Royal Medical Colleges

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John Perry Barlow: Which side of history do you want to be on?

“The main thing here is for people to recognize that what we’re doing is creating the foundations of the future in a very fundamental way.

I mean we’re building the future that we all might want or all might not want, depending on our current vested interests.

I think it takes a really crummy ancestor to want to maintain his current business model at the expense of his descendant’s ability to understand the world around them.

And if you really want to figure out which side you’re on, ask yourself what’s going to make you a better ancestor?

John Perry Barlow
Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Interviewed in the feature documentary “Downloaded” aired on SBS.

data saving lives, entrepreneurship, healthcare, healthy habits, quotes & aphorisms

Google founders on their distaste for health data regulators

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidshaywitz/2014/07/04/google-co-founders-to-healthcare-were-just-not-that-into-you/

David ShaywitzContributor

I write about entrepreneurial innovation in medicine.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

PHARMA & HEALTHCARE  17,430 views

Google Co-Founders To Healthcare: We’re Just Not That Into You

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At his yearly CEO summit, noted VC Vinod Khosla spoke with Google co-foundersSergey Brin and Larry Page (file under “King, Good To Be The”).

Towards the end of a wide-ranging conversation that encompassed driverless cars, flying wind turbines, and high-altitude balloons providing internet access, Khosla began to ask about health.

Specifically, Khosla wondered whether they could “imagine Google becoming a health company? Maybe a larger business than the search business or the media business?”

Their response, surprisingly, was basically, “no.”  While glucose-sensing contact lenses might be “very cool,” in the words of Larry Page, Brin notes that,

“Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.”

Adds Page,

“We have Calico, obviously, we did that with Art Levinson, which is pretty independent effort. Focuses on health and longevity. I’m really excited about that. I am really excited about the possibility of data also, to improve health. But that’s– I think what Sergey’s saying, it’s so heavily regulated. It’s a difficult area. I can give you an example. Imagine you had the ability to search people’s medical records in the U.S.. Any medical researcher can do it. Maybe they have the names removed. Maybe when the medical researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched it and why. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year. Just that. That’s almost impossible to do because of HIPAA. I do worry that we regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are certainly on the data-mining end.”

Khosla then asked a question about a use case involving one of my favorite portfolio companies of his, Ginger.io, related to the monitoring of a patient’s psychiatric state.

Responded Page, “I was talking to them about that last night. It was cool.”

That pretty much captures Brin and Page’s view of healthcare – fun to work on a few “cool” projects, but beyond that, the regulatory challenges are just too great to warrant serious investment.

(To be clear, Brin and Page emphasized their personal distance from Google Ventures, which has conspicuously pursued a range of health-related investments.  “Medicine needs to come out of the dark ages,” Google Ventures Managing Partner Bill Maris recently told Re/code.)

On the face of it, it’s pretty amazing that a company that doesn’t think twice about tackling absurdly challenging scientific projects (eg driverless cars) is brought to its knees by the prospect of dealing with the byzantine regulation around healthcare (and more generally, our “calcified hairball” system of care, as VC Esther Dyson has put it).  A similar sentiment has been expressed by VC and Uber-investor Bill Gurley as well; evidently taking on taxi and limousine commissions is more palatable than taking on the healthcare establishment.

Yet others – with eyes wide open – are taking on the challenge.  AthenaHealth’s Jonathan Bush, for instance, is maddened by the challenges of regulatory capture (see my WSJ review of his book here), yet he shows up each day to fight the battle.

Similarly, while I’ve not always agreed with Khosla’s perspective on algorithims, I’ve consistently admired his willingness to enter the fray (see here and here).

This morning on Twitter, he asked whether his willingness to invest in healthcare means he’s courageous (as I suggested) or naïve.

The answer, I imagine, is probably both.  The challenges in healthcare, especially regarding regulation, are real, and disruption is hard to come by.  As Brown University emergency physician Megan Ranney comments, there are “big risks, lots of roadblocks” but also “huge potential for humankind.”

I suspect the key to overcoming the regulatory roadblocks will be making the use cases more persuasive and immediate.  After all, most people have the enlightened self-interest to embrace life-saving innovations (anti-vaxers notwithstanding).

The challenge is that to this point, the benefits of technology generally seem less than persuasive – the tech seems “cool,” as Page and Brin might say, but not exactly convincing.  I’m not just talking about Google Glass (which perhaps defines the genre) and Google’s contact lenses (I’ve not met many experts who’ve bought into this technology), but also approaches like 23andMe.  When they ran up against regulators, there wasn’t exactly an outcry, “this technology has transformed my life and now you’re shutting it down.”  If only.

In contrast, efforts to shut down Uber typically generate far more impassioned protests.  Why? Because it’s immediately apparent to users how Uber improves their lives.  To use the service once is to be convinced.

What healthcare technology needs is to find a way to be similarly indispensable.  Page may cite the potential to save 10,000 lives, but the challenge is to convince anyone this applies to their own N of 1.  More directed examples of instances where technology could immediately impact lives, and could impact more were it not for oppressive regulation, would go a long way to rolling back the regulations that seem to impede progress.

Rather than focusing on the thousands of lives that could be saved in an imagined future, technologists would do well to provide a compelling demonstration of what big data and sophisticated analytics can achieve for the health of discrete individuals in the present, even with current limitations; success here could help innovative entrepreneurs push back on antiquated regulations, and bring healthcare delivery into the modern age while ushering in a new era in biomedical research driven by access to rich coherent datasets.

The truth is, Page is probably right about the underlying opportunity.  In particular, as I’ve long-argued, there’s tremendous potential to be found by thoughtfully combining comprehensive genomic and rich phenotypic data – immediate opportunities to impact clinical care, and the chance for a longer-term impact on scientific understanding.

I’m perhaps more optimistic than Page is, however, both about our collective ability to succeed meaningfully even within the constraints of our existing system, and about the ability of demonstrated success to move even the most intransigent stakeholders.

data saving lives, health market quality, healthcare, policy, rapid learning health systems

Healthcare, meet capitalism – Jonathan Bush

The $2.7 trillion industry lacks accountability for exorbitant costs. The system incentivizes doctors (and hospitals) to do tests and procedures, instead of paying them to do their jobs—keeping people healthy. It’s like paying carpenters to use nails.

“The biggest lie that we baked into our thinking,” Bush said in Aspen, is that “starting in 1958, in the wake of World War II, the government wanted to control wage inflation, so they let employers provide healthcare as an incentive (What could go wrong? It’s 1958!)—was this idea that healthcare itself is just a monolithic, identical thing. That there’s no value in price shopping. That there’s no value in choosing whether or not to get [a certain health service]. We act, as a society, on the unconscious level, like we’re not in charge. This is a massive problem. Not just because we utilize expensive things, but because we give up the opportunity for those things to get better.”

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/a-case-against-donating-to-hospitals/373637/

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWBf7G2JH2M#t=1830

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.
Athena (Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty)

Self-described “lunatic-fringe disruptors” depict U.S. healthcare like one of Ayn Rand’s dystopias. The $2.7 trillion industry lacks accountability for exorbitant costs. The system incentivizes doctors (and hospitals) to do tests and procedures, instead of paying them to do their jobs—keeping people healthy. It’s like paying carpenters to use nails.

“I believe we are on the cusp of an oil rush—a fabulous revolution of profit-making and cost-saving in health care,” disruptor Jonathan Bush told a rapt audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. In the Rand comparison, Bush might be John Galt—were he not exuding as much benevolence as relentless capitalism. And he’s not giving up on the system; he’s trying to upend it.

Last week I moderated a discussion that became heated—by moderated-panel standards, and by no part of mine—between Bush, Toby Cosgrove (CEO of the Cleveland Clinic), Rushika Fernandopulle (CEO of Iora Health), and Dena Bravata (CMO of Castlight Health). It ended in an emphatic plea by Bush to never donate money to a hospital.

That was met with equal parts laughter and applause. From Cosgrove, seated three inches to his right, neither.

Logos of healthcare disruptors

To Bush, CEO and co-founder of the $4.2 billion health-technology company Athena Health healthcare is a business, driven by markets like any other. Altruism and profit-driven business need not be at odds. It’s incomprehensible and unsustainable that people have no idea what their care costs and have no incentive to consider cheaper options.

“Profit is a dirty word among the corduroy-elbow crowd in the research hospitals and foundations,” Bush wrote in his recently-released book, Where Does It Hurt? “But just like any business, from Samsung to Dogfish Head Brewery, this industry will grow and innovate by figuring out what we need and want, and selling it to us at prices we’re willing and able to pay.”

In Aspen, Bush mentioned Invisalign braces and LASIK surgery as procedures that have been driven by the free market. These things started off exorbitantly expensive, but prices fell and fell. For LASIK, the procedure was “$2,800 per eye [in the 1990s]; now it’s $200 per eye, including a ride to and from the procedure.”

The oft-cited, disquieting numbers—the U.S. spends the largest percentage of its GDP on healthcare of any country (by far) but ranks 42nd in global life expectancy and similarly underwhelms in many other health metrics—are projected to worsen. Massive hospitals systems are buying out their competition across the country, charging exorbitant premiums without incentive to cut costs or optimize the care they provide. Bush’s gushing proposition is that when patients can “shop” for healthcare based on quality and price, it will drive innovation and better care. Innovation will inevitably disrupt the bloated status quo. But the current system has to be allowed to fail. That might sound bleak, but to innovators like Bush, Fernandopulle, and Bravata, it’s an opportunity for reinvention.

Forecasting of this sort is the currency of the Aspen conference (hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic), but Bush has the infectious passion that makes it feel like he’s one of those people who, while giving a keynote on the need for change, is already halfway out the door to make something happen.

Here’s the second half of the discussion, which neatly explains some fundamental problems with healthcare delivery:

Dena Bravata is the chief medical officer of Castlight, whose platform helps patients compare cost and quality to make informed healthcare decisions—shifting incentives for doctors toward lower-cost, higher-quality care.

Rushika Fernandopulle is a primary care physician and co-founder of a small company called Iora Health that is trying to fix healthcare from the bottom up.

“We start by changing the payment system,” Fernandopulle said, “which I think is part of the problem. Instead of getting paid fee-for-service, we blow that up and say we should get a fixed fee for what we do. That allows us to care for a population, and our job is to keep them healthy. If you believe that, you completely change the delivery model.”

Iora assigns each patient a personal health coach who does the blocking and tackling in dealing with the healthcare system. They interact by email and video chat, reaching out to patients instead of leaving the onus on the patient to follow up on their care. In Fernandopulle’s view, athena health, which is still contingent on the current fee-for-service model, is something of a dinosaur. Fernandopulle is a disruptor of disruptors.

Toby Cosgrove, the former surgeon and current CEO of one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., the Cleveland Clinic, cites redundancy: “What we need to understand is that not all hospitals can be all things to all people.” The Cleveland Clinic, for example, has become expert in cardiothoracic surgery, drawing patients from across the country. In Cosgrove’s model, there might be only one hospital in the country that does a certain complex procedure—but it does the procedure extremely well, efficiently, and on a scale that is maximally cost-effective. Drawing on his experience in Vietnam evacuating injured soldiers, Cosgrove argued for moving patients to expert physicians, rather than trying to have sub-sub-specialized experts everywhere.

So the future of U.S. healthcare will not come in the form of more hospitals. As Cosgrove noted, we already have plenty. Hospital occupancy in the U.S. right now is 65 percent. “Twenty years ago [the U.S.] had a million hospital beds, Cosgrove said. “There are now 800,000, and we still have too many.”

Bush recognizes that the core of healthcare is the relationship between the doctor and the patient. He says that any successful health-business model will be predicated on maximizing the act of total presence during a doctor visit. Ancillary staff will do the busy work that might keep a physician away from her patients. The doctor’s undivided attention is what patients want, and giving it is what makes a doctor’s job meaningful and effective. Despite demand from patients and doctors for more time together, Bush notes, the average visit is eight minutes.

When large hospital systems leverage their market position and brand names to overcharge for basic services, they not only subsidize research, but they perpetuate inefficiency. A cornered market favors complacency and maintenance of the status quo. In every other industry, if you’re still using a pager in 2014—as many doctors are—your business fails when your clients go to Iora Health, where they can video chat.

In his book, Bush calculated the fortune that could be made if a person wanted to start their own MRI business. At Massachusetts General Hospital, an MRI can be billed to an insured patient for $5,315. Bush proposes that an industrious person could rent an MRI machine for around $8,000 per month, a suburban park office for $1,000, two technicians for $6,500 each (including benefits), and around $3,000 for taxes and fees. That’s $25,000 per month in cost. If you can do three scans per hour and run twelve hours per day, you’d break even at $28 per MRI.

“The biggest lie that we baked into our thinking,” Bush said in Aspen, is that “starting in 1958, in the wake of World War II, the government wanted to control wage inflation, so they let employers provide healthcare as an incentive (What could go wrong? It’s 1958!)—was this idea that healthcare itself is just a monolithic, identical thing. That there’s no value in price shopping. That there’s no value in choosing whether or not to get [a certain health service]. We act, as a society, on the unconscious level, like we’re not in charge. This is a massive problem. Not just because we utilize expensive things, but because we give up the opportunity for those things to get better.”

complex adaptive systems, data saving lives, health market quality, healthcare, musings, policy, politics, rapid learning health systems

Pincer funding: how to support appropriate coding of adverse events without rewarding bad behaviour

There’s a problem with correct coding of adverse events. In effect, we want a system that rewards correct coding, but punishes harmful behaviour.

If the institution is punished in any way for adverse events, they will be far less likely to code their occurrence.

If the institution is not punished (i.e. rewarded or unaffected) for adverse events, then adverse events will either continue or at best remain unchanged.

A thought bubble had today at the safety and quality commission workshop involves the idea of a pincer funding arrangement, specifically suited to Australia’s current funding arrangements.

At the local hospital district (or individual hospital) level, pay for coded adverse events, but then impose financial penalties at the state (or local hospital district) level.

I imagine they’d just all learn new ways to game this, but the intent is to reward correct coding, but punish harmful behaviour.