Tag Archives: digitalhealth

Digital Health, Healthcare, Healthcare Reform, Medtech, Value Based Care

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #17

Lengthy article on the evolution of mobile phones for digital phenotyping (ie. continual data collection of the individual). 

CareSignal (formerly Epharmix) gets funding from customers and others for remote patient monitoring. The beauty is, it’s a relatively low-tech solution that can be used by many diverse patient populations with different conditions. See studies on COPD, diabetes, and mental health. Often, simple really is better.

The direct primary care model continues to evolve with Clove Health claiming to be the first legally incorporated as a public benefit corporation getting to work in Florida. More on that style  of incorporation here. Citizen Health is heading down a similar path.

I touched on the ongoing battle over patient access to their own data. Apparently the federal government has started hitting providers with fines if they make it difficult for patients to get their data.

From Imperial College London, using sound to detect vital signs allows a device to penetrate layers of clothing.

Medicare builds on the mixed success of ACOs to create the Direct Contracting model for the next stage of value based care. There’s also the Primary Care First model, now due sometime next year. Also, a fresh study of Medicare ACOs finds that much of the cost variation comes from the use of out-of-network primary care docs.

More Medicare, the CJR program was controversially introduced as a hip and knee replacement bundle a few years ago. Controversially because it was a mandatory bundle introduced because providers didn’t sign up for the similar voluntary program with sufficient enthusiasm. Now CMS wants to extend it for another 3 years, and add in outpatient settings too. Which makes sense because it will drive the cost down, all other things being equal.

A new design to make better, cheaper biosensors for fluid analysis. Quite honestly, it works in ways I don’t fully comprehend, but hopefully it means something to some of you…

More healthcare reform, CMS picks 205 EMS services for the experimental ET3 model. The intent of ET3 is mostly to help people with chronic conditions get treated in their homes, avoiding the personal discomfort and stress of perpetual trips to the ED. It also should save Medicare money on avoidable ED visits too. To do that, ET3 allows EMS to get reimbursed for other services, not just transport. This potentially opens up another route to market for medtech vendors in applications like remote patient monitoring.

Wearables and machine learning start to show real promise: PhysIQ and VitalConnect study shows promise for predicting hospitalizations for heart failure patients. We’re already seeing machine learning breaking into imaging. I think continuous patient monitoring also has real potential. There’s a big need to determine baseline vital signs for individual patients, rather than just using generic values. I think machine learning might have the potential to usher in more adaptive algorithms that can help to reduce the long-running over alarming problem.

Apple leans hard into atrial fibrillation. A new collaboration with J&J makes the Apple Watch available for $49 to seniors who take part in a study. This could be a win for everybody: Seniors who avoid a potential stroke through the early detection of afib, cardiologists who get more business, and obviously Apple. Presumably J&J has some meds for managing afib in its portfolio too. And Medicare could win, since stroke care is reckoned to cost $40bn a year.

Sepsis has been a silent killer for a long time. A new study finds a stunning growth of 40% among Medicare beneficiaries who were hospitalized. Digging deeper into the economics, the same study finds the total cost of treating sepsis to be much higher than previously thought – over $23bn for inpatient care alone.

At the other end of the age scale, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has developed a new algorithm for detecting pediatric sepsis.

A new potential tool in the opioid crisis, a wearable to detect opioid induced respiratory depression (OIRD) in the community. Developed by Altair Medical in Scotland, I’m interested to see how this develops and works in practice. There are definitely challenges in current opioid addiction treatment that this could address. (For podcast fans, Freakonomics has a good two-parter on the crisis and current approaches). Also, equal parts tragic, genius, and sheer practicality, a number of communities are training kids to administer Narcan. Note, OIRD is still a major problem for post-surgical patients too, where hopefully the patients location and time to rescue are more predictable, so potentially more effective overall.

Simple early warning scoring is still an undervalued (and under adopted) practice for catching patient deterioration early. One hospital system in the UK dropped cardiac arrests by 75% by capturing vitals at the bedside with iPads and calculating the early warning score automatically. 

An unfortunate reminder that technology alone can’t change anything: WellSpan Health York Hospital gets cited for failure to respond to a patient in distress. It seems even thought the patients falling heart rate and oxygenation levels were noted for at least 20 minutes, nursing staff failed to intervene.

Digital Health, Healthcare, Healthcare Reform, Value Based Care

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #14

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A glasses-attaching wearable to monitor eating habits – because I’m pretty sure we all lie to our calorie counting apps at least some of the time…. 

CMS loosens up the purse strings to try digital health for moms-to-be and kids with complex needs.

Some positive results for the Medicare bundled payment experiment, lower costs for hip and knee replacements with no loss of quality. The study doesn’t see any change with other bundles though (there are 48 possible bundles in total). That doesn’t surprise me – and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. By far the most popular bundle with hospitals was hips and knees. Basically, it was a very low risk way to get into the bundled payment game – a relatively simple, repeatable procedure. So, the reason why we’re not seeing savings with other bundles yet could just be a lack of volume for providers to learn from.

Not an option for those that sleep in the buff, smart pajamas for monitoring vitals and sleep patterns.

Boston/Paris based Cardiologs picks up $15m in funding for its afib diagnostics algorithm. Abstract for a clinical study here.

Ah, the tensions of the journey to value-based care….BCBSMN tries to steer patients to out-patient clinics for lower cost care. Hospitals that stand to lose out, sue.

Why aren’t patients electronically accessing their medical records? Because – IMO – there’s rarely anything to be gained by doing so….I can go to my docs portal, I can login, I can see my data, and then…so what, there’s nothing useful to do with it.

VC’s clearly think bundled payments are here to stay, sinking an extra $27m into Aver. They might be right, unless we all go down the ACO path instead. Or just pull the plug on value-based care.

More potential lawsuit woes for Apple, being sued for patent infringement by Masimo. The basis seems to be that instead of licensing the technology, Apple hired key people away. Quite a nifty strategy if you can pull it off actually.

Is digital health failing before it’s even really got started…? Maybe. The good news is a Stanford Medicine survey finds that the vast majority of docs see value in self-reported health data. The bad news…a third are looking for help on how to use AI. So that’s a big fail right there.  Docs really shouldn’t need to know how the algorithm works, unless they want to get into research.

Israel-based Clew raises a B funding round for it’s AI-based platform for predicting patient deterioration. 

Can AI reverse the ‘unsustainable’ trajectory of spine care? In a word, no. Because spine surgery rarely brings much benefit.

Interesting use of Fitbit’s to track the spread of flu.

Payers and providers are squaring up to each other on how to address surprise bills. I’m honestly not confident this will help. The problem isn’t surprise medical bills. The problem is just medical bills. I’m mindful of this case from a couple of years back, where a woman begs people not to call an ambulance because she couldn’t afford it.

Rock Health reports that digital health funding dropped a little to $7.4bn in 2019, Still the second highest funding year on record though.

Masimo to acquire some assets from NantHealth, basically a device integration play. 

The Camden Coalition has previously been seen as a great success in addressing the high cost of high utilizers. Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be true.

Enrollment in Medicare’s MSSP program is stalling as CMS tries to get ACO’s to take on actual financial risk earlier. Meanwhile, it’s reported that one of Medicare’s other ACO programs (Next Generation) saved Medicare $184m in 2018. That’s good, but bear in mind the total budget for CMS is $1.2tn….

Digital Health, Healthcare

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #13

As the diabetic population continues to grow, medtech vendors are looking for alternatives to the unpleasant finger stick to measure glucose levels. Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) wearables are a commercial reality, while researchers have explored using tears as a reliable glucose measure. Now, researchers in India have a plan to use saliva.  Talking of diabetes, incidence is lowest among caucasians in the US.

Patient monitoring of a different kind: Roosevelt General Hospital in Portales, New Mexico tells patients to monitor bank accounts after malware infection. 

A possible speed bump for Apple, a New York doc claims patent infringement for the afib algorithm.

Payers are gearing up to address the social determinants of health, with programs from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, BCBSRI, and Cigna. Meanwhile, UPMC are implementing remote blood pressure monitoring using Vivify Health for new moms after they are discharged. The aim is to improve care quality by catching hypertension early, and reduce costs  by managing follow-up appointments more appropriately. 

Last time I noted how the “healthcare system” fails mothers. Apparently if’s failing kids too, with fewer hospitals able to treat pediatric inpatients. But at least the US isn’t unique in that, with the UK facing a lack of pediatric ICU beds.

In Pennsylvania, the Rural Health Model spins up to see if Medicare can incentivize better access to care for rural communities.

Creative accounting of a good kind, payer and provider split the investment in a social worker to try and keep frequent flyers out of the ED.

A doctor’s disarmingly honest account of how a hospital stay often turns out to be very bad for your health. It’s a long read, so you might prefer the podcast instead. 

From the National University of Singapore, an RFID enabled biosensor less than 1mm wide.

Mobile telestroke program cuts door to needle time for stroke patients by 30 minutes. It’s mostly underpinned by simple process changes, enabling critical treatment steps to run in parallel instead of sequentially. 

Apple was recently granted 35 patents, the most healthcare related being a mattress for measuring vitals signs, and exercise intensity via a PPG sensor.

Many of the ancestry/genealogy companies have two revenue streams. Charging individuals for testing their DNA is the obvious one. But, less well known, a second revenue stream comes from selling the individuals anonymized data to big pharma. 23andMe is doubling down there, inviting individuals to add their medical history to the 23andMe database. As the article notes, that could be a hugely powerful dataset – but should it be owned by a private, for-profit company?

On that note, some concern about Facebook encouraging users to share their health data so that they can get recommendations for preventative care. I think there will always be concerns here. Many tech companies change their terms of service frequently, which is always a concern. On the other hand, if it helps people take care of their health better than the traditional “healthcare system” does, it’s worth thinking about.

Related to that, a Rock Health survey finds that only 10% of consumers would be willing to share their data with a tech company (free download). But, before you read too much into that, here’s the exact question that was asked in the survey: “Please indicate which of the following individuals or organizations you would be willing to share your health information with…”. 

So I’ve done primary research for a living. With every data set that I ever collected, I’d always look at the data afterwards and think “Doh, I wished I’d asked <fill in the blank> instead”. In this case, I’m thinking a more insightful question might be “Would you share your health information with a tech company if it saved you $500 a year in your out of pocket healthcare costs?” I think you’d get a very different answer from 10% would be willing to share. Different again if you suggested $100, and different again for $1,000. A more informative approach perhaps. Everything has its value, everything has its price.

Also in the very same Rock Health research survey…Apparently, consumers are significantly less likely to share their data with their own doctor than they were two years ago. Why…? I would guess because consumers can’t see any demonstrable value in doing so. Because sharing data with any entity – a doctor or a tech company – only makes sense if it leads to lower costs and/or better quality care. If it doesn’t, you’re just wasting your time.

A wearable to help identify swallowing disorders.

Progressive, but not clear to me how this would work in practice without consumption on-site: Massachusetts Looks to Open New Drug-Monitoring Centers.

Coincidentally in Massachusetts, Lowell Hospital is working with Frontive to leverage Amazon’s Alexa to try and improve post-discharge orthopedic care.

Apparently house calls by doctors have been decreasing for years. Partly – if this article is to be believed – because the reimbursement was so low. But, for homebound people, there’s real value there. This is something that Accountable Care Organizations should be willing and able to revive. If that home visit – by a doctor, an NP, or a paramedic – can keep someone healthy at home, there has to be a payoff there for an ACO. 

Digital Health, Healthcare, Healthcare Reform, Value Based Care

Healthtech Fortnightly Update #10

Clinicians may have the opportunity to use wearables to help PTSD sufferers.

A good primer on bundled payments for anyone that wants to understand more about that value-based care experiment. Oh, and enrollment in Medicare’s BPCI voluntary bundled payment program dropped 16% when providers had to take on risk. A number of reasons why are offered in the article, and they’re all valid to some extent. But, this program was introduced in April 2013. So, in reality, that’s over 6 years for providers to figure out their costs, what causes readmissions etc. Clearly, that hasn’t been a priority for some.

Sensor-based medication adherence firm Proteus Digital Health shows some success with hepatitis C, more clinical details here. 

Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) fret that value-based care is going to drive them out of business unless they adopt technology. Well, they’re right to worry, because there’s likely to be a bloodbath. There are over 15,000 SNFs, many of them smaller, independent facilities. And many of them are about to get squeezed out of the market. First, Medicare is trying to bypass SNFs altogether, and discharge people directly to their homes, with home health agencies to provide rehab. That’s because it’s cheaper, all other things being equal (although comparing  readmission rates would be interesting…). In addition, in the past, patients needing further rehab have been free to choose any SNF when discharged from hospital. As Medicare tries to make hospitals accountable for reducing readmissions, hospitals need more control over the entire episode of care, end-to-end. So, they are going to develop preferred partnerships with SNFs so they can manage and improve quality. Ergo, there will be far fewer patient days in SNFs, and only the SNFs that can guarantee quality outcomes and integrate seamlessly with hospitals will survive. A good opportunity for companies likes EarlySense and Curavi Health to help out. Even so, some SNFs will go out of business, others will be gobbled up by large SNF corporations or healthcare systems. Expect that 15,000 SNFs to become 12, maybe even 10, thousand over the next few years.

The most impressive thing from the Apple Watch heart study isn’t it’s ability to detect afib. It’s the fact that they collected data from 419,000 people. In the era of AI and machine learning, that’s a game changer. Because, all other things being equal, in the era of AI and machine learning, the person with the most data wins.

The VA obviously likes what it’s seen in it’s diabetic foot pilot with Podimetrics that it’s expanding use to all clinics.

I’ve been of the opinion for many years that the best path to bring healthcare costs under control is to make it a fully transparent and competitive market for consumers. A bit like buying a car, or a fridge, or a central heating upgrade. The push for value based care – ACOs, bundled payments etc. – haven’t really got into that yet. Now the federal government is pushing harder for transparency, and predictably the hospitals are starting to squeal louder. I touched on site neutral payments in my last piece, and predictably hospitals aren’t keen on that either. Because both transparency and site neutrality will mean lower costs for you and I, and lower margins for the hospitals.

Still on the topic of site neutrality, Fresenius reports huge growth in home dialysis. Which is just as well for a couple of reasons: First, Fresenius has to go to home dialysis if it wants a business because Medicare is pushing on that for cost reasons. Second, that’s the main reason it acquired NxStage. Relatively speaking, the US has low rates of home dialysis. Because, it seems, decades ago Medicare policy drove people into dialysis centers. Apart from the cost, I have to believe that in a country like the US with large, sparsely populated rural areas, home dialysis can provide a much better quality of life for many people.

Forest Devices wins a pitch competition for a device to help EMS crews rapidly diagnose a stroke.

Some people are very upset that Google has access to patient data through a partnership through Ascension Health. Google has since clarified things a bit. Me, I’m not that concerned about it. If healthcare is going to become affordable and accessible, we need a revolution, not tinkering. And revolution never comes from within, always from the outside. So I’m all for new approaches that might dramatically improve quality and lower costs.

Humana reports $3.5bn savings from value based care in its Medicare Advantage program.

Docs still don’t like EHRs. Never have, almost certainly never will if it takes away from their patient time. But, hard to deny that having a permanent record that could be shared is better than paper and all its limitations. Nevertheless, it unfortunately seems that EHRs are a good idea badly executed.

But wait, another plus for EHRs….the UKs NHS reports good result with the early detection of in-hospital sepsis. I think this is the full study here, so it looks like an algorithm running in Cerner is the business end of that. We can only speculate how much better the results might be if fed by continuous data from patient monitoring.

More good news on sepsis, University of Colorado has developed a predictive algorithm that runs against the EHR to predict sepsis in children.

Analytics, Digital Health, Healthcare

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #7

Current Health (formerly Snap40) partners to add axillary temp and spirometry to the parameters it measures.

Detecting antibiotic levels in real-time.

Bioformis ups its game with FDA clearance for BioVitals to help manage chronic conditions.

MC10 partners with University of Rochester to collect real-world evidence for how people live with Parkinson’s. Reminds me a bit of this collaboration between IBM and Pfizer.

Interesting perspective that I hadn’t considered before: Dated US regulatory policies are endangering the US lead in healthcare technology.

Direct primary care (DPC) might help achieve half of the quadruple aim, clinician satisfaction and patient satisfaction. But lower healthcare costs overall, and higher quality overall, I’m not so sure. It’s also typically positioned as an up-sell to people who already have health insurance. But just thinking out loud, maybe there’s another angle. If you can’t afford a traditional insurance plan, would a low cost primary-care-only option with a strong focus on preventative care be better than nothing…?

Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, Rensselaer County launches online emergency room for Medicaid patients. I’m sure the intent is good, to prevent unnecessary ER visits. But, pitching an app called “ER Anywhere” to a patient population might just be asking for trouble.

I expect to see more of this from large employers tired of rising healthcare premiums: Walmart to use Embold Health’s analytics to herd it’s employees to high quality providers.

Can a simplified cardiac risk score also predict strokes?

In case anyone was still in doubt, new research published in JAMA suggests 25% of all healthcare spending could be waste (free registration required). And that doesn’t include administration. Candidly, a primary care doc once told me the rule of thumb in primary care is 3 admins for every medical practitioner. Their practice at the time had a 5 to 1 ratio! I’m inclined to think that admin overhead is a direct result of the complexity of the payer/reimbursement model. And they say that government managed healthcare would be inefficient…

Best practice for in-hospital rapid response teams (RRT) include having a dedicated RRT, and the ability for anyone to trigger the RRT without fear of reprisal.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that patients still have to pay some of the cost: Devoted health to use Apple Watch with Medicare Advantage patients. I would be shocked if most payers/providers aren’t paying for wearables like this in a few years – and financially encouraging patients to use them. If they’re not, it probably means the push for value-based care has failed.

The ECRI Institute releases its top 10 technology hazards for 2020. Not for the first time, the problem of over-alarming makes the list.

In Pennsylvania a patient tragically expired in the ER after being left unattended. A potential market opportunity for wearables perhaps. But unfortunately, hard to make a business case for it that is going to make a hospital CFO jump for joy.

Funding for digital health startups has cooled a tad, but still an estimated $1.3bn in Q3 according to Rock Health.

Digital Health, Healthcare, Uncategorized

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #5

How to make use of pulse-transit-time in wearables.

Researchers at Stanford have developed a bodyNET sensor that could potentially measure vitals. More details here, subscription required. Or, if that’s not your thing, how about bio-compatible magnetic skin.

A study in China looks at the use of photoplethysmography technology to reliably detect atrial fibrillation.

We are less than one month away from a major change in how Medicare reimburses skilled nursing facilities. The aim is to get patients the care they need while removing the incentive to provide excessive amounts of therapy. But as Avalere’s Fred Bentley explains, it’s not really value-based care, because volume will still be a big driver of SNF profitability. MedPAC insists value-based care is coming to post-acute though.

Increased signs of action to tackle social determinants of health.

Honestly not sure what to make of this partnership between Verily (Alphabet, née Google) and iRhythm to develop solutions for atrial fibrillation. iRhythm already has afib detection, that’s what it does. So, maybe this is about reaching a bigger market and going direct to consumer at some point? Because right now, iRhythm needs a doctors order…and the Apple Watch does not, neither does AliveCor. So that would be a bit of a strategic shift. Or is the clue in the word “solutions”…? More to come.

In iRhythm-related news, BardyDX extends it’s own ambulatory cardiac monitor to 14 days. This potentially offers better diagnostic yield, since longer monitoring improves the odds of detecting infrequent cardiac events. It does not, iirc, open it up to an additional set of CPT codes (aka an adjacent market segment).

Vim gets some big name financial backers to provide better integration between payers and providers for value-based care.

Another Israeli project, including Ichilov Hospital, AnyVision, and BioBeat aims to improve monitoring of patients on the general floor.

New to me Health Recovery Solutions jumps into the remote patient monitoring fray.

I wrote about Deepmind’s work on renal failure detection recently, but Intermountain is using SymphonyRM to develop personalized treatment plans for kidney failure. 

Modern Healthcare’s list of 25 innovators in healthcare. Innovations include avoiding unnecessary ED visits, personalized medicine, price transparency, addressing the social determinants of health, and much more…

Judge blocks former CVS exec from joining Amazon’s PillPack. Admittedly, this is about enforcing a non-compete agreement. But, I can’t help feeling that if one of your top competitive strategies is wielding lawsuits, that’s never a good look. If you were innovating fast enough, whatever your former employee might have in their head would become irrelevant pretty darn quick.

The law of unintended consequences: The post-acute care savings reaped by Medicare value-based payment programs might be at the cost of family caregivers. On the other hand, Medicare’s bundled payment programs do not seem to have worsened the outcomes for frail seniors. Is that a win? I guess it depends if you’re a family caregiver…

GE is developing a sensor to analyse sweat.

Where Apple goes, Android is sure to follow – only much later…..a collaborative effort to let Android users access their medical records.

PeraHealth adds more FDA cleared capabilities to it’s patient deterioration solution.

CMS proffers both carrot and stick to convince providers to accept downside risk. Seema Verma says all the right words about price transparency and competition – albeit with the obligatory S-word thrown in. By which I mean socialist, obviously. How did it became socialist to want high quality, affordable healthcare for all citizens of one of the richest countries on earth? If that’s how it is, I think I can live with that. Anyway, actions speak louder than words so I’ll reserve judgement on what Seema Verma delivers. I just hope value-based care isn’t going to go the same way as commercial nuclear fusion – forever right around the corner.

Covenant Health introduces a remote sitter program for monitoring at-risk patients.

Research into another new type of wearable using graphene sensitized with semiconducting quantum dots.

Mercy Virtual invests in Myia to monitor heart failure patients at home.

Wondering where America’s National Institute for Health is putting it’s money on mhealth apps? You can find out right here.

Analytics, Digital Health, Healthcare, Healthcare Reform

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #4

I love hearing about startups in emerging nations – I think there is so much potential for cross pollination. Here are five from India focused on blood supply, preeclampsia, kidney health, ECG, and chronic disease detection, among other applications.

The NHS in England shows good results with a pilot for the early detection of sepsis, plans a nationwide roll-out.

A fortnight ago I wrote about Deepmind’s progress in detecting kidney failure. Here’s a bit of pushback, citing some challenges for AI in healthcare in general. This phrase jumped out at me: “(clinicians) also rely heavily on human judgment to diagnose…a level of subjectivity that would be nearly impossible to program into every AI algorithm”. It was well argued almost 10 years ago by very respected clinicians that removing some subjectivity and standardizing care processes (free registration required) would help deliver higher quality care at lower cost.  In other industries, we grow productivity by selectively substituting technology for labor. And we do that in healthcare too. In pockets. Just not enough yet to make high quality, lower cost care repeatable at scale. More on that a little further down the page….

Deepmind, on the other hand, is a half a billion dollar deep hole for Alphabet by the way…

Talking of pushback, Visibly has had to pull its mobile app eye test from the market. The American Optometric Association has apparently lobbied hard against Visibly. Taking a big step back, this might be something of a moral dilemma that we need to figure out over the next 10-20 years. The cost of healthcare is still rising. If that continues, an increasing number of people in the US are going to be priced out of conventional healthcare (i.e consulting a doctor, one on one). Telehealth could be an option.  But pushing the argument further, what happens when people can’t afford to see a doctor at all, even virtually. Are we really going to deny them the opportunity to have their health evaluated solely by an algorithm? Even if that offers a less comprehensive examination than a doctor. If the only options you can afford are diagnosis by algorithm, or no diagnosis at all, which would you choose…?

The American Heart Association is launching a pilot with LifePod Solutions to help care for people with chronic cardiac conditions at home. Also in the remote patient monitoring game, Biotricity reports strong quarter to quarter growth.

Rumors abound that all is not happy in the world of Apple health. But, that hasn’t stopped it expanding use of Apple Health Records to embrace Allscripts. And in not unexpected news, AliveCor has dropped its KardiaBand accessory for the Apple Watch. AliveCor has been pushing into more specialized territory with its 6-lead ECG anyway. But does a 6-lead ECG take AliveCor away from the direct-to-consumer (D2C) model…? I think it might. Meanwhile, if you do see anyone with both hands on a device – while simultaneously pressing it to their left knee or ankle –  you’ll know exactly what they’re doing…

Things seem to be quite peachy at not for profit hospitals, with Mayo growing profits by almost 300%.

Researchers are working on a biosensor that uses interstitial fluid and might be used in place of blood draws in the future.

Biobeat gets FDA clearance for cuff-less non-invasive blood pressure. This has potential. First of all, cuff-less non-invasive BP should mean it’s more comfortable for the patient. That could be especially great in the home for chronic conditions. Second, in my experience there aren’t many wireless BP devices cleared for use in the hospital. There are two unknowns for me that are crucial to success down the road. First, does it fit easily into the clinicians workflow? If not, that’s going to make adoption in the hospital an uphill battle. And second, do the economics work? If it’s more expensive overall than existing approaches, it’s probably not going to fly, however much more comfortable it may be for patients.

In the land of mobile appointment bookings, doc’s choke on Zocdoc’s new pricing model.

I think Remedy Partners really needs this merger with Signify Health. Remedy Partners is arguably the most important player in Medicare bundled payment pilots. It “owns” more episodes of care than any other entity, and in some cases took on the financial risk instead of the providers. But, most of the cost variation in each bundle is driven by post-acute care (slide 16 onward). That is, what happens after the patient is discharged from the hospital. Without a good way to monitor patients post-discharge, that creates a huge financial risk for Remedy. This merger with Signify Health can help to fix that. 

Two chairs aims to take the stress out of finding a therapist.

Strong preventative healthcare is woefully lacking in the US. As Amy Brown of SpringBuk says, incentives for preventative care are not aligned. Honestly, I think there are limits to how much analytics can help with that. There are two massively fragmented, multi-trillion dollar industries here (payers and providers are two different industries, they just share a value chain). There’s a bigger piece here about preventative care that needs to come together in my head, I’ll try and get it written in the next week or two.

And last but not least, Isansys pilot shows that heart rate variability could predict 90 day mortality in patients with cirrhosis of the liver.

cardiology, Digital Health, Healthcare

iRhythm: 12 words that change everything

iRhythm reported its Q2 results just over a week ago. With a 50% year-on-year growth, and a 76% gross margin things are looking really rather peachy. But there is a potential pothole or two in the road ahead. That’s why these 12 words in the press release are more important than the raw numbers:

“…our CPT code change application was accepted by the AMA for review…”

To be more specific, iRhythm is looking to change the CPT code for its devices from a category III code to a category I. Category III codes are used for experimental tests and treatments. As such, they are usually fleeting, temporary, short-lived. And as Kerrisdale Capital noted, that can create a real vulnerability for companies – like iRhythm – that depend on them. Nailing a category I code means you’ve cleared a big, big hurdle. Category I codes are what medical devices want to be when they are all grown up.

So, the AMA’s review is good and necessary for iRhythm. But, it doesn’t mean the company is home and dry yet. Under the current CPT codes (0295T-0298T, if you really must know…) the total Medicare reimbursement for using the Zio XT is about $90 a patient. They key question is this: Will the AMA review keep the reimbursement the same, increase it, or decrease it? Because that’s going to make a big difference to both adoption by cardiologists, and margins for iRhythm. And the answer to that question is, I suspect, down to lobbyists and lawyers as much as anybody else…

A quick disclaimer…Don’t take this as investment advice, because that’s not what it is, that’s not what I do.

Healthcare

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #1

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Caretaker Medical is the only (deep breath…) FDA-approved, Bluetooth-enabled, non-invasive blood pressure monitor for hospital use that I’m aware of.  Now adding end-tidal CO2 via a partner, this should help to bring broader appeal.  Note the use of both Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity, which opens up the possibility for monitoring both in the hospital and in the home.  Since Medicare added reimbursement codes for remote monitoring at the start of the year, many more device manufacturers have started to focus on the home.  While accountable care and bundled payments could ultimately drive that change, there’s nothing quite like a good ol’ fashioned reimbursement to get the market moving…

On that note, CMS reports almost 100% growth in the number of physicians taking part in alternate payment models.  And here’s another change driven by the shift to value-based care: Bundled payments often cut costs by discharging patients home rather than to skilled nursing.  That’s perfectly OK – as long as patients are monitored and rehabbed in their homes.

Intermountain Health has been pushing down the value-based care road for some time.  It’s become so adept that it’s spun off Castell as a platform to help other providers down that path.

While financial incentives need to align for change to happen, communications technology also has to be up to snuff for monitoring in the home to become fully widespread.  So, good to see that the UK is pushing ahead with 5G pilots to fully evaluate the potential for rural communities.  Another (vendors) viewpoint on 5G here.

Talking of financial incentives, the FCC is lining up $100m for 3 years of pilots in telehealth and remote patient monitoring.

Also in the UK, using Amazon’s Alexa to dispense medical advice.  The aim is to take the pressure off overworked primary care docs (general practitioners).  Much easier to try that somewhere with a single payer from cradle to grave – the financial incentives simply align.  Much harder in the fragmented world of US healthcare, but I can see accountable care organizations going down this path too.  Every dollar saved is a dollar in the ACO’s pocket….

The FDA gets more interested in monitoring medication adherence.  Measuring adherence is one thing, improving it something else entirely though….

A new study looks at the use of wearables and machine learning for helping people stay on the path to overcome opioid addiction.  Since we know opioid use depresses respiration rate, it might be good to have a sensor to monitor that too. On a similar thread, Jefferson Health is using analytics to spot opportunities to rein in the prescription of opiates, and that’s no bad thing.

Not the first company to try measuring heart rate and respiratory rate using a camera, but Brainworks is new to me.  Philips has been down this path, while Smart Beat has a direct to consumer device for babies.  And you can find an app for heart rate in your phones app store already.  But, in a clinical setting, respiration rate is often a strong early indicator of impending doom.  For me, the biggest potential application for this type of approach is to help keep people with chronic conditions healthy in their homes.