Tag Archives: #healthcarereform

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.

Digital Health, Healthcare, Healthcare Reform

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #3

Google’s Deepmind shows promise in early detection of kidney failure…and immediate takes heat for using an almost all-male training data set. I can definitely understand people’s concerns with that. On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s a deliberate gender bias here. It’s a machine learning project. Start with the data you can easily get, then refine with better data later. If you wait for the perfect data set, you might never get started.

This might be huge, CMS commits to puff up remote patient monitoring. CMS introduced new reimbursements for remote patient monitoring at the start of 2019. But astonishingly, managed to overlook the need for a precise definition of what services and devices would actually be reimbursable. Bit of an oversight that. This is going to get fixed for 2020.  Also stepping up to the plate is the granite state, providing Medicaid coverage for telehealth and remote patient monitoring. What a great way to provide better care for a rural population that is often under served because of the low reimbursement rates. As if to make my case, here’s another example of using telehealth to bring badly needed help to the patient, instead of forcing the patient to travel. And legislators are increasingly seeing telehealth as a way to help rural moms. Here’s an example of telehealth for preemies and newborns that need special care. 

Those new remote monitoring CPT codes really are catnip aren’t they…? New to me DynoSense, jumps in with FDA clearance for…I’m not quite sure what actually. The press release isn’t clear, but then press releases often aren’t. In the promo video, it looks like a direct to consumer offer. In any case, the sensor appears to yield lots of useful data for not much effort on the part of the patient. And that is going to be one of the keys for successful remote monitoring of chronic conditions.

Voluntis gets FDA clearance for app to help cancer patients self-manage their daily life. Interesting how in this deeper look, Romain Marmot the COO, says that oncology is basically a chronic disease in its own right that needs to be managed better. I like that perspective, thinking about one leg of the quadruple aim that perhaps does not get as much love as the others. And, I wonder how many providers think about quality of life for cancer patients when they are living day to day, outside the treatment center…?

In a somewhat similar direction, this article discusses how smart homes can become the epicenter for self-care. I mostly like where this is going, but only up to a point. I could take issue with phrases like “In the near future, smart homes will be primary care.” No, not in the near future on any significant scale in the US. There are 3 ways this scenario can become a reality: First, the widespread adoption of ACO-type payment models that shift the focus onto preventative care. Second, a large number of people go down the direct primary care path – and I think that’s really only an option for the reasonably well heeled. Third, primary care delivered via the smart home could take off if there’s a reimbursement code for it. And that means alignment between telehealth and/or remote monitoring billing codes and smart home solutions. In the rest of the world, it’s a different story. Where single payer systems dominate, preventative care has a much stronger focus. I can see much faster adoption of smart homes being used for healthcare in Western Europe than in the US. I’d love to be proved wrong on that, but I really can’t see it. And let’s be fair, Alexa’s latest skills are a long way from actually delivering primary care in the home. Those skills are really just nibbling around the edges of the healthcare problem.

OK, now I’ve flirted with the murky subject of the broken US healthcare system, we might as well get this out of the way: 40% of patients face surprise out of network bills. Many of those unpleasant surprises come from bills for ambulances. As that second article notes, many ambulance providers are out-of-network “because they couldn’t agree on a fair rate” with the health insurance companies. A more cynical person might feel that they were deliberately out of network so they could bill large sums to people who are at their most vulnerable and in no position to argue. Especially as that article also notes that ambulance services in the US used to be a public service, yet are now increasingly a for-profit enterprise. The whole idea that a company can provide services to an individual without their explicit consent and then just bill them whatever they want….that just doesn’t feel right now, does it.

When if comes to “wireless”, it’s all relative I guess…Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Michigan introduces a wireless solution for monitoring epilepsy. Not as wireless as the devices that I’m used to working with, but if it gets you down the path to better management of epilepsy, all power to you.

On the topic of wireless devices, I promised a deeper piece on iRhythm’s Q2 results and the 12 words that change everything for iRhythm and similar holter monitor competitors, such as BardyDX.

In patient monitoring, over-alarming is an ongoing problem, with 63% of alarms in the ER going unattended. I fully anticipate that machine learning is going to bring a huge improvement into the quality of patient monitoring in the next few years. Startups like PhysIQ are pushing down this path.  And HBR has a review of Current Health being piloted in remote patient monitoring – in the UK, so no reimbursement code change required to incentivize the change.

Digital Health, Healthcare, Healthcare Reform

Fortnightly Healthtech Update #2

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Does the accountable care organization work? Yes!  The ACO model is leading healthcare providers to focus on cost saving through preventative health. Lower healthcare costs, fewer people getting sick, I love that.  Oh, it definitely works – at least it does for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Or, not so much…. “Why would I ever take away the volume from those two facilities to a lower-cost setting?” The lack of aligned incentives means that some healthcare organizations are going to (understandable) drag their collective feet in the transition to value-based care. Are they playing a smart game, or are they going to be on the losing end ultimately…? Only time will tell. But, I’ll tell you one thing for sure. American’s simply cannot keep paying more and more for healthcare. Basic economics will dictate that, the money’s just not there.  Something will change.

Ben Taub dead patient was unmonitored, found passed out in bathroom. If only there was a way to monitor patients vitals continuously in the hospital and know where they are. Oh wait, there mostly is…the Philips Wearable Biosensor, (full disclosure, I used to be the product manager) gets some recognition for the ongoing pilot at Singapore General Hospital.

While we’re riffing on biosensors, there’s Aseptika diverging from COPD with the, ahh, curiously named BuddyWOTCH, promising continuous blood oxygen, heart rate, respiratory rate and temperature for 7 days.

Not a wearable, but competing hard with them every step of the way, Early Sense notches up another win in post-acute rehab.

Skipping back to payment reform, CMS is proposing a new bundled payment model for radiation oncology, with site neutrality being a key element.  Opponents argue this could interfere with established care models – and here’s me thinking, “But, that’s the whole point….”  Obviously not to jeopardize patient care, but to at least figure out how to provide the same quality care in a lower cost setting.  See note above, basic economics etc, something has to change…

Pampers and Verily introduce the diaper that sends an alert to your phone when a change is required.  Personally, I always found the loud and incessant auditory stimulation from my little ones provided all the alerting necessary.  But, I guess for the ear bud generation, maybe an app is the way to go.  Especially perhaps for a post ear bud generation with hearing loss.

Meanwhile, North of the border, paramedics and remote monitoring are being use to reduce unnecessary ER visits.

I think emerging nations can often signpost the way to lower cost healthcare solutions. Here’s a test for anaemia, jaundice, and oxygen saturation from Indiathat costs less than one US cent.

Potentially great news for diabetics, with coaching linked to real-time blood glucose measurements. Surely so much more valuable to have actionable guidance triggered by real-time feedback to drive long-term behavior change.

Data is everything.  All other things being equal, the people with the most data – and a decent strategy to leverage it – will win in the long term.  That’s why Amazon’s PillPack wants it, and SureScripts would rather not share…

And while on the subject of Amazon, Amazon and Cerner were apparently able to detect the onset of heart failure 15 months out.  Couple of immediate questions for me.  First, I’m not a clinician, but is 15 months notice really that significant for heart failure?  Isn’t the condition often brought on by decades of lifestyle choices?  If so, can an individual do anything meaningful in 15 months to avert the inevitable?  Assuming they can, this is great news – as long as you don’t live in the United States.  In countries that truly see the economic value of preventative healthcare, this truly could be great.  In the US, we’re slowly changing reimbursement models (read ACO, or single payer…) so we can actually get to the point where providers are paid for preventing disease instead of merely treating it.   Until then, it’s really just a bit of a machine learning novelty.

Ohhh, I like this – 3D printed heart valves.  Faster, better, cheaper – what’s not to love.

Curavi Health is eyeing up adjacent markets methinks.  Originally focused on bringing telehealth to SNF’s, it’s also now piloted a solution for use in the home.  Makes total sense in context of the an article in my previous update, where ACO’s are bypassing SNFs and sending patients straight home when they can.  And remote patient monitoring has a big fan in New Jersey, with Valley Health System driving readmission rates down to 2%.

Can’t quite decide which is the more impressive part of this announcement, but I think there is something in here somewhere….PhysIQ has ambulatory respiration rate.  But maybe more importantly, has hardware independent respiration rate.  Hmmm.

iRhythm, focused on cardiac arrhythmia detection, reported Q2 revenue 50% higher than last year.  But, the most significant thing in the announcement is CEO Kevin King saying “…our CPT code change application was accepted by the AMA for review…”.  That’s a bigger story than I have time for now, but I’ll try and squeeze out another post soon that gets into the nitty gritty about why that’s so important.

Very intrigued by this really stretchy wearable coming out of a collaboration from many US and Korean universities.  The full scientific paper here for the geeks among you…