The KHIT Blog: Health 2.0 2013 final day

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Health 2.0 2013 final day

The final day of Health 2.0 2013 was off the hook. Matthew and Indu are amazing. The entire roster of presenters was amazing. The staff and volunteers were amazing. The A/V tech crew was amazing. The food was great (but the far-out, groovy, healthy rice milk and soy milk and no-fat/low-fat milk -- seriously? seriously? I'm with Matthew on that issue. Note to self; bring your own next year).

The receptions were great. My wariness regarding "Big Data" has been materially abated. My jaw is sore from repeatedly dropping to the floor over the Nokia Sensing xChallenge winners. "Disruptive," indeed. Sell your Quest and LabCorp stock (cut your losses) or short them (make money on their demise).

The youngsters presented as "Rising Stars" make me feel old and slow. Scary smart 23- and 24 year old CEOs. Where the hell did I put my hemi-walker and Metamucil?

Fred Trotter is scary smart. Love the new haircut, too, bro.

I want one of those OM Signal body biometrics shirts. Like, today. Where do I send the check?

My skepticism with respect to "employee wellness programs and apps," though, has only hardened. As I commented on September 24th on THCB:

Interesting post. Tomorrow I have to get up early and submit to some “Wellness Screening” stuff at my wife’s company, so that we get some “rate discount.” Having retired from my REC gig, I’m now on her insurance. Just gonna smile, play ball, and not make any waves for now, I guess.

I would speculate that, were we able to do a sound scientific study, we’d find that MOST U.S. companies are organizationally/psychodynamically toxic, places where one speaks truth to power at one’s peril (notwithstanding all the cherubic blather about “openness” and “safe culture”), places where backstabbing org chart climbing are rife, places where the bookshelves groan under the weight of books on “leadership” and “empowerment” and “team building.”

That, sadly, would characterize my last place of employment — a QIO, REC, and now HIE (for whom I worked 3 times spanning 20 years, noting an accelerating change for the worse). It was a factor in my “retirement” in April. They’d started into this lame HR-driven “wellness” “Re-Education Camp” initiative this year that was pure Dilbert Zone. I pretty much ignored it.

Wallpapering pretty “wellness” laminate over toxic business cultures is gonna do little more than decrease operating margins.

I’ve worked for seven employers across my white collar career. Only two of them could be considered culturally non-toxic.

Other stuff: A huge, irritating disappointment; the cancellation of the Health 2.0 ONC Town Hall owing to the absurd federal government shutdown. Farzard and his people had to return to DC Monday night.

Another irritant: endless barrages of "This data," "that data," "the data is" (I know; the "data are" battle is largely lost). And, everything is now "curated."

I'm back home, to the delight of my dogs. Fresh half and half in the fridge. Hundreds of photos to review and triage, much narrative commentary to ponder and write up. Bear with me. This may take a couple of days to fully reflect upon.
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FINAL DAY PHOTOS

I will eventually get names affixed to most of these faces (I hope; the action was intense and fast-moving).

Francois de Brantes of
Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute

Fred Trotter and his data visualizations

Evolent CEO Frank Williams

Alere's Helen Figge

Dignity Health CEO Lloyd Dean

Todd Rothenhaus, AthenaHealth

Adam Perer on big data complex patient clinical outcomes mapping

This interative node/path stuff reminds me of the kind of
CART analytics stuff I used to do in banking (pdf). e.g., below:

Above: the fabulous Epocrates "Bugs and Drugs" smartphone app

Yeah, what if your smartphone could warn you of an incipient stroke?

My competition ;)

Nokia sensing xChallenge winner Team Nanobiosym

Dr. Anita Goel, MD. PhD, Nanobiosym

Rising Star Akilah Satish, CyberDoctor CEO

Rising Star Pelu Tran, AugMedix Chief Product Officer

Kudos to the Health 2.0 show tech staff

Above, at the closing reception (L-R),
Leslie Kernishan MD, Gregg Masters, Pat Salber, MD, Vince Kuraitis, JD

Still weeding through photos...
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More to come...

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
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"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
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"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
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"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
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"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
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"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
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"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
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"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Thursday, October 3, 2013

Health 2.0 2013 final day

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