The KHIT Blog: September 2016

Thursday, September 29, 2016

#health2con 10th annual conference final day

Beginning with the end in mind...

The view on the 680 heading north toward Pleasanton on my way back home to Antioch. Ugh.

The conference wrapped about 4 minutes early, at about 3:11 pm. I'd planned to maybe just hang at the hotel until after rush hour, but, I thought 'hey, a quick dash through the restroom, out the side door by the ballroom, right to my van in the parking lot. I can do this.' I was pulling out of the Hyatt parking lot straight away, up to the 237 eastbound on-ramp. Traffic was heavy. but moving.

Momentarily up on the flyover onto the northbound 880...

'Oh, shit...'

Up ahead, a parking out. Multiple ambulances, tow trucks, and fire trucks, blue and red lights flashing.

Well, after, I crawled past that mess, the NPR KQED Traffic Alert advised me of a "multiple vehicle crash in Milpitas on the 880."

OK, off on Mission, over to the 680. Crawling again. 15-20 mph. Bladder, don't fail me now...

Next decision: given that I've lost my mo', do I really want to get in the always-brutal Walnut Creek to Concord area 680 pm rush hour mess?

Bail to the 580 eastbound at Pleasanton. Traffic heavy but moving in the 60's. Cool.

Off at Vasco Road at Livermore to run up the back way to Brentwood and home in nearby south Antioch.

Head north across the 580 bridge. Portable digital road sign advises "Construction delays, 9-28, 9-29, 9 am - 4 pm." Yeah, the iPhone map app is showing red in the area.

Screwed.

My daughter fussed at me for not using Waze (she's an addict; she' can't go to the grocery store without launching it).

Like, what alternatives would there have been? None.

Finally home after 3 hours. Only about 60 miles via the Vasco Road route. Whatever, I'm home. Pour some Cabernet. Jaco is glad to see me. And, likewise.

I will never lose sight of our luckiness in getting him back. Cheryl found him in July 2003 at the Jones and 95 freeway on-ramp in Vegas, just a freaked-out puppy about to get killed by traffic. He's been our delightfully goofy "puppy" ever since (the name "Jaco" is in honor of the late bassist Jaco Pastorius). Our gratitude to the young man who collared him and turned him in to Animal Control cannot be overstated.

Next up, shopping a GPS signal smartphone-enabled collar for him. Not goin' through this anguish again. And, a trip to the vet for a post Jaco-on-the-lam assessment (he's 14 and is on a kidney Rx diet).
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So, I have about 400 shots to review and triage (ive; thus far only posted a handful), and copious session notes on which to reflect and write up. Gonna be at it a while, bear with me. Keep checking back. Tomorrow I gotta get back on my weekly Muttville.org volunteer shift, so I may be into the weekend recounting the Health 2.0 Conference.

Meanwhile, I could not recommend more highly that you obtain and read Gerd Leonhard's intriguing tech futurism book "Technology vs Humanity." Also, Brett King's "Augmented: life in the fast lane."

To reiterate what for me is the thematic, cut-to-the-chase #health2con takeaway slide:

'eh?
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More to come...

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

#health2con 10th annual conference Day Two

Day Two was a long crush of great broad and deep content and endless photo-ops. I can already tell I'm gonna be posting about #health2con 2016 into the weekend. I have hundreds of shots already. And, three evening cocktail receptions Tuesday alone.

Back off to the ballroom shortly this morning for Day Three.
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More to come...

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

#health2con 10th annual conference Day One

A jam-packed, inspiring day. Myriad technical topics to reflect on and write up. But, below, the cut-to-the-chase emblematic slide that jumped right out to me.

That critical "connectivity" spans the gamut, from self bio-monitoring to the breadth of clinical medicine and community/social services resources. Virtually everything presented all day fits within those parameters.

Shot more than 120 photos. Will be triaging them all day as time permits. A few for now.

I'd intended to begin the day attending the 8 a.m. blockchain tech session, but instead went to Dr. Painter's "Intersection of Technology and Public Health" 4-hour forum. Glad I did.

Hope everyone has a great Day Two. Tweet me @BobbyGVegas if you want to chat up. Speaking of tweets...

LOL. No, I don't dig the guy. "Believe me."
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Well, a ton of thoughts and photos to post, but, we gotta have our priorities...

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More to come...

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Showtime! #health2con 10th annual conference

I could not be in a better mood this morning. We got our dog Jaco back yesterday after 12 days of numbing anguish over his getting loose and disappearing on September 13th. Jaco is safely home with my daughter, and I'm here at the Hyatt Regency onsite hotel at the Santa Clara Convention Center with my wife, who just returned from an intense week-long business trip to Israel. Not even a loud and obnoxious early morning hotel union protest out on the sidewalk could harsh my buzz (and, thank you, Hyatt staff for comping me the lattes as apology for the protest harangue).

As I noted on Facebook yesterday afternoon:

It's been a good day. My wife came home from overseas, my dog came back, and Tennessee beat Florida. I feel a country song coming on.

LOL. I been known to write a country song or two...

Cheryl and I lit into some maragritas and lemon drop martinis and chow at the hotel Evo bar last night, and got to have some nice chats with Health 2.0 co-founders Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt, both of whom are utter delights.

Today:

Provider Symposium
The Provider Symposium is back again this year! This event will bring together hospital & other provider executives with innovators to tackle the biggest challenges facing health systems today.

To truly drive change in health care, innovation needs to occur at both an operational level as well as in the day-to-day workflow of clinical care. The symposium unites those worlds with classic Health 2.0 demos of the latest technology designed to improve the lives of these key stakeholders, as well as meaningful discussion anchored by case studies of pilots using new technology, or developing innovation within from forward-thinking institutions like Cedar-Sinai, UPMC and more! By gathering the right people, technologies, and systems into a single room, the Provider Symposium will foster debate and spark the exchange of ideas between the best minds from leading health care systems in an effort to change the face of health care as we know it...

Patients 2.0 at the 10th Annual Fall Conference
This year’s theme is Patient Match, where we discuss the resources and tools available for patients as they navigate their health journey from diagnosis to long-term care. The Patients 2.0 session is run by Patients and marshaled by Sarah Krug from the Society for Participatory Medicine...

"[I]nnovation needs to occur at both an operational level as well as in the day-to-day workflow of clinical care."

Indeed, which is why, aside from HIMSS and IHI conferences, I also cover The Lean Summits every year. Health 2.0 and Lean are my favorites, gotta say.

Gonna be a great day. My cameras are fully charged and ready to rock. Still ruminating on the myriad implications of "thinking about jobs, education, healthcare, and tech." And, Gerd Leonhard's "digital obesity" amid the broad and deep panoply of health space issues I continue to chew on here at KHIT.

Hope to meet a bunch of you here today and this week. My Twitter handle is @BobbyGvegas.

ERRATUM

I should note this USC Center for Health Journalism webinar coming up on Thursday.

I've signed up. Recall my reviews of Ann Neumann's book "The Good Death" here and here.

News item. I searched Google news for "Health 2.0." This popped up:

Insiders: Silicon Valley is blowing its chance to ride the silver tsunami
By Dan Diamond

Health care is being swamped by the so-called silver tsunami: 10,000 seniors are turning 65 and becoming Medicare-eligible every day. But rather than ride the wave, investors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are too focused on the shallower pool of younger, healthier Americans.

That's according to health care IT leaders and thinkers who participated in POLITICO's health IT advisory forum this week...

And, get off my lawn!

REFLECTING ON A YEAR AGO

Are we finally getting to or at the uptick elbow of the Health IT innovation traction Hockey Stick curve. Last year at this time I mused on "Free Beer Tomorrow" - "Transforming the Healthcare System."

A FEW RANDOM SHOTS

Stage lighting at Health 2.0 is generally fine, but today's pre-conference symposium day lighting was a bit weak (yes, I'm a lighting snob; come by it honest). While they continue to know that they should deploy overhead backlighting (unlike my friends at the Lean Healthcare Summits), the Front-of-House spot trees this time were inadequate. Makes for grainier, oversaturated photos. Nonetheless...

Below, the busiest guy in the ballroom. We ran long. It was way worth it.

My running joke with Matthew Holt.

Ugh.

I took pretty good notes on the day. More later. Fixin' to go to the Redox reception shortly.

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MONDAY MORNING BREAK-OF-DAWN NEWS ITEM

Community Health Center Network and Welkin Health Partner to Improve Health Outcomes for Bay Area's Most At-Risk Populations
Health 2.0, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to award grant to develop complex case management platform for underserved populations

Community Health Center Network (CHCN), a non-profit public benefit corporation, and Welkin Health, a San Francisco-based digital health company specializing in patient relationship management, have partnered to develop a complex case management platform to elevate the success of CHCN’s Care Neighborhood program. The innovative program addresses and supports the health needs of the East Bay’s most at-risk and underserved populations through consistent patient outreach by Community Health Workers (CHWs) embedded in the CHCN health centers.

Selected as one of three national finalists for Health 2.0’s Technology for Healthy Communities initiative, a project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Welkin Health will develop a complex case management platform for CHCN. Emphasizing strong patient coaching and data-driven insights, the platform will help CHCN health centers streamline communication efforts between patients and CHWs, increasing engagement, reducing costs and leading to improved long-term health outcomes for patients. It will also aggregate patient data from EHR systems and claims databases to provide CHWs with optimal clinical decision support, increasing efficiency and the ability to track health improvements of enrolled patients over time.

The platform will launch at three CHCN health centers in the Alameda County with a goal to eventually expand to support Care Neighborhood programs at all eight health centers that are members of the network...

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More to come...

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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