Health IT investors share lessons learned from early investments

If you were to ask a healthcare investor what their investment strategy is, it is likely the product of some brilliant foresight, a little luck, and some lessons learned from bad experiences or near misses.

In a series of phone and email interviews, we picked the brains of health IT investors at four firms. We asked them what they learned from early investments and how those lessons and insights informed their strategy going forward. One theme that threads its way through the investment narrative of these companies is that technology is all well and good, but you need a service to support it as well.

Cotiviti (originally iHealth) and athenahealth were two of the firm’s first investments made in the space, Lamont said in an email.

“They were very much about fixing broken processes through software, services, and data. That’s been our approach – addressing a broken system and improving it through the powerful combination of software, data, and services.  That’s particularly the case when behavior change is an important part of what needs to happen to improve healthcare and materially bend the cost/quality curve.  Appropriately, Aspire Health, Quartet Health, VillageMD and Axial Healthcare all have service as a component.” For the full article click here 

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Ireland to go-live with national maternity electronic record

Ireland’s biggest maternity hospital will go-live with Cerner next month, as part of an upgrade that will see all its maternity units switch to the electronic health record system.

Cork University Maternity hospital will deploy Cerner on the weekend of 3 December. By the end of 2017, the country’s 17 maternity hospitals that will share a single nationwide Cerner record.

eHealth Ireland chief executive Richard Corbridge told Digital Health News that Cerner had rebuilt and validated the system specifically for Ireland’s maternity context.

“This will be a single instance across 17 hospitals to promote the sharing of information,” he said. For the full article click here 

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Many Insured Children Lack Essential Health Care, Study Finds

Margo Solomon has health insurance for herself and her four children.

But actually getting treatment is another matter.

Ms. Solomon, a 35-year-old mother from the Bronx, says she has struggled to find a doctor who accepts her insurance. And with three of her children coping with asthma, and one with more complicated medical problems, locating a specialist is even more challenging. And once in the door, she cannot afford the costs, including for deductibles and medications.

“I feel like I am all alone out here,” Ms. Solomon said.

She is not alone.

A new study to be released on Monday by the Children’s Health Fund, a nonprofit based in New York City that expands access to health care for disadvantaged children, found that one in four children in the United States did not have access to essential health care, though a record number of young people now have health insurance. For the full article click here 

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Letter: ACA repeal would turn back century of health care progress

I commend Sen. Joe Manchin for calling for reform of the Affordable Care Act rather than repeal (W.Va. reps to seek repeal of EPA rules, ACA, Nov. 10).

It is shocking to think that President-elect Donald Trump and Congress might repeal the ACA and turn back the clock on a century of progress toward universal health care.

President Richard Nixon and President Ronald Reagan had plans that included some of the principles in the ACA. Access to affordable health care should not be a privilege for the rich and those employed full-time in big business. It is a fundamental right.

Repeal of the ACA would be “devastating” to West Virginia (to quote Terri Giles on Nov. 11). Health care is a large sector of our economy and West Virginia has poor health outcomes and higher morbidity and mortality than most states. For the full article click here For the full article click here 

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Study finds reasons for accumulated stress levels more complicated than thought

TORONTO, Nov. 17, 2016–African-American and Latina women have a higher accumulated stress level than Caucasian women, but a new study found that less than half the differences could be explained by expected factors such as poverty, neighbourhoods, stress and support systems.

Study author Dr. Pat O’Campo, a researcher with the Centre for Urban Health Solutions of St. Michael’s Hospital, said there was growing interest in the impact of stress on women’s health, including lifetime accumulated stress and the psychological toll of having to repeatedly respond to stress.

In a study published today in the journal Social Science & Medicine, Dr. O’Campo compared the “allostatic load” of African-American, Latina and Caucasian women enrolled in a large longitudinal health disparities study in the United States. For the full article click here 

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ML Tool Speeds Deployment of Health Predictor

Large health datasets are being used to develop predictive risk models for individual and population groups. The latest example is a partnership between a predictive analytics vendor and a machine-learning platform specialist to deploy a new health predictor.

Brooklyn-based Yhat, developer of a machine-learning deployment platform called ScienceOps, said this week that analytics vendor Lumiata is using its platform to launch its AI-powered health prediction tool. Yhat said its platform helps overcome incompatibilities between AI algorithms and emerging digital applications.

ScienceOps is positioned as providing the technical infrastructure “to transform statistical code on an analyst’s laptop into a product you and I can interact with,” explains Austin Ogilvie, Yhat’s CEO and co-founder. The goal is to help launch more AI-based applications, Oglivie added. For the full article click here 

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Hospital Impact: Trump, chaos theory and the OIG

It is not yet possible to predict what President-elect Donald Trump’s administration’s policies will be when it comes to EHRs and health IT.

Will he embrace some of President Obama’s projects, like precision medicine? Will anything happen to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the review of certified EHR technology? And what happens to the fight against information blocking? Will that continue? Or become less important?

So imagine how much more daunting it is for those in the government who have to follow through on policy in the face of all these questions, all this change and so much chaos. For the full article click here 

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