Healthcare, Homelessness and Hope

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Ashley Boyd

SBR Health and a new Boston-area nonprofit, Found in Translation, share an important core value: connecting patients and healthcare professionals through better communication. Found in Translation is the brain-child of Executive Director Maria Vertkin, who thought it would be a good idea to connect homeless, bilingual women with free job training to become medical interpreters, whose average annual salary is over $40,000. In Boston shelters, more than 40% of families identify as Hispanic/Latino (Source: Annual Census Report), and many are bilingual women.

Maria, an Israeli citizen born in Russia, saw an opportunity to help bilingual women by creating a program that offers not only a 12-week medical interpreter’s certification course, but common sense support such as child care and transportation. The Kip Tiernan Fellowship Committee at Rosie’s Place saw the opportunity too, and awarded Maria with a $40,000 start-up grant in 2011. Found in Translation graduated their first class of 21 women, selected from a pool of 164 applicants, in April 2012.

“The potential for women in this job field is tremendous,’ said Maria, who has worked as an interpreter and translator since she was a teenager. ‘Our program participants are looking at a 500% income increase. That not only helps the women and their families, it helps fill a need in the hospital workforce and improves the quality of healthcare for non-English speakers.”

Today, hundreds of low-income, bilingual women are waiting to apply for their next training cycle in 2013, hoping for an opportunity to use their language skills to create a better life for themselves and their families.

The next few months are critical for Found in Translation – additional funds are deeply needed to continue this important program. Party Around the World is the organization’s first annual fundraiser – a multi-cultural celebration with live Latin, African and Chinese lion dance performances, multi-cultural foods, and world music. It takes place at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA on November 16, 2012 from 6 to 10 pm. Tickets are only $55 general admission and $25 for students/starving artists. Please buy tickets, enjoy a fun night out and support this great organization!

For more information about Found in Translation, please visit their website: www.found-in-translation.org or contact Maria Vertkin at [email protected]

Why Innovation Requires Letting Go to Drive Change

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Ashley Boyd

This year’s 2nd Annual Digital Health Conference put the spotlight on efforts to advance healthcare innovation in New York and beyond. While the big apple is home to some of today’s biggest name celebrities like Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, talk of progress on health information exchanges and the secure sharing of data, as well as new mHealth and telemedicine tools, was top of mind at the conference.

Featured over the two-day conference were keynotes with Dr. David Brailer, Chairman of Health Evolution Partners, and often referred to as the ‘grandfather of health IT’, and Stephen Dubner, journalist and award-winning author of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics, as well as breakout sessions on some of today’s hottest topics in healthcare.

One of the most well attended and thought provoking sessions was the ‘mHealth Innovators Panel’ with Ben Chodor, CEO of Happtique, as moderator and Leonard Achan, Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at The Mount SInai Medical Center; Wendy Mayer, Vice President, Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer; and Martha Wofford, Vice President, Head of CarePass at Aetna as panelists. By addressing the goals, perspectives and challenges of using mHealth for care delivery, this hour-long panel offered key insights on mHealth’s potential to revolutionize the healthcare ecosystem from the key players in the market including hospital providers, physicians, patients, pharma, payers and programmers.

Q: How do you convince the C-suite that innovation is important?

Wendy: My team drives innovation platforms with a focus on transforming digital to support business and develop capability tools across the organization. With digital, you can innovate more quickly. Pfizer is still working towards a corporate digital strategy but has come a long way.

Q: How has innovation changed?

Martha: There’s been an explosion of applications. Now it’s more about navigating the ecosystem and connecting the best pieces brought to market.

Leonard: We’re further along now. Once you get the C-level support and get past the threshold of change, then you build trust and it’s easier to move forward.

Q: What’s the best innovation out there?

Wendy: Accessibility to healthcare beyond the local environment and the global implications of providing care and extending care more broadly.

Q: What’s the best thing about CarePass?

Martha: Allowing people to see a different future with data and get them there. We’re excited about all the things you can plug into mobile. You can revolutionize access to care around the world.

Leonard: The $7 trillion impact of mobile in low and middle income countries across the globe. A lot of more simple technologies will be transplanted from countries around the world.

Q: Why do people say they want mHealth but not everyone is using it?

Wendy: The existence of mobile technology in places where there is no alternative of care allows for quick adoption. Here in the U.S., the alternative is the person, the doctor. We have an immense amount of data from the traditional care delivery approach and less reliable evidence and data to allow doctors to let go and feel more comfortable with mobile. Mobile as a new means of communication is difficult to assess the impact.

Q: What advice would you give to startups?

Wendy: Do your homework around issues that pharma is dealing with. Vendors come in and talk about solutions that don’t connect to our business strategy. We’re looking for ideas that address our challenges and solve real problems.

Leonard: You have to do a lot of research ahead of time. We used to let everyone in. It was a disaster for entrepreneurs pitching to executives and not doing their homework. It’s important to understand the business goals. If you’re going to save lives and money, you have a chance but you really have to differentiate yourself.

Martha: CarePass is attracting developers with new solutions. We’re working collaboratively with other organizations to inspire innovation. We may be further along but not yet attracting the best and brightest. We want to create a community for developers to help us innovate and drive change. https://developer.carepass.com/

Blending mHealth and Telemedicine

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Ashley Boyd

The World Congress hosted three conferences in one space this week at the Colonnade here in Boston with a great pool of innovators and thought leaders in the mHealth and telemedicine space.

While the three conferences – mHealth, mHealth Innovation Exchange and the Leadership Summit on Telemedicine – were all unique in focus, I think they could have easily been combined into one conference. With discussions on the latest technologies and initiatives transforming healthcare today, it was hard to choose between attending an mHealth or telemedicine sessions, as they are really one in the same.

Alex Nason, Director of Telehealth at Johns Hopkins Medical, summarized the three conferences’ theme well. ‘It’s the connection to health service delivery that matters.’ Both mHealth and telemedicine are services and means for improving the quality and delivery of care. Connecting payers, providers with patients, we’re all in the ‘service’ of innovating care. And it’s a good service to be in.

In case you missed it, here are the highlights:

mHealth:

-Consumer Trends for Mobile Solutions

-Building Scalable and Sustainable mHealth Behavior Change

-Joslin Everywhere Diabetes Mobile Health Initiative

-Connected Mobile Health Apps and Consumer Engagement

-Intersection of Social Media, Games and mHealth

-Mobile Monitoring for Chronic Conditions

-Global mHealth Perspectives and Challenges

Telemedicine Summit:

-Transitioning to Virtual Care Models

-Telemedicine Funding Opportunities and Current Initiatives

-Pediatric Specialist Care Delivery via Telemedicine

-TelePsychiatry

-Legal Requirements of Telemedicine

-Virtual Care Team Coordination

-Social Media and Telemedicine

-Prescribing via Telemedicine

The Virtualization of Care

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Ashley Boyd

This year’s World Congress Leadership Summit on Telemedicine features a great lineup of speakers. Joining innovators from major hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations, we’re excited to hear about the industry-wide interest and demand for telemedicine use in care delivery.

One of the more interesting sessions was the keynote panel discussion on the Joslin Diabetes Center’s ‘Joslin Everywhere’ diabetes mobile health initiative and efforts to virtualize the delivery of care.

Panelists included Chief Medical Officer Martin Abrahamson, Chief Information Officer Ed Charbonneau and WebCare Program Manager Paul Penta. The focus of their panel was on efforts to improve quality, extend their specialist reach by supporting providers at affiliate sites, improving clinical metrics and collaboration with partners in the healthcare field. Through the use of new and innovative tools to train and engage patients to promote better care management, Joslin is establishing itself as a leader in diabetes care and ensuring care anywhere and ‘everywhere.’

Stay tuned for more updates throughout and after the conference.

What’s wrong with telemedicine?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Ashley Boyd

While studies have shown that successful use of videoconferencing and real-time communications can profoundly benefit patients and doctors alike, how do we define success?

Telemedicine has been in use now since the 80′s but due to complexity, specialized equipment, expensive network infrastructure and poor Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement policies, it remained limited to a small number of users. These challenges made it impractical to use televideo technologies for care delivery on a larger scale.

Today, low cost and ubiquitous technologies do exist that can facilitate a world in which videoconferencing has a place on the desk of every doctor, nurse and clinician. However, what is needed at the clinician level are applications designed specifically for the health care industry with televideo as a method of communications.

What does this mean?

As studies have shown that health care outcomes improve when truly collaborative communication takes place among patients, doctors and specialists, televideo is becoming more mainstream. But for televideo to be both successful and effective, televideo technologies must be user friendly, highly secure, low cost and fully customizable.

Is that all?

Fixing televideo goes beyond cost and complexity. While there are a number of innovative televideo technologies, there is still the problem of integrating televideo seamlessly into clinical workflow. The success of any technology depends only 10 percent on the technology and 90 percent on how the technology is integrated with existing workflows.

To deliver care successfully and effectively across the healthcare continuum, televideo must be mapped to existing workflows to improve patient and clinician use experiences and to minimize change management issues.

Change is good but it’s not always great.

To make televideo great, let’s start with improving the usability.

Day Two: SBR Health at the WHITv7.0 Conference

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Admin

Day two of the World Healthcare Innovation and Technology (WHIT) conference got off with less of a bang than Monday - hard to match the energy Todd Park put forth yesterday.

Today’s keynote was delivered by Peter Tippett, MD, Vice President of Connected Healthcare Solutions at Verizon who was to speak on the revolution in HIT being enabled by the marriage of the Cloud and mobility. Although very interesting, his keynote ended up pretty much being an hour long advertisement for Verizon. Not that this was all bad, as Verizon is doing a lot of interesting work applying science to uncovering falsehoods in current security dogmas. For instance, Peter presented how Verizon is attempting to make data more secure. By studying, then releasing information on data breaches and publishing the data at www..com/databreach, the updates will appear on their blog at securityblog.verizonbusiness.com.

What I find particularly interesting is that the length of a password does not significantly reduce the chances of being compromised. However, Tippett stated that most attacks come from remote access, so just doing port scans followed by locking down open ports would reduce data breaches by 70%!

I also found his discussion of the Verizon LTE was enlightening. Evidently Verizon uses a lower frequency than other carriers so their 4G service works better at penetrating buildings such as hospitals as these lower frequencies get around walls better.

In a panel session on mHealth, Joe Kvedar, MD, Founder and Director of the Center for Connected Health, spoke of his center has found that patients are starting to do a better job at more effectively taking care of their health. This is being enabled by connected consumer devices like the new iPod Nano that can track your daily steps. He also stated that this is a timely convergence with the change in the way healthcare is being paid for, where healthcare providers need to become better at managing their populations health so these tools could not be coming at a more plotting time.

I found the rest of the day pretty mediocre with the exception of a presentation by Cynthia Galbincea, Executive Director of Marketing Communications at the Cleveland Clinic. Galbincea spoke on their mobile strategies, stating they are seeing a lot of demand from consumers for wellness and information applications, and have been very active in developing and deploying these types of applications, especially in support of their branding strategies. From their doctors, their organization is seeing the largest uses of their iPads for sharing information with their patients, assisting with diagnosis, as well as tracking patient’s progress on them. Cleveland Clinic’s mHealth strategist, Tony Crimaldi stated they are focusing exclusively on iOS development, and with that, mainly applications for iPad devices as these are the preferred device with their clinicians.

That’s it from the final day of WHITv7. Overall, a pretty impressive line up of thought leaders and innovators and I’m looking forward to more high quality innovation events such as this one from the World Congress.