To be understood, seek first to understand. It applies in life, and it applies when you're trying to gain traction with an innovative product, solution, or workflow in the Health IT market. Why? Because there are too many draws on your customers' attention. If you want them to take the time to understand you, then you'd better position yourself where they already are, or will soon be looking. In short, get to know your market. On this episode, we're talking with Dexter Braff, President of The Br...
Jan 18, 2018•52 min
Read this on the web Have you ever wondered why your employer buys your health insurance for you? They don't get involved in car insurance, home owners, etc. Why healthcare? To understand that, you have to go all the way back to World War II. When the federal government froze wages during WWII, employers needed a way to compete for employees. As it turned out, benefits weren't included in this freeze and became a great way to attract talent. And then, as often happens, inertia took over and we j...
Jan 05, 2018•48 min
People like to say things like "If you've seen one healthcare system, then you've seen one healthcare system" or "every community is different". That may be true on some level, but these are really just excuses to keep doing things the same old way. In fact, most communities are exactly the same when it comes to the most important issues facing the U.S. healthcare system. If you pick any random community across the country and examine their healthcare delivery system, you'll find that: Tradition...
Dec 07, 2017•1 hr 2 min
On this episode, Rick Moore, CIO at NCQA, joins us for a discussion about what's next for digital quality measurement. Rick likes to call this Digital Quality Measures 2.0 and you can see it coming to life in NCQA's eMeasure Certification (eMC) program . The program aims to take burden away from health plans and auditors by establishing a process for generating standard supplemental data for HEDIS measures. This will enable software vendors, providers, HIEs and others to more effectively and eff...
Nov 30, 2017•58 min
They say that civilization advances by extending the number of important things we can do without thinking about them. To me, that's the promise of technology and it's particularly true when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Still, not everyone sees it that way. Some worry that they'll be replaced. Others take offense to the fact that they're seen as replaceable. But just like the rise of ATMs led to an INCREASE in the number of bank tellers , we'll see AI drive unpredict...
Oct 26, 2017•1 hr 5 min
On this episode, we talk with John D'Amore. John is Founder, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Diameter Health and has been working on Quality Measures in healthcare since the early 2000s. Yup, pre-EMR quality measures! John takes us on a fascinating journey from paper based quality measurement (see RHQDAPU ... at least we've streamlined our acronyms!) to the dawn of electronic measurement. via the Electronic Medical Record (EMR). He explains why the single-EMR approach made sense in the h...
Oct 10, 2017•56 min
Quality... What does that mean in healthcare? How can it be measured? Is it the same for everyone? Who gets to decide? These are just a few of the incredibly difficult questions that the healthcare industry is grappling with as we enter the age of value-based care. The decisions we make about quality in the coming years will have significant and lasting impact on the future of our industry. This is a conversation that's very much worth having. On this episode, we bring you another conference pre...
Sep 28, 2017•41 min
The healthcare industry has lots of problems, lots of money and is in a constant state of change. With those characteristics, it's no wonder startups are throwing their hats in the ring in increasing numbers. The theory is that they'll take some technology or process that's just killin' it in every other sector, apply it in healthcare and profit. The reality they find is quite different. Even with a great product, the notoriously long sales cycles, counter-intuitive financial incentives and poli...
Sep 21, 2017•46 min
The entire healthcare industry went digital in a very short time. We've barely got our arms around the mountains of data created every day in our transactional systems (i.e. EMR, Scheduling, RCM, etc.). Now the genomic, patient-generated and device-generated data is starting to flow. Take all that, mix it up with some HIPAA, a few parts ransomware, an uncompromising need for on demand data and reliability, the almost-dogmatic refusal to ever let go of a single piece of information, and the rapid...
Sep 13, 2017•47 min•Ep. 20
The most important thing we do on The #HCBiz Show! is confront reality. We don't complain about how things are, or how they ought to be. We know that's a dead-end. Instead, we examine our current situation and identify our obstacles. Then we come up with practical ideas for how to work through, under, around, or with those obstacles. That's the only reasonable approach for an innovator. Dealing with obstacles to Infection Control The Healthcare Infection Transmission Systems (HITS) conference (a...
Aug 23, 2017•29 min
Healthcare is the most intermediated business in the history of the world. There's always someone, and usually several someones, in between the clinician and the patient. Similarly, while most of us working on the business of healthcare will enthusiastically agree that we do this for the patients, we spend very little time talking about them. Of course, I'm not referring to the "front-lines" of healthcare delivery (i.e. doctors, nurses, etc.) or even their immediate support team at the hospitals...
Aug 07, 2017•40 min
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. That may be the best advice I can give the healthcare industry at this point. On this episode, we talk with Dave Marotz, Director of Directory Services at Surescripts to break down the Provider Directory concept into its component parts... "capability style". We go deep on the technical and architectural hurdles that need to be overcome to progress Provider Directory. You'll learn about: The various standards-based approaches that have been/are bei...
Jul 26, 2017•1 hr 4 min
This week's guest is Martin Dunn, CEO of Gaine Healthcare. Martin frames up the current state of provider data and directory issues quite well with this quote: "It doesn't matter how much you regulate the docs, It doesn't matter how much you've threatened the docs. It doesn't matter how much you incent the docs to pull this information together for you. If you ask questions that are difficult to answer, difficult to understand, impossible to keep up with because the doctors and the physicians an...
Jul 18, 2017•54 min
Friedrich Nietzsche argued that there are no facts, only interpretations. It seems that this idea holds true for provider data too. Today's guest is Andrew Kobylinski, Head of Platform at BetterDoctor. Andrew tells us that the provider directory issue is first and foremost a data quality issue. At the heart of data quality, he says, is metadata that explains where the information came from, what it means, when it was updated, and more. This metadata is the interpretation and without it, your fac...
Jul 11, 2017•52 min
Life can be hard for entrepreneur's in healthcare. Sure, we've seen an increase in Digital Health investment over the past few years, but it remains exceedingly difficult for new companies to prove their value, align with complex reimbursement models and get that first customer. That's where Digital Health Accelerators like Startupbootcamp Miami come in. They're in the business of aligning startups with specific customer needs, and in doing so, can help founders make big leaps in a short amount ...
Jun 29, 2017•47 min
On this episode, the fourth in our ongoing Provider Directory Series , we continue to unravel the "why" behind provider directory inaccuracies. One major theme that's emerged is that we have a context gap between health plans and providers. That is, even when we're asking the right people at the right time, we might be asking the wrong questions. Our guest, Ron Urwongse, a Senior Product Manager at CAQH, explains how adding a level of specificity to our questions can yield dramatically different...
Jun 21, 2017•41 min
There are two kinds of Provider Data Explicit provider data comes directly from the providers, their groups or even their IT systems (i.e. EMR, RCM, etc). Since this data is coming from the source, it's assumed to be up-to-date and accurate. However, as we learned in episode 11 (PD-02) there are subtleties and complexities to consider. For example, there are scenarios where it's best to go straight to the provider and others where you must talk to the group instead. You see, there are contractua...
Jun 13, 2017•1 hr 1 min
The national provider directory discussion is clearly focused on the patients and health plans. It focuses on the patients because they're the consumer of this information and without it, they can't make educated decisions when buying health insurance. The conversation focuses on health plans because they're the ones being held accountable for making the information available to consumers. To effectively address this issue, we also need to take a good hard look at things from the providers' poin...
Jun 07, 2017•46 min
In 2016 we saw new provider directory regulations from CMS and several states, including the particularly "toothy" SB-137 in California. The new rules are intended to hold health plans accountable for any inaccurate and/or incomplete information in their provider directories. The national conversation is focused intently on the consumer side. That is, bad information makes it difficult for patients to make educated decisions when they select plans and can lead to access issues down the road. The...
May 31, 2017•45 min
Darrel Hicks is internationally recognized as one of the subject matter experts in infection prevention and control as it relates to cleaning. He has written and published numerous articles in professional and healthcare related journals as part of his commitment to providing a cleaner, safer and healthier indoor environment. Darrel has a specific interest in soft surfaces and what he calls "The Patient Hot Zone". That is the hospital bed and the 36" around it. There are high-touch surfaces here...
May 25, 2017•36 min
What happens to an infectious agent once it leaves the human body? Well, it ends up in our cars, airplanes, food, water and soil. If we know how that contagion behaves "in the wild", then we'll be able to kill it, filter it, or otherwise prevent it from proliferating, and potentially improve the lives of millions of people in the process. This is the study of Environmental Microbiology and it's a topic that today's guest has spent more than 30 years trying to understand. Dr. Syed Sattar is Profe...
May 17, 2017•45 min
Sepsis is not an infection. Rather, it's your bodies overwhelming reaction to an infection and can lead to some serious health issues. In fact, sepsis is the #1 cause of death for patients in hospitals. Sepsis definitions and protocols have been around for some time, but have been undergoing major changes. Additionally, sepsis is under scrutiny from CMS at the federal level and is subject to public reporting in many states. All of this, plus the importance of quickly diagnosing and treating the ...
May 10, 2017•39 min
There are two things I can say for sure. First, healthcare-associated infections (HAI) cause a lot of suffering and cost a lot of money. Second, it's really hard to sell into healthcare, even when you have an innovative product that attacks a well-known problem in a common-sense way. On this episode, we get to dive into both of those things. Infection Control and Environmental Surfaces Over the past decade, substantial scientific evidence has accumulated indicating that contamination of environm...
May 03, 2017•45 min
Clostridium difficile (klos-TRID-e-um dif-uh-SEEL), often called C. difficile or C. diff impacts 453,000 people every year. And with 29,000 associated deaths, it takes more lives than AIDS and drunk-driving combined. Yet, most people have never even heard of it. That's a big problem because you can't protect yourself from a threat when you don't even know it exists. The impact on the business of healthcare is significant too. A study published in the American Journal of Infection Control found t...
Apr 26, 2017•51 min
Hand hygiene is the number one line of defense when it comes to controlling the spread of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and infectious disease. Since we know that antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance is on the rise, and few new antibiotics are being developed, it becomes exceedingly important that we prevent people from acquiring these infections in the first place. Checkout our extensive coverage of the Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) space We know that hand-washing is effec...
Apr 19, 2017•53 min
Rik Heller is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Wello . A self-confessed technology and healthcare geek, Rik has also been called the Grandfather of Active RFID and holds many patents in this area that are licensed globally. With a background in math and electrical engineering, he has been working in healthcare since 1989. In 1999 Rik Heller founded FreshLoc and became a pioneer of environmental monitoring for compliance and reporting in the healthcare industry. Freshloc is a remote temperatu...
Apr 12, 2017•38 min
The #HCBiz Show first address the topic of Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI) in July 2016 when we asked Infonaut founder Niall Wallace the question: Why are we losing the battle to hospital-acquired infections? From that post/interview: Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) are a big deal in US healthcare: They cost U.S. hospitals as much as $45 Billion per year. On any given day, approximately one in 25 U S patients has at least one infection contracted during the course of their hospital car...
Apr 11, 2017•41 min
Co-hosts Don Lee (@dflee30) and Shahid Shah (@ShaidNShah) introduce the podcast and tell you what to expect in 2017. The premise behind #HCBiz is that we can't "just innovate". Sure, you may have a great idea, an all-star team and execute flawlessly, but if you don't understand the complex dynamics of the healthcare business you'll never get traction. It'll seem that the system is broken and the people inside of it are irrational. You'll swear that it just doesn't make any sense at all. Well, we...
Apr 01, 2017•34 min
