October 10th, 2012

Meet The Three Most Fund-able Health Companies From The DC To VC Showcase

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Today, Morgenthaler Ventures and Health 2.0 concluded its “DC to VC” startup showcase, a nationwide contest that aims to find the most promising and “fund-able” young businesses in health IT looking for funding. From hundreds of applicants, twelve finalists were chosen to pitch their ideas on stage at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in front of a crowd of 400+ VCs, angel investors and… → Read More

October 5th, 2012

Healthy Consumers And The Future Of The Patient-Physician Relationship

Michelle Snyder

Editor’s note: Michelle Snyder is executive in residence at InterWest Partners focusing on the transformative role that mobile, social, and data can play in the healthcare industry. You can follow her on Twitter.

It’s hard not to read an article about the healthcare system these days without some reference to the demise of the patient-physician relationship and the risk this poses to us as… → Read More

May 1st, 2012

Castlight Lands A Whopping $100M D Round To Bring Transparency To Healthcare Costs

Logo_High Res

Founded in 2008, San Francisco-based Castlight has been at the forefront of the movement to bring price transparency and comparison tools to healthcare, offering a B2B service that enables self-insured businesses to provide their employees with the tools to compare costs and quality of a wide range of tests and procedures. While there was plenty of resistance from providers off the bat, the value… → Read More

March 16th, 2012

Aetna: The Company Scaring Its Competition And Delighting Startups

Health Insurance - Whose Path Will You Follow

Whither health insurance? A former medical advisor to the Obama Administration who happens to be the brother of former Presidential Chief of Staff predicted in the New York Times that by 2020 health insurance companies will be extinct. Nearly two years ago, I penned a piece entitled Health Insurance’s Bunker Buster. It outlined two key reasons that health insurance — as we have known it the last… → Read More

February 15th, 2012

Communication is the Most Important Medical Instrument

Control & Acuity Diagram

“A good scalpel makes a better surgeon. Good communication makes a better doctor.” The future of medicine in the U.S. is clear. The days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered as it has produced one of the most inefficient healthcare systems in the world. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is crystal clear — highly effective… → Read More

February 6th, 2012

WWJD? The CEO Every Healthcare Leader Should Learn From

Innovator's Prescription

As healthcare goes through massive changes, health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a similar situation. In the late 90′s, the following dynamics were present:

Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
Newspaper companies bought up… → Read More

February 2nd, 2012

Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad

HealthIT is bad

I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional… → Read More

January 24th, 2012

The Rise of Nimble Medicine

Innovator's Prescription - New Wave of Disruptive Models in Healthcare

In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of small… → Read More

January 4th, 2012

Healthcare Field of Dreams In Idaho: Health System Opens Innovation Center

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Fifteen years ago the Internet was revolutionizing global communications and computing so companies were looking for the most advanced markets to test their technologies. Locales such as Korea and Singapore portended the future. Today, no less than reinvention of healthcare is taking place. A key question is which locales will provide a similar testbed for healthtech. It’s not always the obvious… → Read More

December 28th, 2011

DIY Health Reform: Employers Solving Healthcare Crisis One Onsite Clinic At A Time

DIY

In several of my past pieces, I have written about the importance of a disruptive model of care and payment called Direct Primary Care (DPC) such as The Most Important Organization In Silicon Valley That No One Has Heard About. As the DPC models scale, they become a great option for individuals and small business. However, larger organizations have another option at their disposal that I’m as… → Read More

July 3rd, 2011

The Declaration of Insurance Independence

The scale of the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Health Reform movement is dramatically bigger than I realized when writing about how that movement could affect the Talent Wars taking place in the tech community. So much so that I’m convinced we’re on the cusp of the third, and by far the biggest, major wave of Health IT. The first wave was the introduction of mainframe/minicomputer based departmental… → Read More