Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. Pharmaceutical companies are in trouble… → Read More
“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
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
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
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
NYC-based Blueprint Health, a health-focused member of the TechStars Network, is announcing its inaugural class of startups today. The Winter program, which begins on January 9th, will be taking place in a 12,000 square foot loft in SoHo that will be shared with the NYC-based members of Health 2.0 starting later this month. Part of the loft may also be turned into a co-working space for other… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter@chasedave.
I can’t think of a product or service that both… → Read More
“In the future we might not prescribe drugs all the time, we might prescribe apps.” Singularity University’s executive director of FutureMed Daniel Kraft M.D. sat down with me to discuss the biggest emerging trends in HealthTech. Here we’ll look at how A.I, big data, 3D printing, social health networks and other new technologies will help you get better medical care. → Read More
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
If you’re planning a marathon next year or just full of delicious stuffing and turkey, you may want to look into getting a sports watch. These wrist computers offer GPS, heart-rate, and pace measurements for runners, bikers, and, most recently, swimmers and they can help motivate you to get off your duff and, what’s more, help you shave some seconds off your time.
I’ve used all of these except… → Read More
Today, Docphin is launching a new Web service the company likens to a “Bloomberg for Doctors.” The site aims to help physicians organize, bookmark, read and track medical news and research from a number of sources, all within a single dashboard interface. Included with the service are simple tools to view and filter through hundreds of medical journals, something which has been difficult to do… → Read More
I had the opportunity to use a Fitbit Ultra, the successor to a glorified pedometer that has become oddly popular and addictive to a certain subset of non-torpid technophiles. To be clear, the desire to measure your days in terms of steps taken is an old one (there is heard tell of an old Chinese tradition of walking 10,000 steps a day to reach health and prosperity), but the Fitbit does this in a… → Read More
With Halloween around the corner, what better way to celebrate than to watch us animate my desiccated, lifeless limbs with jolts of fiery electricity? In this episode of Fly or Die, Erick and I look at the Compex Sport Elite. It zaps muscles to improve fitness, recovery, and general strength and it can, in a pinch, stand in for a massage. It also looks wildly freaky when turned on. → Read More
Exclusive – Social Q&A site Sharecare.com, created by WebMD founder Jeff Arnold and TV’s Dr. Mehmet Oz, is partnering with Healthline Networks, a provider of intelligent health information services. Healthline currently powers the health platforms at Yahoo Health, AARP, Aetna, United Health Group and others. Going forward, it will power Sharecare’s search services too. → Read More
The hotel bed that is empty tonight can never be sold again. That insight led Hotwire to create a disruptive model that has given travelers great deals on hotel rooms. It turns out there are “beds” and “suites” of a different variety - Surgical Suites/Beds - that have a similar phenomena. Just as top hotels rarely are 100% booked and can earn incremental revenue from otherwise empty beds, top… → Read More
As reported on TechCrunch, Google shut down its medical records and health data platform. Since then, there’s been a lot of bits spilled offering explanations, but they all missed the most critical item. Money. Or in the language of healthcare – Reimbursement. I explain more below regarding why Google Health was doomed to fail in light of the legacy reimbursement model.
First, let’s recap some… → Read More
After two years in stealth, Adam Bosworth is finally ready to start talking about his health startup Keas. Keas is not a Mint for health, although it began that way. Bosworth, who previously launched Google Health at Google and before that was known as the father of XML at Microsoft, founded Keas two years ago with $10 million from Ignition Partners and Atlas Venture. He thought he would build… → Read More
I’ve been suffering with a major wrist issue for the past few weeks and I’m slowly trying to figure out what triggers/prevents the onset. To that end, I’d like to share this nice post on unpluggd that features four separate wrist exercises for sedentary knowledge workers like me. → Read More
One of the objections often raised against 3D, and with justice, is that people with certain common vision problems can’t see the 3D effect. It just has to do with 3D technology assuming a certain level of intact functionality in the visual system, and the fact is that a significant portion of the population, for one reason or the other, doesn’t meet that level. Our own Matt Burns can’t really see… → Read More
Here you see the world’s first and only motorized prosthetic knee. The California-based company that makes the knee, Ossur, has just made the Power Knee available to above-knee amputees in Europe and the United States. → Read More
I’ve never understood why people on diets exclusively drink “diet” sodas — does advertising work that well? For starters, diet soda tastes like crap, offers absolutely no dietary benefits, and are full of aspartame. Whether or not aspartame converts to formaldehyde, there’s nothing natural about the stuff. So it comes as no surprise that a recent study found a link between drinking diet soda… → Read More
Bad news for those of you in the audience who love energy drinks, particularly those of you with children or younger siblings. Well, and if you make a habit of giving energy drinks to said youngsters. A University of Miami study suggests that—and this will shock you—that energy drinks may not be safe for young children, primarily because we have no idea how the combination of… → Read More
The gist of this story is that there’s a number of people out there who don’t like 3D because it makes them feel funny: their eyes hurt, it causes headaches, and so on. Despite this, companies are still throwing their weight behind the medium. Why? Why would companies keep throwing money at something that doesn’t seem to have “clicked” with the public yet, and may actually cause discomfort in… → Read More
How about that, all of this technology is killing us. That’s what researchers at University College London have said, in so many words, in a recent study that tracked screen users’ health (“screen users” being a catch-all term for people who do anything screen-based, that is, use a computer, watch TV, fiddle with their iPhone, etc.). It turns out that people who sit in front of a computer (and… → Read More
While I salute the courage of the 29 young men who had thermometers applied to their undercarriage in the name of science, I doubt the outcome is a surprise to anyone. Hot laptops resting on your lap will cook your coconuts. → Read More
There a number of ways to sterilize your water when you’re camping, traveling, or just feel like making sure. Boiling generally does the trick, but if you don’t have the time to set up the stove, your options can be limited. Nobody likes the taste of iodine, so this UV-based SteriPEN Sidewinder might be a good option. You crank the handle, it blasts the one-liter bottle with UV, and… → Read More
Hayden Allen, who looks quite a bit like Atlético Madrid’s Simão Sabrosa, is one of the first people on the planet to use Rex, the Robotic Exoskeleton. Developed in New Zealand—need I remind you that New Zealand was the only undefeated team in the World Cup—Rex can beest be described as robotic legs. Point being, Allen, whose spinal cord was injured in an accident, can now walk… → Read More
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime mentioned during a recent interview that people should be wary of their children playing 3D games for too long (or for any time at all). I suppose it’s a good idea to be on the record with this since the DS audience skews pretty low, but really, there’s no difference between Nintendo’s warning and Samsung’s. → Read More
You’re an animal. You’re a living creature not too dissimilar from a chimpanzee—well, I guess chimps don’t wear sneakers—, and yet you constantly fight your natural instincts. Like, you’re meant to be awake, alert and on the ready, during the daytime. The moment the sun begins to set you should be winding down your day. If the sun is down, you should be down, sleeping a deep sleep and… → Read More
MobileHelp is a small device that works “beyond the home” allowing your loved one to call for help at a press of a button. The device also also tracks your loved one via GPS and, when they sound an alarm, MobileHelp’s staff will contact them directly and call the proper authorities. My mother tried this at home and found the installation to be fairly easy – all she had to… → Read More
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