Healthcare by MarketScale

COVID-19 is affecting everything. Whether it’s sports or music, politics or education, the deadly pandemic has interrupted routines, affected business and functionally altered the world.

So it should come as no surprise that the pandemic is changing things in the healthcare sector, including some of the regulations in place around virtual doctor visits, according to today's podcast guest, Brian Scarpelli, senior global policy counsel for Connected Health Initiative.

“So far the Health and Human Services department - through its Medicare and Medicaid centers primarily but also some other parts - has expanded the use of Telehealth, that is live voice and video and loosened some of the requirements around it, they’ve reinforced that there are some other billing codes that can be used for virtual visits," he said.

“They’ve also, for example, removed some rather outdated and onerous fraud and abuse checks, I think, that were put into place as far back as the 1990s, for the purposes of this crisis.”

Advances in medical technology can go far beyond simply allowing for remote doctor visits or letting patients use FaceTime or Skype, however. Scarpelli noted that biometric-monitoring tactics are among other advances still being rolled out that could be helpful to caregivers during this pandemic.

That said, he also cautioned against thinking a revolution will happen over night.

“In many other sectors - and some in the health-care sector say it and I take issue with it - that somebody is going to “Uber-ize” health. Somebody’s going to just go in and break things and disrupt and deal with all the regulations later,” he said. “That’s not going to happen in the health-care sector.

“There’s just far too much of an established framework and ecosystem for the delivery of health today, and the fact that the largest payer in America is the government in the form of the Medicare system makes its influence undeniable. In some ways the Medicare system has led the private sector.”

Those cases show that it’s not so much where the advance is coming from but what’s being improved when it comes to health care. Surely we soon will be seeing even more steps forward.

Massachusetts-based Ranfac has a long legacy in the medical manufacturing industry dating back to 1888, well-before World War I, when it provided hypodermic needles to the military for use in the field. But its leadership has a family legacy, too, dating back three generations.

On this episode of MarketScale's Healthcare podcast, host Shelby Skrhak sat down with Harlan Adler to discuss his recent succession to president of Ranfac following his late father and what's in store for 2020.

In April 2019, Harlan's father, Bob Adler, passed away at the age of 65. The elder Adler had been Ranfac president since 1984, when he came to lead the company after his father Herbert passed away that year.

"It was certainly difficult, on a personal level, losing your father, but then, at a professional level, losing someone who you relied upon for leadership and guidance for many years," Adler said. "But I was really fortunate to have really good people around me to help guide me through that transition."

As Adler established his leadership, he had to decide which company traditions to keep the same and which to change in order to make them his own.

"There were certainly aspects of how he led the company that I wanted to continue. However, I wanted to make sure I made the company my own and started fulfilling my vision for the business," he said.

Tune in as Adler shares specific ways he's balanced his father's leadership legacy with his own.

The "casual" in "casual dining" should not refer to the restaurant's attitude towards the cleanliness of the experience. In this episode of MarketScale's Healthcare podcast, John Shanahan, president and CEO of Ionogen, sat down with host Sean Heath to discuss the recent chemical events in a popular fast-casual restaurant, how those chemicals got there in the first place, and how to protect ourselves when dining out.

The process of protecting ourselves when dining begins the moment we step through the door, Shanahan said.

"If you walk into a restaurant and it doesn't smell clean? It isn't clean, and you shouldn't eat there," he said.

The generally accepted authority on whether or not a dining environment is clean is the local health department, explained Shanahan.

"The standards are actually the same, uniformly, across all of them, because, in every state, the health department is the guardian that watches over these restaurants to make sure that the standards for sanitation are uniformly observed," Shanahan said.

He also clarified that a shiny table is not necessarily a safely clean table.

"The leading national blue glass cleaner has 11 chemicals in it that you can't ingest," he said.

This is not a problem that is limited to "quick-serve" restaurants. "White linen" dining experiences can come with their own dangers, as well, explained Shanahan.

"The linen is typically replaced at one of those, after every single guest," he said. "Especially during flu season, someone will go out and have dinner at a 4-star restaurant. They'll have the early stages of the flu and grab the salt and pepper shaker. If you're the next person at the table, you've just been introduced to that virus, because it's been left on the salt and pepper shaker."

Technological advancements in the healthcare industry can be shockingly effective. They also can exert a significant impact on a hospital’s budget. On this episode of MarketScale’s Healthcare Podcast, David Macfarlane Marketing Communications Manager for Medsphere Systems, sat down with host Sean Heath to discuss the challenges of adopting the latest and greatest technologies.

The initial cost of a new healthcare technology can vary widely, based on the size/scope of the product, Macfarlane said.

“If you’re looking at the entire range of IT products, specific to healthcare, so, we’re talking about an entire healthcare platform. An electronic health record that runs a whole hospital, or a healthcare system, and then you could scale all the way down to a single software product that does something very specific, or a single device that does something very specific," he said.

The cost and budgetary impact of technological advances is apparent across the entire industry, explained Macfarlane.

“There’s a linear relationship between increases in healthcare costs and the introduction of technology into the healthcare environment. When you introduce new technology, costs go up. We haven’t managed to bend that curve, at all," he said.

Macfarlane also explained that the rapid adoption of healthcare IT systems can decrease the usage by the physicians it was designed to assist.

“They found that they sort of made their lives more complicated, not less complicated,” Macfarlane said. “They found that they spend more time now than they used to, entering data and a lot of hospitals have actually hired people to do that for physicians. So, there’s still a lot of maturity (for these systems) to achieve.”

The practice of sports vision training has evolved due to a better understanding of how the visual system works and new technologies that allow us to access information and train in natural contexts. Dr. Greg Appelbaum, Ph.D., and his team at the Duke University School of Medicine’s Human Performance Optimization Lab, are interested in how they can optimize human performance using neuroscience-based tools. Some of these tools expand into the realm of virtual reality and augmented reality.

Appelbaum’s combination of laboratory-based research and real-world research is used to advance the science of Sports Vision training. “A lot of these new tools, especially these digital tools, allow us to collect data in context that you wouldn’t think of as a research context,” Appelbaum said.

Can Sports Vision training play a role in athlete safety? What sports most benefit from this type of training? Is it expensive? And how is technology like Reflexion's adding an advanced layer of data to neuro-fitness? Dr. Appelbaum answered these questions and revealed a host of training methods and tools athletes use to improve areas such as depth perception and anticipatory timing.

It is one thing to finally clinch that dream job, but if an organization’s workplace culture is unsatisfactory, a dream job can quickly turn into a reluctant daily obligation. On this podcast we learn from workplace culture expert Mary Lipovan of Western Reserve Area Agency on Aging about how health and human services organizations can cultivate better work environments that retain employees and foster growth, innovation, and communication.

“People aren't in this for the money,” Lipovan said of health and human services workers, “they’re in this because they genuinely want to help people.”

In order to sustain this altruistic motivation to work, an organization must establish strong company values and a clear vision. But, when these defining elements are lacking, employees lose interest and ultimately leave in search of stronger leadership.

Lipovan emphasizes the importance of defining values: “If those aren’t clear and your employees don’t know what they are, there’s always going to be that misalignment and friction.”

But defining values is more than just putting a poster up in the breakroom.

“The shortcuts seem inauthentic and that resonates just as flat as not addressing values at all," Lipovan said.

Organizations can bring their employees together by providing opportunities that authentically foster community and build relationships. Strong values are key, but Lipovan said organizations need to take it one step further.

Lipovan argues that people should ask “...not only what the values are but how to measure them.”

Lipovan explained how there needs to be a way to determine whether the company messaging is working, and leadership needs to be open to change if it is not working. At the core of this workplace infrastructure is values, vision, and commitment, but an effective means of communication is perhaps paramount to all.

After all, Lipovan says, “Communication is key. Communication keeps the organization healthy.”

Social determinants of health have become a large topic of conversation in the healthcare industry. Kevin Stevenson, executive vice president of IntegraNet Health, joined MarketScale to explain this trend and why it means physicians are taking a more proactive approach to medicine rather than being reactive. 

"[Social determinants of health] is defined by the World Health Organization as the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age," Stevenson said. 

These factors are obviously numerous, but physicians can now use data to more accurately gauge the health concerns of a community. Kevin discussed how the industry as a whole is adjusting its thinking and changing moving forward. 

For more insight from Kevin Stevenson, check out his appearance on MarketScale Mornings discussing telemedicine and his previous podcast on mentorship in healthcare. 

On today's episode of the Healthcare Podcast, host Sean Heath got a crash course on medical crash carts from HealthFirst's marketing and product manager Lynda Goodrich.

Since 1971, Washington-based HealthFirst has been providing dental and medical offices cost-effective solutions for medical emergency preparedness, infection control, medical waste, and regulatory compliance. HealthFirst offers an automated medication replenishment system for crash carts, a wheeled set of drawers or trays that contain emergency medication and equipment for life support protocols in a patient medical emergency.

While crash carts are always found in hospitals and acute care facilities, Goodrich pointed out that medical emergencies happen everywhere.

"Crashes don't only happen to patients in hospitals," Goodrich said. "They can happen anywhere at any time. Parking lot, shopping mall, aircraft ... crash carts are a necessity in hospitals but I would argue they're a necessity everywhere."

While a hospital may have a full crash cart routinely restocked and checked by an on-site pharmacist, a smaller acute care facility may have a smaller, less-used crash kit containing medications prone to expiration or recalls. Manually checking those crash kits takes a lot of manual time and labor, something that can be solved with technology.

"You can log onto OnTraq, for example, and see all of your expiration dates and your lot numbers in case of a national recall, but it also helps eliminate human error," Goodrich said. "Plus, OnTraq's proprietary automatic replenishment system will monitor those expiration dates and prompt a replacement shipment."

These days there are a number of avenues for individuals to dive into the healthcare industry. Gone are the days where proficiency in medicine was the only requirement for a career in healthcare.

That has certainly been the case for Kevin Stevenson, who has worked with various healthcare organizations for over 30 years with expertise in operations, strategy, network development, marketing and crisis communications. On this podcast Kevin discusses his journey into healthcare and shares some practical career advice for anyone interested in joining the industry.

From his entrance into healthcare to his current role as Executive Vice President for the North Texas region of IntegraNet Health, Kevin has seen the positive effects of industry professionals who are willing to provide guidance to newcomers.

"It speaks to the type of people that enter our industry," he said. "We are, for the most part, servant leaders. We're looking for ways to serve not only our patients, our constituents, our doctors or whatever, but really the community and humanity as a whole."

Listen to the full interview for more on professional healthcare organizations and how they can be beneficial for industry professionals.

It seems like every year, at least one foodborne outbreak terrorizes the nation, prompting Americans to throw away millions of tons of food. On this week’s podcast, food safety advocate and Ionogen president and CEO John Shanahan shared his insight into a new approach food providers are taking in order to prevent another outbreak from gripping the country.

According to Shanahan, last year growers threw away $2 million worth of romaine lettuce following an E. coli outbreak. People fall ill and die from foodborne diseases all the time, which can have a negative impact on farms, restaurants, and grocery stores.

“This issue of produce safety, and even meat and cheese safety, is a huge problem," Shanahan said.

When outbreaks occur, the first thought is to look to the farmer and their practices to trace the pathogen; farmers are naturally inclined to point elsewhere for the outbreak origin. It's difficult to locate where the pathogen originates, and the responsibility could fall on packing houses, process plants, restaurants or grocery stores.

But a change is underway. Operators in the food supply chain are working together to identify and prevent problems before they occur. What is bringing this unity? New technology. Now there are metering devices that farmers use to detect bacteria at their sites, keeping that infected head of lettuce from ever spreading its disease.

Still, Shanahan advised that people at home should clean and sanitize their food before consumption. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of produce isn’t grown within the United States; often it's from a different country.

“Better than 40% of the produce that you eat in this country comes from overseas," Shanahan said.

He also advised to shop at the local farmer's market where smaller growers have more control over the cleanliness of their product.

It’s a great big world out there, but when you can, buy local and eat local," Shanahan said.