Health:Further

Dr. Jeff Thompson is Executive Advisor and Chief Executive Officer Emeritus at Gundersen Health System in LaCrosse Wisconsin. He is also an accomplished author and speaker, as well as a practicing pediatrician. Dr. Thompson ran Gundersen Health System for 14 years. The organization covers a significant portion of Wisconsin, hundreds of thousands of patients, employes a staff of 7,000, and is consistently ranked as one of the highest quality healthcare organizations in the country. Much of that success comes from Dr. Thompson and his team's work to build and sustain a culture where patients are put first - in practice and not just as a slogan - employees are encouraged to remember why they got into healthcare in the first place, and where business goals and financial imperatives are aligned with the mission of providing outstanding care. In this conversation, we talk about leadership, organizational culture, and how the business of healthcare can and does work closely with the ideal of not just treating sick people, but keeping them well in the first place.

My guest today is Esther Dyson. Many of you will be familiar with Esther’s work, which includes multiple startups and board seats - 23andMe being one - her writing - including the 1997 book Release 2.0, her work in digital health and her investing with EDVentures. And that’s only part of her history. These days, one of her big projects is Wellville, a non-profit focused on community health and community wellness that she founded and chairs.

Change is hard. Whether it's getting a patient to change his lifestyle or adhere to a medication, or convincing an executive to implement a new tool or strategy, getting humans to change course is no easy thing. Hamid Ghanadan of the Linus Group spends his time thinking about how to build products and campaigns that will lower the energy barrier to change. In this episode, Ghanadan talks about the barriers to change and how change management can make a difference for the healthcare system. He also provides some specific examples of how minor changes - nudges - can create an outsized effect. Be sure to check out Gahanadan's books "Persuading Scientists" and "Catalytic Experiences."

Holly Fletcher founded BirdDog earlier this year to bring "slow news" to healthcare, tech and economic issues in Tennessee. The goal is to provide deep reporting on issues that affect the state, including some - like healthcare - that ripple out to the rest of the country. With Nashville as a national hub for the healthcare industry, the response of Tennessee health systems to policies and trends have an effect elsewhere. In this conversation, we talk about Fletcher's approach to covering the news (lots of data), the trends people are talking about (transparency and balanced billing), the things making healthcare companies nervous (again, transparency and balanced billing), challenges to making long-term progress in those areas, and holding policymakers accountable by asking hard questions.

We are taking the next couple of weeks of from releasing new episodes of the Future of Health. We'll be back on June 19. When we come back, we'll have conversations on blockchain in healthcare as part of our new Tokenizing Health Initiative, conversations about behavior change and change management, and a couple of panel discussion around things like transparency and care coordination. In the meantime, check out healthfurther.com for information about the 2018 Health:Further Festival and to sign up for our weekly healthcare newsletter.

Jay Desai is Co-founder and CEO of PatientPing, a care coordination platform that brings an individual’s medical records together to eliminate these problems. The service is built on network effects, sending providers alerts when the patient receives care at other facilities and also compiles their history into “stories” at the point of care. The goal, says Desai, is to reduce costs through fewer redundant tests and treatments, as well as provide insight that will improve care based on past events and reduce adverse outcomes or readmissions.

Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt, as well as a practicing pediatric endocrinologist. Dr. Kumah-Crystal, along with Dan Albert, Associate Director of Health IT Product Development at Vanderbilt, is building EVA (EHR Voice Assistant). It is a voice user interface for physicians that can naturalistically communicate with an EHR to ask questions and get answers back. Erum Khan is CEO of SoundMind, Inc., which creates voice artificial intelligence applications to empower seniors and improve the caregiving experience. The three technologists joined us on the podcast to discuss voice technology and AI, what it can do and what it is doing across health and healthcare.

Dr. Griffin Myers Chief Medical Officer at Oak Street Health. The organization provides fully-capitated care to patients covered under Medicare and Medicaid, so Oak Street is incentivized to provide efficient care with limited resources. Dr. Myers talks about this example of value-based care and how they've been able to reduce hospitalizations by over 40%, the mission of Oak Street health (personal, equitable, accountable care), and what new physicians entering the system need to know.

Bianca Oudshoff is the Deputy Consul General of the Netherlands Consulate in Chicago; Pieter Kolstee is an intern at the Consulate. They came down to Nashville as part of their work touring the Midwest and Midsouth, studying different cities and their business and innovation ecosystems, and taking that information back to the Netherlands as a resource for Dutch companies looking to do more business in the U.S. During the conversation, we discussed the Dutch healthcare system, the current state of healthcare innovation in the Netherlands, the process of building bridges between the two countries, and what Oudshoff and Kolstee are looking forward to with future technology.

Nisha Mehta, MD, is a practicing radiologist and founder of Physician Side Gigs. She joined us to talk about personal and professional development for physicians, getting clinicians more involved in healthcare operations, and how doing that can make careers in medicine more sustainable while also contributing solutions to some of healthcare’s greatest problems.