Health:Further

Mary Mirabelli is Vice President of Global Healthcare Services at Hewlett-Packard, as well as former chair of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, HFMA. The conversation combines Mary's personal health and healthcare experience, as well as her professional work in the healthcare industry. In fact, we talk about how her views on innovation and patient care are deeply informed by her personal healthcare experience. She talks about making the choice to thrive and taking control of our own health. Also, in and among all the very important conversation around health technology and costs, being willing to do the right thing for the patient, even when it may be a hard business decision.

Stephen Konya is Senior Innovation Strategist at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, or ONC. In that role, Stephen helps develop the federal government’s plan for encouraging and supporting advances in the health IT world, and helping the health innovation and entrepreneurship community build products and processes that work within federal standards and laws, such as meaningful use. He also spends a lot of his time traveling, updating entrepreneurs and the rest of the healthcare community on what the government in general, and ONC specifically, is working on. We get into UI/UX, interoperability, and the 21st Century Cures Act. It’s very encouraging to know that we have people working within the federal government to create an environment within the healthcare industry that is friendly to and supportive of innovation. And, maybe even more encouraging, that people within government are building a new culture of innovation. Like Stephen said, it’s not just government that struggles with innovation, it’s large healthcare organizations in general.

Blake Marggraff is a healthcare entrepreneur with significant goals. He wants to set the bar for patient engagement. He’s doing that through a commitment to research and evidence-based product development. Blake is the founder of Epharmix, a digital platform and mobile health technology that helps patients with chronic diseases and other conditions. It is designed to improve patient engagement, increase adherence, provide feedback to clinicians and care managers, and ultimately reduce costs and improve outcomes. Blake and the team do all that with studies that cover thousands of patients and take feedback from clinicians using Epharmix tools. True researched-backed, peer reviewed work.

Dan Trigub is Head of West Coast Healthcare Partnerships at Lyft. His job is to figure out how to literally deliver better healthcare. Lyft, of course, is a ride-sharing company that is making a massive push in the healthcare space, bringing people to appointments and medical care, as well as bringing caregivers to patients. They’ve partnered with Brookdale Senior Living to do a lot in senior care and elder living, as well. With all of that going on, Lyft is right at the center of health technology, making health accessible and affordable, improving outcomes and patient satisfaction, and even helping create more efficient cities in the future.

Ryan Wilson is the Chief Growth Officer & SVP of Sales at ‎Brookdale Senior Living. Part of the “growth” in his title is figuring out how to find, develop and implement innovations in the world of senior living. Put another way, he works to be a healthcare entrepreneur within a large healthcare organization. In that capacity, and in the interest of transparency, he is one of Health:Further’s Innovation Partners. But aside from our relationship, Ryan’s role means that he has to think creatively about what innovation in healthcare means and how to do it. He has over 100,000 residents at Brookdale facilities, with 80,000 employees. So it’s a massive challenge. Under all the talk you'll hear about healthcare marketing, corporate culture, employee engagement, defining and engaging the end user, was Ryan’s mandate to - as he says - do the right thing. So it’s providing content that is helpful to people making decisions, even when that content isn’t high tech. It’s helping families make decisions, it’s bringing in residents to help guide the Brookdale innovation team in what’s needed to make their lives even better. It’s empowering employees to be great at their jobs and work with integrity.

We talk a lot about health in terms of medicine and healthcare and technology. But we’ve also pointed out, repeatedly, that there’s a lot more to it than that. The question is, “what is real wellness and what is real health?” That’s something Jennifer Masley is very interested in. Jennifer is a health entrepreneur who builds communities, bringing people together through food. She works to create places where people are supported, so they have someone to fall back on when things get rough and avoid a lot of the health and wellness problems that come from that. It was a lot of fun talking to Jennifer and having a chance to think about health in a different context. I love how her comments, and her work, end up coming back to pretty much every aspect of health and wellness - mental, physical, and more. Mind, body and spirit, as she said.

John Bass is the second blockchain conversation we’ve had on the Podcast. The first was last summer with Kristen Johns of Waller Law, which gave us a great overview of blockchain. In this conversation, John Bass of Hashed Health goes into more of the current blockchain environment. He points out early on that there’s a lot of hype, but that the basic principles are well-proven. He also talks about some basic principles - the trust between two sides of a transaction that eliminates the need for a middle man - that blockchain creates. In the second half of the conversation we talk about the things that Hashed Health is doing with blockchain in healthcare. It’s Hashed-specific, but as examples of what is being done, what can be done, with blockchain. For example, decentralized provider identities.

Jerry Youngblutt and Sara McCurdy are part of Boyden-Youngblutt, a design and advertising agency. Boyden-Youngblutt has worked across many industries and with a huge range of clients, everyone from museums to medical systems, hospitals and universities to state lotteries. Their work is built on an approach that starts with the consumer of the product and works backwards from there, which means the team know how to think about people, and relationships, and trust. All of those things, of course, play into designing for health, so that’s a big part of this conversation. We also talk about virtual reality in healthcare and medicine towards the end.

Jessica Sweeney-Platt is the Executive Director of Physician Performance Research at Athenahealth. Her work looks at what it takes to help care teams, particularly physicians, operate at their best. What are the quantitative and qualitative measures of performance, and what are the resources and training needed to make that happen. In this conversation, we’ll talk a lot about leadership in healthcare, and how that qualitative idea is creating quantitative outcomes for health systems in the era of value-based care. One of the big takeaways is that leadership, good leadership, shouldn’t be an afterthought but actually does have implications for the measurable outcomes like bottom line, as well as patient experience within the healthcare system.

Steven Collens is CEO of MATTER, a Chicago healthcare community and startup incubator. Steven, and the team at MATTER, work from an assumption that collaboration between healthcare industry and healthcare startups is the best way to make progress on the challenges we’re facing in healthcare. This, we’re hearing from more and more people, is the way forward. It’s a perspective we wholeheartedly agree with at Health:Further. Steven makes a good point about two-thirds of teh way through that entrepreneurs aren’t going to blow up the healthcare industry. There is still a structure in place, so it’s evolving that and finding useful solutions, particularly with the new mindset of value-based care. Also, he makes some interesting comments at the end about the trends in healthcare, making it less episodic and more continuous. It seems like that is, in fact, a good way to move us more towards a model of health and wellness rather than just delivery of medical care.