Health:Further

The most recognized male figure skater in history doesn’t define himself that way. Instead, he jokingly mentions his “hobby of collecting life-threatening illnesses” and then moves on to how his celebrity combined with the blunt fact that he’s survived against the odds gives him a powerful platform to help others. That, it would seem, is how Scott Hamilton sees himself these days. As a man working hard to make sure others have it better than he does, even in the midst of horrible circumstances. "The more you go through it the more you learn and the more you wish you would have known earlier. "I just really want people that are just diagnosed with cancer […] to truly understand what the implications are for this path forward and your treatment options." Scott Hamilton also has thoughts for the healthcare system as a whole, along with health entrepreneurs, healthcare executives, patient advocates and the biomedical research community on how we can improve outcomes and make cancer a much more manageable process for those affected by it.

What happens when individuals needing medical help don’t fully acknowledge the problem, much less know where to go to get treatment? It can be a problem in any area of healthcare — “No, my heart is fine, I’m just tired.” In behavioral health, though, the problem is compounded by a confusing system and the still-present social stigma around mental health issues. That, in a nutshell, is what Centerstone is trying to solve. Co-founder and CEO David Guth sees the behavioral health system as needing a restructure to get there. Add to that the changing but still-present social stigma around mental health issues, and people looking for treatment are left with a very difficult process to get help and recover. Fortunately, barrriers are coming down. The science around behavioral health is improving and the body of research growing. Education is becoming more commonplace, so people have a greater understanding of the physiological, pathological underpinning of so many mental health conditions. Additionally, people are starting to speak out about their own struggles and recoveries. This has an enormous positive effect in terms of breaking down the social stigma around mental and behavioral health. And, organizations like Centerstone are working to provide personalized treatment based on each patient’s needs, not based on the organization’s specialty

Rasu Shrestha is physician and business executive who spends his time thinking about how to keep people out of his hospitals. Well, sort of. Rasu is the Chief Innovation Officer at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Executive Vice President at UPMC Enterprises, where he leads a large team of people working to align all sides of the payer-provider-patient relationship work together. The goal?  [To] make sure that thriving becomes a thing so that if we don’t do a procedure, if we don’t have a patient in our hospital beds, economically it still makes sense for the system as a whole. Rasu and the UPMC team work from the assumption that patient-centric care and building an economically viable business don’t have to be mutually exclusive. So, they give people access to tools that will help them become (or stay) healthy and stay out of UPMC’s hospital beds. At the same time, UPMC isn’t just a hospital system, but also a payer. With this integrated system, along with the portfolio of companies within UPMC Enterprises, the organization is finding ways to maintain actual wellness without having the revenue pressure of doing more procedures. Value-based care writ large. If our hospital beds are filled in the future we have failed. And we’re specifically focusing on technologies and capabilities that would allow for our hospital beds not to be filled.

Healthcare is complicated. We talk about trying to rebuild it, make a more patient-centric environment, do more with value based care, improve outcomes, make sustainable business, get to a world of interoperability...and more. With all of those conversations going on, we decided it would be good to step back and look at the macro view of the current healthcare landscape today. Money and politics ultimately dictate a lot of where we can go with so much of what we talk about on the podcast, from health entrepreneurship to healthcare technology to how the healthcare system can better engage patients and improve outcomes. Here, Emily Evans and Tom Tobin of Hedgeye Risk Management give an overview of the current healthcare policy and economics to help us understand what we’re up against.

Empathy is a term that’s batted around in healthcare a lot these days. It’s part of the push to get back to a patient-centric view of health and healthcare. The idea is to understand where patients are coming from to help create experiences within the healthcare system that will meet their needs more effectively and improve patient engagement. So Marquise Stillwell of Openbox, Marcus Whitney of Health:Further, and John Farkas of Golden Spiral Marketing sat down for a live podcast at Health:Further 2017 to talk about empathy, design, and the patient experience. Except, that’s not exactly how it went. Instead, the three of them challenged the idea of empathy and took the conversation in a direction that no one really expected. There's something in there for everyone - patients, physicians, entrepreneurs, designers and more.

Today we hear from Ed Pershing, CEO of PYA. He brings 40 years of experience in healthcare, both professionally and personally as a patient. That’s means he’s watched a lot of change and he’s helped drive a lot of change. And, interestingly, Ed sees improvement. He is optimistic. That’s good to hear while we’re all looking around at some of the challenges going on today in Washington and elsewhere in the healthcare industry. He also makes a note that uncertainty may be seem greater today due to the media and technology resources available. Not that it’s artificially inflating uncertainty, but that our perception is different. Overall, though, Ed Pershing sees progress taking place in health and healthcare innovation.

Today we hear from Darren Hay of Care Angel. Darren has an extensive background in telemedicine, which gives him a unique perspective on innovation in remote care and telehealth. Care Angel engages patients through the phone, using AI (artificial intelligence), while at the same time allowing healthcare organizations to reach their patients at scale and help in compliance and reduce readmissions rate. Those are important issues in this new age of value based care. CareAngel also offers a lot of engagement with providers and integration with EMRs to help streamline care. Towards the end of this conversation Darren also gives a two minute overview of the history and evolution of telemedicine.

Today we hear from Peter Hermann of BreatheAware. The company has a platform designed to help individuals change their behaviors to manage stress and improve health, leading to better individual lives and reduced burdens on the health system. He says some interesting things about the importance of trust in patient engagement, about collecting data to actually use it and get a result out of it, and, importantly, the value of just showing up sometimes. He says, “taking care of yourself is about showing up and doing something,” not necessarily hitting every metric put in front of us every time. It's a good lesson for us as patients in managing our own health and for providers thinking about how to best engage their patients and support them in their healthcare.

What happens when you wake up after living a life that revolves around movement...and you can barely move? This is where Banning Bouldin found herself one morning, and it sent her on a powerful, personal health journey. Banning is the founder of New Dialect, a contemporary dance company in Nashville. She was recently diagnosed with an early stage of multiple sclerosis and has been working her way back from the consequences of the disease on her body. She uses her story to show how important it is to be your own patient advocate, to search and research treatment options, and to build a network of health professionals that will help pull you through. Her story is a reminder that even in the midst of all our 21st-Century technology, a personal approach to medicine and healthcare is still the most important thing.

Today we hear from Jill Sonke, Director of the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine. Her work is a unique type of healthcare innovation, as it revolves around research into how art, dance and music directly affect patient care and outcomes. You’ll hear about some data showing that, in fact, music can actually induce the same pain-killing effects as some narcotics. The implications of the work Jill and her colleagues are pursuing are significant, pointing towards some intriguing ways to improve outcomes and control costs, as well as potentially make a difference in the opioid crisis. This conversation points to the merger of science and evidence-based medical care with the arts - something that is core to our humanity. Especially here in Nashville, we hear so much about musicians, celebrities, coming to entertain patients during their hospital stays. Jill’s work shows how important those types initiatives can really be, and how expanding them into actual treatment modalities makes a measurable difference in patients' lives.