Live-Blog from Health Datapalooza Plenary Session

MONDAY JUNE 3, 2013
12:20 PM
Plenary sessions wrapping up for the morning. Done live-blogging – more Datapalooza coverage to come later on.
11:40 AM
High-energy iconoclastic keynote from Jonathan Bush, cofounder of Athenahealth. Back to the early days of the company: They began by developing a care model for pregnancy with midwives and other nonphysicians providing care. Reduced the C-Section rate, but threatened the business model of doctors who “thought they were the only ones who could attend during pregnancy while watching the Celtics.” Having developed a data management system to track care, they pivoted their business model to focus on claims analysis. They developed the “Pain-in-the-Butt Index”of health-care payers at PayerView. Now Athenahealth helped doctors get paid faster, and with better efficiency as they connected directly into the payers’ systems.

Bush closes with three major asks for regulators:
– Release CMS (paid claims) data to any entity that can use it to manage risk.
– Expand the ACO (Accountable Care Organization) model – any entity that can manage risk well should be able to
– Legalize an open market for health information exchange
And some business ideas:
– Take down the silos to get market data working.
– Bring the principle of comparative advantage to the health care supply chain. “Pull care down” to levels where problems can be handled more efficiently – e.g., move cases from hospitals to office-based physicians, from physicians to mid-level providers.
– And pursue the goal of developing business models that can enable a return to nore personalized care.
11:00 AM
Back after break: Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of Health Data Consortium (see my interview here), introduces the finalists for their diabetes data challenge:
– Clifford Jones, CEO, Allazohealth: Focused on medication adherence. a $290 billion problem. They combine big data and industry analytics. Analytic service for health insurers and others. They predict probability that each patient will be adherent to medication to help manage their care.
– Paul Sandberg, CEO of PHRQL: Their Connect&Coach application creates “an ecosystem for better health” that brings nutrition counseling to supermarkets and pharmacies. Software-as-a-service subscription model.
– Dr. James Maisel, CEO of ZyDoc Medical Transcription: A retina specialist who works with diabetic patients. MediaSapien extracts data from unstructured text to help improve care for undiagnosed diabetics.
– Kyle Simmons, founder of NuDuro: “The Pandora of nutrition,” helping you find nutrition to meet your particular needs. “Take control, get personal, get connected.” When you select each meal, it improves the nutrition algorithm for you.
– James White of CommonSensing: GoCap is the first wireless tracking monitor for insulin injections, making it easy to visualize the data rather than having patients track everything by hand.
 
9:50 AM
 
Keynote by Atul Gawande, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, New Yorker writer, and author of three best-sellers. He’s championed the idea of the medical checklist for quality control.
He looks back 50 years to another great doctor/author, Lewis Thomas, who wrote about “the technology of medicine.” At the time, Thomas bemoaned the poor use of $80 billion a year in health care spending (we’re close to $3 trillion today). He saw a future where data would be applied to improve health care. He knew it would be “bewildering” in some ways. He saw different kinds of medical technology: supportive care for non-curable, chronic diseases with no good treatments; “halfway” technologies that help treat chronic disease but don’t cure it; and “complete” technologies. (Difference between these last two: iron lungs for polio vs. the polio vaccine.) Complete technologies are still hard to come by – no vaccines for cancer, heart disease, stroke, or dementia. And all of our economic growth in recent years has gone to paying for health care.
A message for “data drunks” in the audience: “Incomplete technologies are where data’s power lives. The Datapalooza is about coming to terms with the fact that we live in a world of incomplete technology.”  The reason: “Life is not curable.”
We can take lessons from engineering processes that have made fields like aviation and car production safer and higher quality. They’ve learned to deal with complex technologies – a close analogy to incomplete technologies in health care. What we need first: Simple checklists and feedback loops. But “the future is automation of the best possible ways of doing things while constantly reinventing them.” An example is anesthesia, where the field has progressed from setting guidelines for anesthesiologists (including, Don’t turn the oxygen to zero – !), to checklists and feedback loops (e.g. the oxygen monitor on the finger), to the beginnings of automation (manufacturing of machines that standardize how oxygen is turned on and off). “The future will be machines that adjust according to the oxygen level of the patient.”
Where are health data analysts needed? “At every one of these steps.”
Health care systems are starting to change, he says, and “we’ve come to a moment of hope.”
9:45 AM
Results of the Heritage Health Network $500K challenge for better predictive analytics in health. “Team PowerDot” takes the prize out of a huge competitive field. Next: A $3 million challenge from Heritage.
9:30 AM
Great keynote by Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health in the UK. Amazing work going on there. Highlights:
We need to be prepared for coming health care needs. His baby daughter has a one-in-four chance of living to be 100. At the same time, one in four Britons suffers from a chronic condition. There are three major parts to the transformation of health care in the UK: the power of data to be transformative; improving transactions, such as scheduling appointments; and, most important, the drive to “put patients in the driving seat of their own health care.” (Great applause for that.) There are six initiatives:
– Electronic health records rolling out to 50 million people.
– Sequencing the genomes of 100,000 people.
– Developing telemedicine for three million people in the next three years, making the UK the second-largest telemed system after the U.S.
– Care Connect – a program to harness “the power of what patients are saying about health care quality to help improve care.” NEWS: Announcing pilots of this program in London and the northeast of England.
– Friends and Family test – giving patients and staff in all 266 NHS hospital trusts the test that asks whether they would recommend the hospital to friends and family, a test that reflects quality of care accurately
– The iDoctor program – building on the UK experience of releasing heart surgery outcomes, which dramatically improved care, and expanding that approach to ten other specialties.
9:15 AM
And we’re live! Late start and some internet problems, but blogging now. Highlights so far:
Bryan Sivak of HHS – this all started with 45 people four years ago – he joined the movement a year ago. Two thousand people here today.

Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: NEWS TODAY: HHS is releasing cost data on 30 new medical procedures, in addition to the recently released data on hospital costs. Here’s the link:
http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Medicare-Geographic-Variation/GV_PUF.html
Bob Kocher and Steven Krein, conference organizers: More data released by HHS in the last four years than in all the time up until then. A thousand businesses launched with the data since then. Code-a-palooza coders here are now working with newly released data on Medicare Part A and B and chronic care. Setting up HealthDataConnect as a hub for this community.