Many of the big announcements at HIMSS conferences are bow-wrapped products ready to hit the market: the IBM blockbuster is a prime example. But what’s more intriguing are the many companies, big and small, rolling out brand new ideas that are taking their first swing as solutions to the big problems in healthcare.
These offerings are often more rough drafts than finished products. For these companies, HIMSS, instead of a place to close deals, becomes the launching pad for these concepts that will be adjusted, retooled, copied by others and re-launched until they become something healthcare can really use to become better, faster and cheaper.
I fell in love with a few of these concepts walking the show floor. Here are some of my favorite half-baked ideas from HIMSS15.
GCH Platform
Green Circle Health’s GCH Platform is the definition of the wonderful half-baked ideas at HIMSS: a dynamic, imagination-capturing yet flawed attempt to deliver a lasting personal health record. Yet you can truly see people carrying a more polished GCH Platform through their lives like their 401(k) or e-mail addresses.
The platform accepts data as is. It will, preferably, digest health records and provide analytics. It also ingests information from wearables. But it will also accept PDFs and image files like jpgs and store those, too. What matters is having the information gathered together.
GCH is also elegant in the way is connects family members to view one another’s records, while also providing a nice interface for practitioners and other caregivers.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
It still requires patients to do a bit too much typing, though. It needs to adopt a Delectable approach to basic health data: let patients take pictures of their Walgreens blood-pressure results, for example, and – poof! – translate that information into GCH. There’s also the question of how to let this snazzy record live beyond any employer, payer or provider. In concept, an employer would pay no more than $25 per year per family to provide the service. Would a family carry on that cost? Or could they get it for free.
But you know this product has merit, because if you talk with the Green Circle’s founder you find yourself having yes-and conversations and exploring how this could work instead of why it won’t.
“We need to get out of Apple Newton and get to the iPod stage,” said Dinesh Sheth, a healthcare outsider who is CEO and founder of GCH.
GE Healthcare’s DenialsIQ
This is less a half-baked product than a major ingredient to GE Healthcare’s shift and refocusing efforts on its Centricity products. GE Healthcare IT President and CEO Jan de Witte gushed over DenialsIQ in an interview with me. He praised it well above all other GE Healthcare products debuted at HIMSS and on multiple occasions called it a “beautiful application.”
de Witte is clearly proud of DenialsIQ. It was the best use of data to dig into the “unsexy” parts of medicine – back end and financial processes – that I saw at HIMSS.
DenialsIQ takes the data used to review denied claims to finds patterns and determins why they’re denied in order to fix that problem. It goes beyond that, though, and with a touch of Minority Report it can begin to pinpoint when an insurance claim is on a path to being denied and stop it before it happens.
For example, by culling through the DenialsIQ-culled information a medical practice could quickly pinpoint when one staff member is regularly coding the same procedure incorrectly, get it correct and get the employee retrained.
In a test run with WestMed Practice Partners, Orlando Health and UC Irvine, DenialsIQ surfaced 80 percent of denied claims. About one-third of the denials could potentially be turned into revenue, according to GE Healthcare.
RightPatient
This app, which launches in July, is interesting on its face. It’s a mobile personal health record/analytics tool packed with ways to manage patients’ health, medical billing and appointments. Its roots are with a company called M2Sys, which has connections with health systems and technology that can extract and mange electronic medical records data. Plus, RightPatient is already partnering with IBM to see if Watson could leverage their data and technology (and vice versa), said company President Michael Trader.
You can learn more about the app in this video. But what will be interesting to watch evolve is how they make money from the app.
Trader said he they will be going directly to consumers to adopt the app while at the same time offer it to hospitals using M2Sys services. They’ll make money on mobile advertising, but Trader also said they’re developing a revenue model about in-app purchases, which is the part I found fascinating.
Is there a way to take the Clash of Clans model of monetization and put it into a personal health record/wellness app?
Trader was coy on what would require an in-app purchase – and I got the feeling that he didn’t yet have the answer. But it will be worth hearing by the end of the year whether it’s even feasible.
AppScript
I’m kind of in the bag for products like IMS Health’s AppScript, SocialWellth and hospital-built app stores. I believe that the only real way mobile apps get traction and make a difference in people’s health is if they are prescribed by the doctor and the data from these apps is verified as secure and true by the hospital’s health IT system.
So AppScript is trying to be a big piece of that puzzle. It has built a platform where physicians rate and suggest apps, content and devices to their patients.
I already wrote about IMS Health’s plan to roll out a consumer-facing platform. But more intriguing is how AppScript will try and aggressively scale its main product to other hospitals.
Its data claims doctors already working with prescribe about three apps per day. It also has data that shows that 54 percent of patients who get a AppScript-prescribed apps are still using it 30 days after it’s prescribed.
That data is a beginning, not an end. What I hope IMS Health figures out by year’s end is exactly what is the necessary level of “app adherence” that will convince doctors that apps should always be used alongside the treatments the drugs they prescribe. Fifty-four percent isn’t it.
IMS Health gave me their entire HIMSS15 presentation, which you can review here.
[Photo from Flickr user Stella Hwang]
