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About Lisa Suennen
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Most Popular Posts
- From Russia With Love
- The Secret to Lower Healthcare Costs: Dying Faster
- You Say You Want a Healthcare Revolution
- We Are the 51%!
- Singing a New Tune: Redefining Innovation in the Medical Device World
- Rap Genius: Healthcare to a Hip Hop Beat?
- When “Cloud-based” Means Technology, Not Heaven: Report from AARP Health Innovation@50+
- A Tale of Two Doctor Visits
- Your CEO May Be A Man, But Your Healthcare Customer is a Woman
- Healthcare IT BINGO!
- I’m On A Boat! The Rising Fleet of Incubators
- Employers and Health Innovation: Will They Go Long or Advance One Yard at a Time?
- Give ‘Em That Old Razzle Dazzle
- Never Let Anyone Make You a Carrot
- What’s Done Cannot Be Undone
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Recent Posts
- The Star Thrower, or How Healthcare Looks to Consumers
- Medical Technology and Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief
- There Is No “I” in Team, But There Is In “Win”
- A Soda A Day Keeps Your Lifespan Away
- Investor Comedy Relief: The Missed Investment Opportunity
- Psilos Releases Annual Healthcare Outlook Report: A Golden Age in Healthcare Investing
- Discounts on Two Upcoming Conferences for Venture Valkyrie Readers
- Digital Health: The Cat’s Meow
- School Daze
- Showcase Your Start-up at the AARP Health Innovation@50+ Event-Viva Las Vegas
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Tag Archives: healthcare IT
The Napster-ization of Healthcare, Coming to a Theater Near You
Two weeks ago I had the good fortune to be invited back to the South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) to participate as a judge of a digital healthcare start-up competition. SXSW, which takes place in Austin, TX, is historically an indie music gathering that has evolved into a massive mainstream music conference as well as a monumentally huge film festival, like Sundance times twenty. There are literally hundreds of bands and films featured around town. There has now evolved alongside this a conference called Interactive that draws more than 25,000 people and focuses on technology, particular mobile, digital, and Internet.
In other words, SXSW has become one of the world’s largest gatherings of hoodie-sporting, gadget-toting nerd geniuses that are way too square to be hip but no one has bothered to tell them. Imagine you are sitting at a Starbucks in Palo Alto, CA among 25,000 people who cannot possibly imagine that the rest of the world still thinks the Internet is that newfangled thing used mainly for email and porn. SXSW is a cacophonous melting pot of brilliance, creativity, futuristic thinking, arrogance, self-importance, ironic retro rock and … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, Digital Health, Healthcare Information Technology, Innovation, Uncategorized
Tagged apple healthcare, Chilmark, CommonWell Health Alliance, downloaded, Epic, health data interoperability, healthcare IT, healthcare technology, innovator's dilemma, jody holtzman, napster, open systems, psilos, sxsw interactive health, the movie, Wang, x/open
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From Russia with Love
It is not everyday that a person gets to see something entirely foreign and new and have their eyes opened to things that delight and surprise them, but I have just returned from a week of that feeling and it was downright revelatory.
It started in November with an invitation I received from the Skolkovo Foundation, an Innovation-focused foundation established by the Russian government (yes, that Russia) to foster innovation across a variety of Russian industries. The invitation was to participate as a speaker and moderator at a conference on digital health which would occur the week of December 9th in Moscow and, while there, to help judge a business plan competition in the same area, all expenses paid. My first thought was that it was one of those scams where you end up having to buy a time share at the end, except that the invitation was co-signed by people who I know to be entirely legit and super smart: Dr. Milena Adamian, who runs the Life Science Angels Network Fund in New York, and well-known tech and health angel investor Esther Dyson. Ok, I figured, I’ll … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, Diagnostics and Screening, Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Reform, Healthcare Venture Capital, Innovation, Uncategorized
Tagged beyond lucid, digital health, esther dyson, healthcare IT, jack young qualcomm, jonathon feit, kristin baker spohn, leon peshkin, life science angels network, marek dziki, mhealth, mike keriakos, milena adamian, missy krasner, pascal lardier, russia digital health, russian healthcare, skolkovo foundation, valery senko, viamedix
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Healthcare IT BINGO!
Note: this post also ran 9/7/2012 in HealthcareIT News
I was hanging out with David Shaywitz of Forbes the other day and he told me about a piece he wrote some time back about the buzzwords associated with the “innovation” culture that has emerged by name in Silicon Valley and Beyond. In the story, which can be found HERE, David mentions that Genentech used to penalize its employees for relying on such trite terms, requiring them to self-report such transgressions on gBuzz Bingo cards.
David and I were joking about how easy it is to fall into this buzzword trap, where real thought is diluted and disguised by words that lose their meaning through overuse. Every industry has its jargon, but healthcare and technology are particularly major offenders and the combination thereof could make both Merriam’s and Webster’s heads explode.
My discussion with David, amplified by my constant frustration with this very topic, inspired me to develop an homage to David’s article (and Genentech’s ideal) in the form of a Healthcare IT Bingo board. And thus I plopped myself down on the couch and set out to make myself … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Venture Capital, Uncategorized
Tagged david shaywitz, healthcare bingo, healthcare information technology, healthcare innovation, healthcare IT, healthcare jargon, healthcare venture capital, IT jargon, PPACA, psilos
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Release Yourself from Mental Slavery, or Could Technology Be the Very Thing That Makes Us Sicker?
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds.”
– Bob Marley, Redemption Song
In the July 16, 2012 issue of Newsweek there was an article called “Is the Onslaught Making Us Crazy?” The article is about mounting evidence that the connected world—the world that drives us to obsession in the pursuit of constant Internet, mobile phone, Facebook-obsessesd Twitterosity—is slowly driving us insane. To quote the article:
“The current incarnation of the Internet–portable, social, accelerated, and all-persuasive–may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.”
Yes, I appreciate the irony you are reading this in an online blog. You should probably take my decision to even write this thing as evidence that I have already gone off the deep end and am paddling far from shore.
As I read this article, which described large amounts of recent academic research demonstrating the potentially serious negative impacts of excessive technology addiction … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, Diagnostics and Screening, Healthcare Information Technology, Innovation, Uncategorized
Tagged biometric remote monitoring, consumer engagement, healthcare information technology, healthcare IT, Internet addiction, iphone addiction, medical technology, mhealth, psilos, technology and health, white coat syndrome
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Citius, Altius, Fortius: The Olympic EMR
Citius, Altius, Fortius -The Olympic Motto, coined 1894; in English it means Swifter, Higher, Stronger
In about a month we will hear the dulcet tones of the Olympic Hymn as the familiar five-ringed flag is raised over London for the 2012 Olympics.
One thing that will be different in this Olympics as compared to all that have come before is that, for the first time, the U.S. Olympic Committee will be using electronic medical records (EMRs) to track the health of the 700+ athletes that participate in the games. Apparently they are also converting all of the data from about 3000 other athletes seen by U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) physicians in recent years, according to an NPR article sent to me by Veronica Combs, editor-in-chief of MedCity News.
Apparently in each of the past Olympic Games, the U.S. and other countries have literally shipped pallets of paper files to the Games location so USOC doctors could have access to their medical histories. In other words, they did what most U.S. providers currently do, which is work with inaccurate and incomplete paper files spread all over the place and … (read the rest)
Posted in Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Policy, Uncategorized
Tagged 2012 Olympics, Electronic Medical Record, EMR, GE Centricity, healthcare IT, Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare IT, olympian health, olympic athlete health, Olympic EMR, predictive analytics, psilos
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You Say You Want a Healthcare Revolution
“You say you want a revolution,
Well, you know,
We all want to change the world”—The Beatles
I had the pleasure of attending a “salon” type dinner hosted by Xconomy and its chief correspondent and San Francisco editor Wade Roush last week (and graciously sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and Alexandria Real Estate Equities). The dinner included about 24 people, all of whom in some way had a connection to the emerging field of digital health. In addition to the sponsors, the group featured many CEOs of newly minted companies, some highly experienced and at their second or third rodeo, and some very new to the big desk in the corner. Also present were a few industry thought leader and advisor types, including representatives of Rock Health and Singularity University, as well as a few venture investors, just to be sure all the air would get sucked out of the room. Because the dinner was meant to be “off the record,” I have not attributed points below to specific individuals.
The theme of the dinner was “The Quest to Disrupt Healthcare,” and at the beginning of dinner we started around … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, General Business Issues, Healthcare, Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Venture Capital, Innovation
Tagged entrepreneur, healthcare information technology, healthcare innovation, healthcare IT, healthcare venture capital, hospital IT, psilos, Rock Health, singularity university, Wade Roush, xconomy
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Needed: A 12-Step Program for Automation Addiction (take two)
Sorry to those who may have seen this post already; something glitched out on my posting of this yesterday and so it didn’t go out to my subscribers as it was supposed to. Lisa
Last Thursday I was sitting in my classroom at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business with my co-instructor, Dr. Jeff Rideout; we co-teach an MBA-level class called “The Changing Healthcare Economy” and together we were watching a great guest lecture by Dr. Andrew Litt, Dell Computer’s Chief Medical Officer.
The focus of Dr. Litt’s presentation was the imperative to automate healthcare through the proliferation of a variety of forms of information technology. In particular, he spoke about how essential it is for doctors to have access to analytics at the point-of-care that give the physician detailed information in order to more rapidly diagnose medical conditions and prescribe appropriate treatments. Dr Litt illustrated the importance of such technology by showing a picture of a brain MRI where the symptomatology evident in the image, absent any other information about the patient except age and sex, could lead a physician to one of more than 20 different diagnoses. … (read the rest)
Next Up: A 12-Step Program for Automation Addiction
Last Thursday I was sitting in my classroom at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business with my co-instructor, Dr. Jeff Rideout; we co-teach an MBA-level class called “The Changing Healthcare Economy” and together we were watching a great guest lecture by Dr. Andrew Litt, Dell Computer’s Chief Medical Officer.
The focus of Dr. Litt’s presentation was the imperative to automate healthcare through the proliferation of a variety of forms of information technology. In particular, he spoke about how essential it is for doctors to have access to analytics at the point-of-care that give the physician detailed information in order to more rapidly diagnose medical conditions and prescribe appropriate treatments. Dr Litt illustrated the importance of such technology by showing a picture of a brain MRI where the symptomatology evident in the image, absent any other information about the patient except age and sex, could lead a physician to one of more than 20 different diagnoses. Only by adding information, like medical history and specificity of symptoms–information that is often unavailable to the radiologist reading such an image–is it possible to narrow the diagnosis down to the right one. This … (read the rest)
The Janssen Connected Care Challenge
Beginning in 2013, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) will begin a program of penalizing hospitals that have higher than expected 30-day readmission rates. The program is called the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program and the penalties will be in the form of reduced Medicare payments that will make already stressed hospital CFOs think long and hard about alternative career choices (a great article on the CMS program can be found HERE). Because they can, it is widely expected that commercial payers will jump on CMS’ readmission penalty bandwagon. The result: further financial pressure on already strapped hospitals nationwide.
According to hospital research, consulting and IT firm The Advisory Board:
“As economic pressures place budgetary pressure on federal and state governments, employers, and individual citizens, the outlook for provider pricing growth is weakening. At the same time, a constellation of forces continue to drive hospital expenses upward, further straining margins. And through it all, the rising prevalence of chronic disease threatens to crowd out high-margin procedural volumes with less profitable medical cases, thereby undermining the surgical-to-medical cross-subsidy almost all hospitals depend upon for margin stability. The potential impact of these … (read the rest)
SXSW: Woodstock for Geeks
Turns out there are all different kinds of techno geeks out there. At HIMSS a few weeks ago I was feeling semi-hip among the healthcare uber-nerd crowd that worries about how to make big hospital and healthcare enterprises function with big data. It’s a festival of old-school techno weenies recognizable in the wild by their big company expense accounts and the blue and gray suits that barely cover their pocket protectors. It also felt like a group desperately trying to catch the back of the social networking wave into the world where Mark Zuckerberg and Biz Stone are Gods, not men. In fact, Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, was a keynote speaker at HIMSS and it seemed like the proverbial fish in need of a bicycle. One audience member actually leaned over and said to me, “I have no idea what these young social networking people are talking about.” Poor guy could not have been more than 50 but he was definitely his father’s Oldsmobile. I didn’t want to tell him that by failing to recognize social networking as a meaningful phenomenon he had one foot in the healthcare IT … (read the rest)
Posted in Healthcare, Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Policy, Healthcare Venture Capital, Innovation, Private Equity, Uncategorized
Tagged aneesh chopra, health 2.0, healthcare information technology, healthcare IT, healthcare private equity, healthcare venture capital, HIMSS, psilos, shwen gwee, social health start-up bootcamp, sxsw interactive, tweet a beer, U.S. Chief Technology Officer
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