Category: Science and Other News

Telehealth Has Best Funding Quarter Ever

MercomVenture funding of health IT deals in 2015 Q2 amounted to $1.2 billion in 138 global deals, according to Mercom Capital Group. This was smaller than 2014 Q2, which saw $1.7 billion raised in 159 deals.

However, telehealth and mobile health continue to blow the doors off. Two of the top four deals were $50 million each for Doctor on Demand and MDLIVE. (Mercom Capital also reports public equity financings, but I do not believe this Q2 report includes the successful IPO of Teladoc, which went public on July 1.)

Although I cannot claim to have studied every deal, it appears that the ones which raised the most money are focused on the employer-based market. If the technologies they deploy really do engage employees to lower health costs, that is good news. What would also be beneficial is these tools being deployed in the individual market. Perhaps that will come as the space becomes more competitive.

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Jul 07, 2015 | Leave a Comment | by

Happy Independence Day

American Eagle

Best wishes for the July 4th long weekend. Blogging recommences on Monday.

 

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Jul 03, 2015 | Leave a Comment | by

Health Jobs Outpace Soft Employment Report

Health jobs keep growing faster than other civilian, nonfarm jobs. Health care added 40,000 jobs in June, almost one in five of the 223,000 jobs added. At a seasonally adjusted growth rate of 0.27 percent, health jobs continue to grow significantly faster than other jobs, which grew at 0.14 percent (see Table I).

20150702 TI

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Jul 02, 2015 | Leave a Comment | by

U.S. Busts 243 Providers for $713 Million Medicare, Medicaid Fraud

man-in-wheelchairThis blog does not often congratulate the Obama administration. However, it has been relatively successful at prosecuting Medicare fraud through old-fashioned, gum-shoe type investigations.

From yesterday’s news:

In Miami, the owners of a mental-health treatment center allegedly billed Medicare for tens of millions of dollars’ worth of intensive therapy that actually involved just moving people to different locations. Some of them had dementia so severe that they couldn’t even communicate.

And in Michigan, another physician allegedly prescribed unnecessary narcotic painkillers in return for the use of his patients’ IDs to generate additional false billings. When they tried to escape the scheme, authorities say, he threatened to cut off the medications, to which his patients were addicted.

In the single largest crackdown in an eight-year campaign against health-care fraud, the Justice Department charged 243 people Thursday with $712 million in false billings to Medicare — the medical insurance program for the elderly — and Medicaid, which serves the poor. (Lenny Bernstein & Sari Horwitz, “Government arrests 243 in largest crackdown on health-care fraud,” Washington Post, June 18, 2015)

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Jun 19, 2015 | 5 comments | by

Obama’s Former Health IT Czar Raises $35 Million for New Venture

FMBow-tied and charismatic, Dr. Farzad Mostashari, who led the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) from April 2009 to October 2013, has raised a total of $35 million from leading venture capitalists for his new business, Aledade. Aledade’s senior management includes veterans of athenaHealth and Practice Fusion, both firms which I admire for their entrepreneurship and relative (although not perfect) independence from government.

Like those firms, Aledade will provide its Electronic Health Records to independently practicing physicians. Aledade claims its uniqueness lies in an EHR that will ensure doctors’ win the Accountable Care Organization game. At NCPA, we think that ACOs are unlikely to succeed. Nevertheless, if anyone can pull this off, Dr. Mostashari and his team have got a pretty good edge (in my humble opinion).

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Jun 17, 2015 | 4 comments | by

88 Percent of Nurses Use Smartphones at Work

Patients and providers alike use mobile technology. New data from market intelligence provider InCrowd indicates that the majority of nurses, 93 percent, own smartphones.

Of these nurses, 88 percent use their smartphones’ apps on the job. Though smartphones are becoming integrated into the daily nursing workflow, the majority of nurses are absorbing the costs themselves. Approximately 87 percent of nurses reported their employers do not cover any costs related to smartphone use.

Less than 1 percent of nurses indicated that smartphone use was prohibited on the job. (Carrie Pallardy, Becker’s Hospital Review, June 3, 2015)

I’m all in favor of information technology, but might this not pose a risk to privacy? I had understood most hospitals had very strict policies on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

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Jun 08, 2015 | 1 comment | by

Health Jobs Growth Doubled in May

This morning’s employment report was greeted as good news, with 280,000 jobs added in May. Health hiring doubled its April pace, adding 47,000 jobs (versus only 22,000 in the previous report), comprising about one of six nonfarm jobs. At a seasonally adjusted growth rate of 0.31 percent, health jobs are still growing faster than non-health jobs (0.18 percent)

As shown in Table 1, job growth continues to be concentrated in ambulatory settings, while nursing and residential care facilities added few jobs.

T1

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Jun 05, 2015 | Leave a Comment | by

Can You Pay Poor People To Quit Smoking?

Peter Orszag was President Obama’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Like many high-ramking Democrats, he landed on his feet as Vice Chairman of Citibank. He also writes a very good column for Bloomberg View.

His latest column discusses financial incentives to quit smoking. Unfortunately, it ignores an obvious challenge to the thesis he supports: That poor people can be paid to quit smoking. Read more below the fold.

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May 28, 2015 | 6 comments | by

New Ventures Make Obamacare Exchanges Less Relevant Than Ever

One theme of this blog is that Obamacare exchanges make as little sense for health insurance as a DMV-operated exchange for car insurance, or a HUD-operated exchange for homeowner’s insurance. Just shut them down.

We’re not the only ones who noticed:

Looking to provide health insurance to the 53 million Americans who don’t get benefits from their employers, Stride Health has raised $13 million in new funding.

Venrock led the Series A round, with participation from Fidelity Biosciences and previous investor NEA, which brings Stride’s total venture funding to $17.5 million.

For the freelancers and independent contractors who make up one third of the U.S. labor force, Stride offers a hassle-free alternative to Healthcare.gov.

After you enter your own data, including age, gender, location, and illness history, Stride’s forecasting model evaluates how much care you’ll use throughout the year, prices it on every health plan, and couples it with the coverage price to show you the total cost of each plan. (Christine Magee, TechCrunch)

Private investors are putting their own capital at risk to launch a business to compete against a government monopoly. That shows how useless Obamacare’s exchanges are.

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May 26, 2015 | 6 comments | by

Memorial Day Wishes

We at NCPA wish you a safe and pleasant Memorial Day. While you are celebrating the start of summer, please remember those for whom the day is commemorated.

Dec

We”ll be back on Tuesday.

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May 22, 2015 | Leave a Comment | by
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