The Future of Health

You all remember Chris Chan - good friend of Health:Further and a former guest on the podcast. He is a healthcare entrepreneur and innovator in the best sense of both terms. Chris brings a unique and creative perspective to his work across healthcare, with his latest venture over at plif.us. We like Chris, so we asked him to guest host the show. His guest is Dr. Kyra Bobinet, a physician, entrepreneur, design thinker and behavior expert. She combines design principles with some serious neuroscience to help people change and adapt. It's an important intersection of skills in today's healthcare environment. Patients need to change, clinicians need to adjust their thinking and operations, and organizations need to change to new realities. Dr. Bobinet's work focuses on the individual, but it has implications for all aspects of our healthcare system. Check out her work at drkyrabobinet.com

Daniella Koren is the founder of Arches Health, a digital patient engagement platform for oncology patients. Koren's work revolves around pushing medical information to patients in a way that reduces administrative burden, increases patient satisfaction and knowledge, and reduces anxiety for patients and caregivers. Arches is a good example of the way the business imperative for streamlined operations and improved patient engagement tools now align with the simple idea that it helps patients and caregivers feel better about their experience during a traumatic time. During this conversation we talk about pushing vs pulling information, the value of trust (for both clinicians and patients), automating and white-labeling tools, and the role of the EHR in today's healthcare industry.

As the retail industry looks for new ways to improve the shopping experience and manage consumer expectations around personalization, convenience, service and digital tools, the healthcare industry is learning to engage consumers for the first time. Historically a business-to-business industry, healthcare has not needed a deep understanding of consumer behavior. That foundation is shifting as care moves out of hospitals and individual patients begin having opportunities to act more like a true consumer. Health:Further has partnered with the Global Market Development Center to produce a track at the 2019 Selfcare Summit and look at these issues. GMDC CEO Patrick Spear joined us on the podcast to discuss the state of retail today, explain selfcare, and talk about the value of unconventional partnerships between the healthcare and retail industries. During the ​Rise of the Healthcare Consumer Track​ at the 2019 Selfcare Summit, produced by Health:Further, you will learn about opportunities for the healthcare and retail sectors to redefine how health is delivered based on these trends, particularly through new collaborative models that combine traditional clinical settings and retail. Through this track, healthcare providers will learn how to leverage the trend of care moving out of hospitals and towards patients-as-consumers for increased traffic, new revenue streams, and better overall health for society.

How do healthcare providers adjust to the emerging system where patients are responsible for more of their healthcare spending? How do providers collect on unpaid medical bills? How do patients take responsibility for their care and demand accountability from their clinicians? What role does patient education play in the finances of healthcare? In this healthcare roundtable, we touch on all of these topics and more. We were joined by Wes Pass of CarePayment, Jeff Ridlehoover of Sphere.com, and Bradford Crowther of TransUnion.

We recently published a post about the customer-centric redesign CapitalOne is testing with their new cafes and what healthcare might be able to take from the project. Then we called up Lucas Artusi, Senior Systems Designer at the Design Institute for Health, to get his reaction. The Design Institute for Health team spends their time working to build a human-centered healthcare system through physical design, design thinking, technology, UI/UX, engagement patterns, and more, so Artusi is perfectly positioned to talk about a program like the CapitalOne cafes and whether it's relevant for healthcare.

Derek Anderson is Vice President of Business Improvement at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is also an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. The combination of teaching future healthcare leaders and working within a top-tier academic medical center has given Anderson a strong yet sober opinion on the trajectory for traditional healthcare providers. Anderson recognizes the increasing rate of change in healthcare, viewing it as “a lot of potential chaos and a lot of uncertainty.” As a result, providers are being “thoughtful” about their next steps, especially as they look at managing their fixed assets like physical hospitals. Read more about the conversation here

Adoption of value-based care has gone in fits and starts. The latest news shows adoption has slowed, even while providers recognize its importance. Meanwhile, tech companies are moving faster than ever, and the conversation around patients turning into active healthcare consumers is accelerating - although there is still a lot to work out (for example). Trying to harmonize these two trends is key to managing the current change in today's healthcare economy while planning for what it will look like in the future. Health:Further CEO Marcus Whitney spelled out what's happening and who's responsible. Watch the conversation, listen to the podcast, or read the four main takeaways here.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) recently published a presentation titled Evaluating an episode-based payment system for post-acute carethat explains the committee's thinking about a bundled payment model for post-acute care. Soon after, Becker's highlighted 5 key points from the presentation. We spoke with Bruce Greenstein to get his insight on the post-acute care landscape and, more specifically, the potential value of bundling post-acute care services. Greenstein is the Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at LHC Group, as well as the former Chief Technology Officer of the US Department of Health & Human Services. Check out the full post with quotes here.

Professor Jackie Oldham is a physiology researcher, and academic by background. During the course of her work trying to bring her own innovations out of the lab and into the market, she “vowed that it would never be as difficult for anybody else.” That led her to join Health Innovation Manchester and the Oxford Road Corridor, where she is now the Director of Strategic Innovation. This week she was in Nashville as part of a UK trade delegation. During the course of their time here, Professor Oldham, along with Health:Further parent company Briovation, announced a partnership to facilitate transatlantic investment and acceleration of promising health and healthcare companies. Professor Oldham spoke with Health:Further CEO Marcus Whitney to discuss why Manchester is such an interesting, unique and exciting place to be involved in healthcare innovation.

Chris Chan is one of those people we need more of in healthcare. He's experienced and knowledgeable while also inherently unconventional. Which means he's perfectly positioned to look at both the "legacy" establishment and the new disruptors and find how they can all combine forces. In this conversation, Chris and Health:Further's David Shifrin talk about having a unique, unconventional perspective. They also look at: The impending golden age of healthcare Patient-centric data transparency (because how can you not talk about that?) Payment models and payment systems Employers' relationship with healthcare Incentives (for patients and the industry) And a lot more.

When we started Health:Further in 2015, it was with a belief that by bringing together a diverse group of people passionate about the future of healthcare, we could help to build bridges that would result in real relationships, partnerships and progress. We also felt that the pace of change in the industry was rather slow, and so gathering once a year to check in and see where things were felt adequate. That founding belief carried us through the growth of an event from a summit to a festival, and the development of an awesome community of people breaking ground on moving the industry forward. We felt like we were on top of things, and our festival could support the industry through its evolution to a more ideal state. Then 2018 happened. The pace of change accelerated, and we came to the conclusion that it was time for us to shift our focus from convening our community to taking direct action. Listen to Health:Further CEO Marcus Whitney, Chief Development Officer Steve Tremitiere, and Director of Research and Content David Shifrin, discuss where we've been and where we are heading starting today. Learn more at healthfurther.com

A few months ago Don Lee, host of the #HCBiz Podcast and healthcare IT consultant, and I started talking. There's a lot to be done in healthcare, and the podcasting community tends to be way more collaborative than competitive. A few phone calls and a couple of beers later, the result was this episode. Don and I talk through several of the trends and common ideas we've picked up on over the past year of interviewing dozens of leaders in healthcare. We look at clinical decision support and care transitions as big areas of change and opportunity. We also talk about marketing and leadership as critical, but sometimes unheralded, factors that healthcare organizations of all sizes can use to build success.

Niko Skievaski, Co-Founder of Redox, is a good friend of Health:Further. He and his team, and the Redox brand in general, know how to have fun in a wild, challenging industry while solving some big big problems. The main problem they're working on is fragmentation and lack of standardized data across healthcare. Redox allows vendors to quickly connect to different platforms, EHRs, and the like. This means vendors can rapidly deploy their applications without having to worry about how well it'll play with other software. On the provider side, the value to being able to quickly tie different pieces of software together should be pretty clear. For more, check out the Health:Further page here.

Carrie Liken is the head of industry for healthcare at Yext, a company that helps organizations manage their digital presence and the way people interact with their brands online. This conversation will be somewhat related to the podcast we released a few weeks ago with Andrew Rainey and Elizabeth Davis of Binary Fountain and HCA, respectively, when we talked about reputation management. Liken is the first in her role as head of industry for healthcare. She works closely with the Yext product team and external partners, acting, as a liaison. Her focus is on the patient journey, helping healthcare organizations engage patients to give them a great experience while also driving revenue and sales. We talk about the four (and a half) steps of the patient journey, the somewhat shocking state of healthcare's online presence (if you don't have a mobile friendly website you need one, and yes, that's still an issue in 2018), and the new role of voice in consumer behavior.

Dr. Michael Genovese is the Chief Medical Officer of Acadia Healthcare. Our conversation comes at time when we at Health:Further are spending more and more time looking at behavioral and mental health from numerous angles. Clinician shortages and reimbursement challenges have put pressure on patients, providers and the healthcare system in recent years. Critically, though, is the fact that mental and physical health issues typically go hand in hand - making us wonder why there is a distinction at all. We talk about this with Dr. Genovese, and he offers his thoughts on providing integrative care - literally, integrating all aspects of a person to help them reach the healthiest state possible. And, as we often do on the podcast, we also talk about organizational leadership and culture, both at Acadia specifically and in healthcare in general. You can also listen at healthfurther.com/the-future-of-health/2018/10/16/integrative-behavioral-health-dr-michael-genovese-acadia-healthcare

Marquise Stillwell, Founder and Principal at Openbox, might be our favorite guest on the Future of Health Podcast. Stillwell brings a unique perspective to healthcare that comes from his design background combined with constant consideration of cultural and social questions. As a result, he is designing a future healthcare system that necessarily looks radically different than what we have today. In this conversation, we discuss some of those cultural considerations, including what is "culture"? Stillwell talks about the "invisible gap" that contributes to issues like under-utilization of recommended cancer screenings. We discuss the physical design of the hospital, and how Stillwell is even now rethinking what (or if!) a hospital should be. Openbox itself is a design studio that uses human-centered design to solve real-world problems. Their work includes urban design, education, mobility, and healthcare. Projects cover multiple formats, including film - Marquise mentions a current film project at the beginning of the conversation.

Virtual reality has been described as "the most psychologically powerful medium we've ever had." It has the ability to essentially bypass normal learning pathways and implant information into our brains as experiences. This, obviously, has huge implications for how we teach people. In healthcare, companies like BehaVR are using virtual reality to immerse people in experiences as a way to drive behavior change. In this conversation, Founder Aaron Gani and Chief Medical Officer Pete Buecker, MD, discuss the role of VR in helping people make lifestyle changes that could improve their own health and, collectively, lead to massive savings and improved outcomes across our healthcare system. Gani and Buecker talk about how VR can target many issues, including mental health, behavioral health, diabetes, heart disease, weight loss, and other chronic diseases.

Last year, Kristen Johns, Partner at Waller joined us to provide an intro to blockchain in healthcare - what it is and some of the applications to the industry. In this conversation Johns returns to give an update on the blockchain landscape a year later and define a few more of the terms (public vs private blockchain, permissioned vs permissionless). From there, Sean O'Brien, Founder of OMNY Health joined us to talk about why his company built a supply chain management system on a blockchain. Together, we discuss the usual concerns: what's real, what's hype, where is distributed ledger technology headed, and when it might - or might not - be the right option for a company to build on.

Andrew Rainey is the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Binary Fountain. Elizabeth Davis, the manager of online marketing at HCA Healthcare, works closely with Andrew and Binary Fountain as a client. In this conversation, recorded at Health:Further 2018, we talk about why reputation management isn't just clicking three out of five stars and walking away. In healthcare, reputation management means collecting and responding to feedback in near-real time to improve patient experiences. It's also collecting information over time to see which individuals or departments are performing well, and which ones might need some help. Davis and Rainey touch on a common theme, which is that healthcare organizations aren't competing against each other for patient satisfaction, but companies in other sectors like retail. Customers expect high-quality service and quick responses to problems, so a strong online marketing and reputation management system is important for hospitals, physician practices, and clinics.

This episode was recorded on August 28 at the 2018 Health:Further Festival. Our guest, Michael Ramey, is a Principal at PYA, an accounting and consulting firm with offices across the country and deep expertise in the healthcare industry. PYA is a long-standing sponsor and partner of Health:Further. Michael provides transaction advisory services, strategic planning, business valuation, fair market value compensation analysis, and related consulting services for hospitals, healthcare systems, physician practices, and healthcare information technology companies for purposes of facilitating mergers and acquisitions, performing due diligence, acquiring physician services, and pursuing joint ventures.  His primary areas of expertise are in transaction support, due diligence, valuation, financial analysis, and post-merger integration. Although we've covered the topic of consolidation before, Michael is really the first person we've talked to for the podcast who is working directly in the arena of healthcare consolidation. In this conversation, we discuss the overall healthcare landscape in terms of consolidation, who's doing what (lots of private equity), and areas where Michael is seeing a lot of interesting activity (urgent care). Read more and listen to A Transaction Advisor Talks Consolidation here.

Erik Wagner is Senior Director of Provider Strategy, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Salesforce, one of sponsors at Health:Further 2018. Erik has about three decades of experience in healthcare, working in multiple areas that all tend to revolve around healthcare IT. So he has a great understanding of what the digital side of healthcare looks like these days. In this conversation, we talk about the state of health IT in general, why a lot of supposedly consumer-friendly platforms (like patient portals) don't work, and the difference between just "checking boxes" and actually designing to engage people. Erik also talks about how Salesforce is used in the healthcare industry to solve some of these problems and give providers insight into the patients coming through their doors. It's patient engagement in real time. Check out the whole thing on the Health:Further blog here.

We're recording at the 2018 Health:Further festival! Chip Blaufuss is the Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at HCA Healthcare, the presenting sponsor of Health:Further. Chip heads up innovation at the largest healthcare organization in the country - one of every 20 babies born in the US is born in an HCA facility. So how does such a large company keep new ideas flowing? What happens when a nurse on the floor has an idea for solving a problem? How does leadership vet and test those solutions? Where is the balance between internal and external innovation, where do partnerships in healthcare come in to play? We discuss all of that in this conversation

Martie Ross, Principal at PYA, was one of our first guests on the Future of Health Podcast. Last year, we talked about the earliest days of MACRA and MIPS, among other things. In this conversation, we come back to those issues, and Martie gives us an update on the attitudes within the healthcare industry around these still-new value-based care models. In addition, she talks about what CMS is up to and her outlook on the many new programs the agency is running through Medicare. We also touch on consolidation, telehealth, and consumerization of healthcare.

Waller Law is a long-standing partner of Health:Further, and we are proud and grateful to have had the chance to work with them over the past several years. I recently sat down with Jesse Neil and John Haubenreich, attorneys who work at the intersection between healthcare, policy and regulation. They help clients navigate the complexities of our ever-evolving healthcare system, working on compliance and handling investigations when they arise. Our conversation touched on a number of topics, ranging from current regulatory issues to how to approach a lawyer for help.

This is the second part of an informal and miniseries looking at leadership and culture. Last week we heard from Jeff Thompson, CEO emeritus of Gundersen Health, and this week I'm talking to Jenn Lim of Delivering Happiness. Jenn is the Co-founder, CEO and Chief Happiness Officer at Delivering Happiness, an organization built to help companies understand the importance of, and then build strategies around, happiness and employee satisfaction. A lot of this came out of Zappos, which has a remarkable story about company culture and customer satisfaction and - ultimately - business success. Her team spends a lot of time working with healthcare organizations, and the healthcare community is looking more closely at the ideas Jenn and her team bring to the table. In this conversation, we look at case studies such as Northwell Health to show the value of a strong culture in healthcare.

Dr. Jeff Thompson is Executive Advisor and Chief Executive Officer Emeritus at Gundersen Health System in LaCrosse Wisconsin. He is also an accomplished author and speaker, as well as a practicing pediatrician. Dr. Thompson ran Gundersen Health System for 14 years. The organization covers a significant portion of Wisconsin, hundreds of thousands of patients, employes a staff of 7,000, and is consistently ranked as one of the highest quality healthcare organizations in the country. Much of that success comes from Dr. Thompson and his team's work to build and sustain a culture where patients are put first - in practice and not just as a slogan - employees are encouraged to remember why they got into healthcare in the first place, and where business goals and financial imperatives are aligned with the mission of providing outstanding care. In this conversation, we talk about leadership, organizational culture, and how the business of healthcare can and does work closely with the ideal of not just treating sick people, but keeping them well in the first place.

My guest today is Esther Dyson. Many of you will be familiar with Esther's work, which includes multiple startups and board seats - 23andMe being one - her writing - including the 1997 book Release 2.0, her work in digital health and her investing with EDVentures. And that's only part of her history. These days, one of her big projects is Wellville, a non-profit focused on community health and community wellness that she founded and chairs.

Change is hard. Whether it's getting a patient to change his lifestyle or adhere to a medication, or convincing an executive to implement a new tool or strategy, getting humans to change course is no easy thing. Hamid Ghanadan of the Linus Group spends his time thinking about how to build products and campaigns that will lower the energy barrier to change. In this episode, Ghanadan talks about the barriers to change and how change management can make a difference for the healthcare system. He also provides some specific examples of how minor changes - nudges - can create an outsized effect. Be sure to check out Gahanadan's books "Persuading Scientists" and "Catalytic Experiences."

Holly Fletcher founded BirdDog earlier this year to bring "slow news" to healthcare, tech and economic issues in Tennessee. The goal is to provide deep reporting on issues that affect the state, including some - like healthcare - that ripple out to the rest of the country. With Nashville as a national hub for the healthcare industry, the response of Tennessee health systems to policies and trends have an effect elsewhere. In this conversation, we talk about Fletcher's approach to covering the news (lots of data), the trends people are talking about (transparency and balanced billing), the things making healthcare companies nervous (again, transparency and balanced billing), challenges to making long-term progress in those areas, and holding policymakers accountable by asking hard questions.

We are taking the next couple of weeks of from releasing new episodes of the Future of Health. We'll be back on June 19. When we come back, we'll have conversations on blockchain in healthcare as part of our new Tokenizing Health Initiative, conversations about behavior change and change management, and a couple of panel discussion around things like transparency and care coordination. In the meantime, check out healthfurther.com for information about the 2018 Health:Further Festival and to sign up for our weekly healthcare newsletter.

Jay Desai is Co-founder and CEO of PatientPing, a care coordination platform that brings an individual's medical records together to eliminate these problems. The service is built on network effects, sending providers alerts when the patient receives care at other facilities and also compiles their history into “stories” at the point of care. The goal, says Desai, is to reduce costs through fewer redundant tests and treatments, as well as provide insight that will improve care based on past events and reduce adverse outcomes or readmissions.

Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt, as well as a practicing pediatric endocrinologist. Dr. Kumah-Crystal, along with Dan Albert, Associate Director of Health IT Product Development at Vanderbilt, is building EVA (EHR Voice Assistant). It is a voice user interface for physicians that can naturalistically communicate with an EHR to ask questions and get answers back. Erum Khan is CEO of SoundMind, Inc., which creates voice artificial intelligence applications to empower seniors and improve the caregiving experience. The three technologists joined us on the podcast to discuss voice technology and AI, what it can do and what it is doing across health and healthcare.

Dr. Griffin Myers Chief Medical Officer at Oak Street Health. The organization provides fully-capitated care to patients covered under Medicare and Medicaid, so Oak Street is incentivized to provide efficient care with limited resources. Dr. Myers talks about this example of value-based care and how they've been able to reduce hospitalizations by over 40%, the mission of Oak Street health (personal, equitable, accountable care), and what new physicians entering the system need to know.

Bianca Oudshoff is the Deputy Consul General of the Netherlands Consulate in Chicago; Pieter Kolstee is an intern at the Consulate. They came down to Nashville as part of their work touring the Midwest and Midsouth, studying different cities and their business and innovation ecosystems, and taking that information back to the Netherlands as a resource for Dutch companies looking to do more business in the U.S. During the conversation, we discussed the Dutch healthcare system, the current state of healthcare innovation in the Netherlands, the process of building bridges between the two countries, and what Oudshoff and Kolstee are looking forward to with future technology.

Nisha Mehta, MD, is a practicing radiologist and founder of Physician Side Gigs. She joined us to talk about personal and professional development for physicians, getting clinicians more involved in healthcare operations, and how doing that can make careers in medicine more sustainable while also contributing solutions to some of healthcare's greatest problems.  

Nancy Everitt is the Founder and CEO of HEOPS. Our conversation focused on the new Medicare supplemental benefits program and how even things like pest control could be covered under the new rules - talk about innovation! Also, we talk about the healthcare infrastructure necessary for providers to take advantage of the new rules. Note that "healthcare infrastructure" isn't necessarily server farms and broadband internet, but provider credentialing more.  

Dr. Art Papier is the CEO of VisualDx, which is a visual clinical decision support system specialized in medical image recognition and analysis. The company's tagline is “quality care begins with an accurate diagnosis,” which to me is so perfect, it almost comes across as a little ironic or tongue-in-cheek. Because of course, good care requires a good diagnosis, right? And yet, that misdiagnosis is a real problem in our healthcare system today. So we're going to get into that and what it means for both individual patients and the healthcare system as a whole.

Dr. Jordan Asher is Chief Clinical Officer of Ascension Care Management. A few weeks ago, posted his perspective on how physician practice consolidation is driving changes in how providers deliver care. Here, we follow up with him to talk about that and more. He says, "As we talk about ‘consolidation' or ‘expansion,' it's not a new concept. At the end of the day, there are lots of reasons why people come together to form larger communities.” Consolidation in healthcare happens because clinicians want to focus more on time with patients than the business of healthcare. It happens because hospitals can deliver more effective value-based care when physicians are employees. It also has drawbacks, which Dr. Asher discusses during the conversation.

Despite what you might have heard, artificial intelligence and blockchain weren't the biggest topics at HIMSS '18. They were big, along with cybersecurity and healthcare innovation in general. But according to Linda Stotsky, the biggest splash came at the very beginning of the conference when patients walked in the door. Stotsky has over two decades of experience in health and healthcare, with particular expertise on systems and services. She started as a practice administrator, then moved into the electronic medical record (EMR) world for several years. Today she is a consultant with an emphasis on marketing. With all that, Stotsky is deeply embedded in the health IT world, and joined us on The Future of Health to talk about what's going on in that world based on the events at HIMSS '18.

As patients move out of an acute care setting (e.g., an ICU) into a post-acute setting (skilled nursing facility, rehabilitation facility, or even home), there is a challenging handoff that must occur to ensure their safe transition and ongoing recovery. Caregivers must be able to take all of the patient's information and complex medical situation and build a care plan that will allow them to regain their health and hopefully avoid future problems. This handoff is one of the areas of healthcare that can represent a chokepoint. Clay Richards is CEO of NaviHealth, a Cardinal Health company that helps healthcare organizations create and manage those care transitions. They help “manage patients, improve clinical and financial outcomes, and share risk with payors and providers.” Richards joined us on The Future of Health to explain the problem of care transitions and NaviHealth's solution.

A couple of weeks ago we profiled Health:Further Chief Medical Development Officer Mario Ramirez's career and how his experiences brought him to his current role as a clinician entrepreneur. This week we spoke with Greg Goodman, another clinician entrepreneur and founder of the Physician Entrepreneur Summit (PES), about why he took an unconventional path to his medical career and how he hopes to help other clinicians get into healthcare innovation.

Dan Kirkpatrick, Founder and Managing Partner of Partners in Improvement, works with physician practices, particularly emergency medicine groups, to improve their operational efficiency, financial standing and leadership. We discuss a range of topics including the foundation of a successful medical practice, deficits in clinician training in terms of healthcare business expertise, MedPAC and MIPS, and the future of the hospital.

AndPlus is a mobile and web app development shop located in Boston. The team specializes in healthcare applications, working on everything from medical devices to patient-facing products. Marketing Director Abdul Dremali says that their expertise lies in taking complex products like a medical device, and building a user interface and user experience (UI/UX) that is so good, so simple, that "you don't need a manual." Dremali explains how they do it, and along the way offers ideas for anyone trying to create a more efficient user experience.

Austin Madison is Senior Vice President of The Crichton Group. He runs the employer benefits side of the firm, working with companies to build appropriate health insurance plans, along with keeping track of regulatory and compliance issues. Like all of us in healthcare, Madison is watching significant changes in the industry, leading to realignment in relationships among the many stakeholders, as well as new mechanisms for consumers to take more control of their interaction with the entire medical system. Our interview covered disruption and shifts among three groups: employers, payers and consumers.

Everyone has a health story. If you haven't been a patient, someone close to you has. Each situation is different, a unique combination of factors ranging from a single genetic variation to the social, cultural and physical environment. At the same time, many of the processes and technologies used to prevent these situations - and treat them when they occur - are standardized. And in most cases, we only get to see part of the story. Even when we're the patient, there are pieces of the process that remain unclear. We only get parts of the history of our disease; the genetic basis for our condition is confusing and often obscure; we don't get a clear look at the people and companies working on new treatment options. With Contributing Factors, Health:Further is pulling back that curtain. We'll be talking to clinicians, historians, economists, biomedical researchers, entrepreneurs, sociologists, investors and, most importantly, patients. Contributing Factors, Season 1: Depression, launches March 1. Join us as we explore the (whole) story of health. Sign up at healthfurther.com/contributing-factors for updates on the launch and access to bonus content

Bob Gold is CEO of Gold Group Enterprises. As a behavioral technologist, he uses his understanding of human behavior, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to help healthcare organizations implment programs designed to drive behavior change. His work has significant implications for patient engagement, cost containment, improved outcomes and clinician satisfaction across the entire healthcare system. In this conversation, we talk specifically about how healthcare organizations can pursue innovation.

Patient Engagement is one of the biggest themes, and highest goals, of today's healthcare industry. The problem is that patient engagement is a complex process that includes getting them to take action and likely make a sustained change in behavior. Bob Gold, though, loves the problem of behavior change. Gold, CEO of Gold Group Enterprises, is a behavioral technologist who focuses on applying his work to the healthcare industry to improve outcomes and reduce costs.

This special episode is produced in partnership with The Business of Healthcare. Find out more at bohseries.com. David Young, Chairman of Raiven Health, envisions a world where machine learning and automated patient self-reporting lead to better outcomes.  In his work, he has articulated a seamless and automated patient experience from reporting history and concerns through diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.  He believes the challenges of provider shortages, access, and clinical workflow can be overcome with these innovations. Raiven Health uses the behavioral health diagnostic and treatment archives of a large behavioral health provider, Centerstone of America, to develop machine learning capabilities. Young recognizes the need to address patient privacy risks, to establish ethical policies for reporting back to the patient, and the need reward providers for value rather than volume in order for his vision to be realized.

Is the healthcare industry really taking full advantage of all academia has to offer? Is academia really positioning itself appropriately to help drive healthcare innovation? For people like Dr. John Langell, Executive Director of the Center for Medical Innovation at the University of Utah and Chief of General Surgery at the George E. Wahlen VA Medical Center, the implied answer to those questions is “no.” Which is cool, because it gives them a lot of room to work from. The logical conclusion to answering “no” to the above questions is that it could be time to rethink the academic model of healthcare innovation. Maybe the old system of taking a faculty discovery, applying for a patent and then adding it to a tech transfer portfolio for potential licensing and commercialization isn't enough. Langell isn't just in the middle of this discussion, he's trying to lead it. At the University of Utah Medical Innovation Program, the goal isn't just to protect interesting ideas (i.e. rack up the patent count). It's to fill real gaps in science, medicine and healthcare with real products. In other words, something that a good business will do but that academia hasn't always had a reputation for.

Is it too late to do a 2017 recap for healthcare innovation and a look-ahead to 2018? Everyone does it, we're just doing it a week later. To think about what happened in 2017 - and what it could mean - and what might happen in 2018, I spoke with Health:Further CEO Marcus Whitney. The main themes were change in the health landscape and the healthcare industry, uncertainty due to healthcare policy, and great opportunity for health innovators and entrepreneurs.

Building an ideal future of health will take a lot of different components, but perhaps the most important piece of that future is people. Today we talk about people - connecting the right people with the right opportunities so both individuals and healthcare companies can thrive, which ultimately means that the entire healthcare system improves. Daniel Oppong is co-founder of Ohana Health, a company that sources interns and full-time hires for healthcare companies. Daniel talks about the idea behind Ohana, how he and Co-founder Sabrina Kahn think about finding the right people for clients, and how valuable a well-vetted intern can be for a company. Spoiler alert - the answer is very valuable. In the conversation you'll hear us talking about Brio. Brio is short for Briovation, our parent company. So Health:Further, Ohana, and a couple of other business units operate under that umbrella and Daniel, in addition to running Ohana, is also in charge of talent across the Brio business units. One thing that stood out in what Daniel said was the mix of just paying attention to people and using data to make good matches. So those personality tests and various assessments combined with an ability to read the other person. We talk a lot about that in other contexts on this podcast - the combination of technology or data and the human touch as a way to get the best possible outcome. If you're interested in working with Ohana to source interns or full time hires, or if you're just interested in learning more about what Daniel and Sabrina are building, check out ohanahealth.co.