Part 2, THE GLOBAL SICKCARE SYSTEM

In part 1, we met Dr. Arlen Meyers, President and CEO at the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and Director, University of Colorado CITI Digital Health Consortium.  He is a practicing surgeon and otolaryngologist, professor, and entrepreneur.   We met over social media as a result of reading his comments on physicians’ use of Electronic Medical Records.  He wrote “1.  Show up for the patient appointment on time.  2.  Sit down and talk to the patient.   3. Avoid using the EMR as much as possible.”

He believes that healthcare incentives should be directed more toward the consumer and understands why admission to hospital can be seen as a failure of the healthcare system.

We left off part 1 with a look into the future of healthcare devices,  including a machine diagnosis.  “As technology helps us get smarter in making more predictive diagnoses, the computer can connect the dots better than I can.  So, what is there left for me to do when it comes to diagnoses?”

Start Part 2, The Global Sickcare System

It is a bit scary when coming out of a care model (Dr. Meyers would say sickcare model) where the doctor looks you in the eyes and declares, It’s gas.  We discussed a case like hypertension.  If a watch tracks and trends blood pressure, a contact lens tracks a blood panel, add screening questions with a mobile app similar to those from one of my previous post, where does the doctor fall into making the diagnosis?  Will charges for tests be acceptable when a medical lab device returns the same results and with the same accuracy as a wearable device?  Am I comfortable with that?  Will device manufacturers start buying up wearable device companies?

Dr. Meyers, Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at Tie Rockies,

with Permission of SOPE, http://youtu.be/0FzV-pwl1z8

Remember, that’s really not the prime use for the data.  Dr. Meyers says that a prime use of the information is for the consumer to do something to prevent the condition or early detection and receive a monetary reward for doing so.  In this new ecosystem, depending on how it shakes out, I may be able to live with that cash rebate.

Dr. Meyers seeks to promote finding answers through with SOPE.  “To provide resources and advice for those who want to bring such innovations to the patient.... Our vision is to close global health disparities. Our mission is to help anyone interested in getting an idea to a patient by offering education, resources, and networks.

"SOPE was born out of anger because this needed to be done. In  my professional career, I had been involved in technology commercialization and got so frustrated with the lack of resources to do it properly that I decided with a couple of others to create something to do it myself.  Me and others created SOPE because no one else was doing it and it needed to be done.  It filled a gap.  Everyone had a good idea but no one knew what to do with it.  So we created a place.

"We are a not-for-profit global biomedical and healthcare innovation network.  You do not have to be a doctor to be a member of SOPE.  The thing that holds everything together is that everyone in the organization has an interest in getting an idea to a patient or helping someone get an idea to a patient.   We are everything from ideation to terminal deployment.  We do not do it.  We are a sandbox. We put everyone in the same place and let good things happen.  But we provide them with the education, resource, and networks.

"We are growing in dues paying members at a rate of 100 persons each month.  Our audience numbers in the tens of thousands. Our dues are only $50US per year.  We keep it ridiculously cheap to encourage people to participate.  We feel that we offer a fairly compelling value proposition.  We want to engage as many people as possible and yet sustain the organization.”

“So if a person has an idea, what should be the first thing to do?”

“Join SOPE at http://www.sopenet.org.”

“And what happens after that?"

“They have to go through a series of steps in the life science innovation roadmap. That involves fairly clear steps in getting an idea to market. Whether the idea is drugs, devices, diagnostics, digital health, care delivery innovation.  It depends on the idea.  It depends on following those steps to get to the next success factor before you can move on to the next.  Whether you need a mentor or to pay someone to commercialize your idea, you can do that.  SOPE is not the place where a person hands off an idea to just expect checks in the mail.  This is a very hands-on experience.”

THE GLOBAL SICKCARE SYSTEM

“We have a sickcare system and not a healthcare system.  You can’t just jam more stuff into a sickcare system.”  Dr. Arlen Meyers’ remarks came quickly and without reservation.  With all the polarizing politics about American healthcare, it is easy for such a statement to be seen as partisan.  In this point, Dr. Meyers has broken through and bounded far beyond those sorts of arguments. 

Dr. Meyers is President and CEO at the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and Director, University of Colorado CITI Digital Health Consortium.  He is a practicing surgeon and otolaryngologist, professor, and entrepreneur.  He helped create the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SOPE) to help others more than just physicians:

- push beyond the concepts of what we think is possible

- pull together what we currently know into ecosystems that are both scalable and meaningful to the patient and those who treat patients.    

Dr. Meyers and I met through social media.  A member asked about the best practices in using electronic medical records in the patient environment.  Dr. Meyers responded, “1.  Show up for the patient appointment on time.  2.  Sit down and talk to the patient.   3. Avoid using the EMR as much as possible.”  By his other posts in various forums, I could see that there was more to this statement that just the bad and worthless EMR rhetoric one so easily finds. 

Dr. Meyers purports, “The experience people value the most is experience in the exam room.”  Everything else is secondary and must support that experience.   It isn’t so much as not liking EMR, it’s a much larger issue of how an EMR interfaces with physicians.   He asserts that the physician interface should be providing “decision support and actionable information.  Within the time constraints of the few moments I have with a patient and with limited resources available, how does the EMR optimize and maximize the quality of that experience.”  Revenue, expense, and meaningful data should be captured while enriching the patient to physician experience not detracting from that experience.  It’s not a matter of if it can be done; rather, someone needs to get it done.

Spend time with the patient. Less Focus on finding a way to charge the patient for every little thing...via the physician....  The complaints sounded familiar.  So I asked, “Listening to what you are saying, seems that many of the same issues surfaced at the rise of the HMO.”

            He replied, “There have been various experiments to try and do that.  HMOs were one of them.  That was more about rationing healthcare.  I don’t think what’s working out now will work either.  And in reference to the social media post, in order for things to change we don’t just need new technologies - hardware, software, and digital health technologies, we need new business models.  We need new ecosystems.  We need a regulatory apparatus which allows those things to grow.”

Dr. Meyers has similar perspectives on wearable devices as well.  Great inventions but…  “How is this helping the patient or the doctor?  By integrating it into the patient record?  This is different from a health diary in which a patient may take blood pressure readings or records when certain symptoms occur.  These are devices capable of transmitting data on a continuous basis.  Some people have the expectation that the data will be beamed into the respective patient’s medical record in real-time.  Who gets it and what do you expect them to do with it?  It’s not scalable as currently presented.”      

The conversation transitioned a bit.  Dr. Meyers elaborated on the role of technology in healthcare.  There were two ideas.  The first idea, not a problem.  The second was something that gave me pause. I wasn’t comfortable with it at all.  At least, not until I had time to think about the context of what Dr. Meyer’s view of how healthcare should look.

The first, Dr. Meyers stated, “Healthcare education is mostly hospital based.  The business cases and regulatory apparatus are geared toward a hospital based care.  This is a sickcare system.  Admission into the hospital should be seen as a failure in healthcare.

“If I attach a monitor to my car, I could get substantial discounts if I behave on the road. If we go to wearable medical devices, hook them up and give money or credits to adhere to care plans and avoid hospital stays based on that data.  Make it easy to be healthy with minimal effort on the consumer’s part, and save money.  The policy apparatus should support that.”

Then he started into the second idea, the one that gave me pause.  That is, a machine diagnosis.

Dr. Meyers continued. “As technology helps us get smarter in making more predictive diagnoses, the computer can connect the dots better than I can.  So, what is there left for me to do when it comes to diagnoses?”

Read part 2