Collaboration is the New Innovation – Themes from the Health 2.0 Conference

Health 2.0 gathers together many of the world’s leading health innovators and entrepreneurs to present their technologies, investors who are looking to identify the next promising company to fund, and large health organizations who are seeking to understand what is coming next and how they might weave the latest in technological innovation into their offerings. Startups at Health 2.0 are seeking to get their technologies into the hands of as many patients and clinicians as possible by partnering with pharmaceutical, insurance, and provider organizations who have access to these populations and can help them scale. During the conference, there is exciting matchmaking activity occurring between startups and investors and startups and large health organizations.

The “New Landscape for Digital Diagnosis and Remote Care” panel I moderated at Health 2.0 featured companies Tyto Care, Ceeable, Teckel Medical, and Cloud Diagnostics. These companies are pioneering technologies that bring care into the home and make diagnosis less expensive and more portable. As care extends outside the four walls of the hospital and is delivered in our homes, neighborhoods, and places of employment, it quickly becomes clear that these organizations could partner together to provide a suite of tools and services that could be provided.

A consumer may interact digitally with their insurance company, pharmaceutical company, health system, pharmacy, and other applications and tools. There are a myriad of one off solutions, many of which have proven benefits.

However, these solutions need to connect for the patient and clinician so that they are not left to piece disparate solutions together on their own. Jonathan Bush put it well when he said, "The world is done with digital medicine. We need network medicine." Athena Health's Unbreak Healthcare movement is focused on delivering on that vision.

And we are starting to see movement in this direction at the Health 2.0 conference and in the industry in general. Organizations and startups in a given space are beginning to align creating opportunities for collaboration and coalitions of product and service offerings to be formed. For example, Health 2.0 hosted a code-a-thon in San Francisco last weekend before Health 2.0 exploring what technologies could be built to help seniors manage their health care and costs combining the capabilities and API’s of FDB, Pokitdok, and Humana.

Dr. Karen DeSalvo, acting assistant secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services discussed Public Health 3.0, an HHS initative to leverage data, connection, and collaboration to address the determinants of health that will help us create healthier communities. Startups and large health organizations in related spaces who partner together to create a combined offering, service layer, or platform approach as opposed to competing for time and resources may be more likely to provide value to the audiences they serve and achieve their objectives in commercialization and scale.

Some great examples of this innovation through collaboration are, the winners from the “A Bill You Can Understand” design and innovation challenge, who were announced today at Health 2.0. The challenge, which was administered by Mad*Pow in collaboration with the US Department of Health and Human services, and financed by AARP, was intended to draw national attention to a common complaint within the healthcare system – that medical bills and the medical billing process are a source of confusion for patients.

The challenge engaged patients throughout the process, promoted a human-centered design approach, drew more than 80 entries from across the country, and produced a number of innovative approaches to help patients manage the financial aspect of their healthcare.

HHS lined up six pilot partners – Cambia Health Solutions, Geisinger, Integris, Providence, MetroHealth, and University of Utah Health Care – to take the outcomes of the challenge and evaluate them for implementation in whole or in part. RadNet Inc. won the challenge to design the bill that is easiest to understand, and Sequence won the challenge to fundamentally transform the experience of medical billing. Many organizations also received honorable mention for the merit of their proposed solutions.

Mad*Pow’s Center for Health Experience Design will be publishing a report with insights and findings from the “A Bill You Can Understand” challenge that will serve as a resource to insurance companies and health systems interested in improving medical billing and simplifying the financial aspect of healthcare for consumers moving forward.

When exploring how collaboration can make us stronger together versus when we are apart, it is crucial to invite patients, families, and clinicians to the table of innovation.

Human-centered design methods like participatory design can ensure fruitful collaboration between all parties and help to focus solutions where they will have the most impact.

There is an avalanche of data, but health organizations do not want data, they want information, insight, and results.

This was a theme heard again and again at the Health 2.0 conference. A solid understanding of the real life and psychographic needs of the people we serve, combined with insights gained from data will enable us to design “precision health experiences” which will deliver real meaning and value in the context of people’s lives and the results that health organizations are seeking. The combination of genomic information, claims data, biometric device data, medical records, self-reported data, and machine learning will enable us to create custom pathways and precise experiences that will enhance efficacy, moving us beyond a “one size fits all”. The field of “Precision Experience Design” holds great promise, especially when combined with the sensibility of “Life Design” which will guide us in appropriately addressing determinants of health, the lifestyle behaviors and other factors that affect the level of health we enjoy in our lives.

I look forward to seeing more collaborations which bring health organizations from across the ecosystem together to improve the experience of health by pooling data, sharing insights, and creating coordinated service offerings.

These are the types of communities of collaboration that Mad*Pow’s Center for Health Experience Design will be looking to facilitate.

Amy plays an essential role in Mad*Pow’s visualization of a changed healthcare system United States. As the chief instigator behind Mad*Pow’s Healthcare Experience Design Conference, HxRefactored, and the managing director of the Center for Health Experience Design Amy has successfully connected and networked disparate parts of a challenging and siloed system. She can be contacted at amy@ madpow.com.