Faces of Digital Health

Because US healthcare is private and operates by the rules of the free market, prices for services and medications can differ substantially. Solutions such as GoodRx and Amazon Pharmacy are addressing price transparency for consumers. On the other side are the Real Time Prescription Benefit Providers which help physicians see drug prices for a specific patient even before that patient leaves their office. The challenge with knowing how much a drug will cost a patient lies in the fact that different insurance companies have different policies regarding how much they will pay for medication. Patients might have a plan with high deductibles. But it’s not just the provider and the insurance company: prices depend on the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PMS) - intermediaries that manage prescription drug benefits on behalf of health insurers. PBMs negotiate prices with drug manufacturers and pharmacies. In this episode, Carm Huntress, the CEO of RxRevu Real Time Prescription Benefit Provider company, talks about the upcoming challenges of prices related to precision medicine, how drug pricing affects prescribing and treatment, and how price transparency can change the medication prescribing process.Leave a rating or a review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealthEpisode summary: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/rxrevu-drug-pricing

Funding in technologies, especially software in healthcare, has been booming in the last few years. Recently, SPACs - special purpose acquisition companies have gained in popularity. SPACs are not a new vehicle that makes it much easier for companies to go public. But it seems like their use has been reborn in the last year.This episode is prepared in partnership with mHealth Israel. mHealth Israel, led by Levi Shapiro, recently organized a webinar about SPACs. That webinar is adapted for audio in this episode. This is a three-part episode. First, you’re going to hear about what SPACs are as explained by Keith Townsend from the law firm King & Spalding. Then Sari Kaganoff, General Manager at Rock Health will take you through the state of SPACs in healthcare. The two presentations are followed by a Q&A session. The whole content is moderated by Gil Bashe, digital health thought leader and Managing Partner at Finn Partners marketing agency. Watch the SPAC webinar on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gnjpZPexQg&t=2854sJoin the premiere of (OVER)DOSE documentary: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/overdose-how-can-we-prevent-medication-errorsJoin the chat already before the premiere at the event's site on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/events/over-dose-howcanwepreventmedica6800062280823263232/Leave a rating or a review: https://lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealthThanks to our Sponsor: Health Resources and Services Administration: Receive up to $250,000 in student loan repayment in exchange for service in a community disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis. Learn more and apply to join STAR LRP - that stands for the Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery Loan Repayment Program. Applications Close on July 22, 2021

Simone Lehwess Mozzilli and Liliane Dübois both had cancer in their past. Liliane as a child, Simone as an adult. They are both an integral part of the Brazilian non-profit Beaba. Beaba offers support to children with cancer and their families by demystifying cancer and informing in a clear, objective, and optimistic way about the disease and treatment. They do so through various means, for example, a printed book called Beabook which resembles a dictionary and explains more than one hundred and fifty terms about cancer. In this episode, Simone, who is the President of Beaba, and Liliane, who is the Strategy Officer, talked about how to approach children with cancer, what they’ve learned from the app and other products being used across the world and talked a little bit about cancer care in Brazil. Join the premiere of (OVER)DOSE - How can we prevent medication errors? More info: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/overdose-how-can-we-prevent-medication-errors Go to www.facesofdigitalhealth.com to browse through other episodes as well.Learn more about Beaba and how you can support it: www.beaba.orgLeave a rating or a review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth Thanks to our Sponsor: Health Resources and Services Administration: Receive up to $250,000 in student loan repayment in exchange for service in a community disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis. Learn more and apply to join STAR LRP - that stands for the Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery Loan Repayment Program. Applications Close on July 22, 2021Recap: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f133-how-can-you-explain-cancer-to-children-simone-mozzilli-liliane-dubois-beaba

Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems across the world. Globally, the cost associated with medication errors has been estimated at $42 billion USD annually. Errors can occur at different stages of the medication use process. This is the movie trailer, adopted for audio for a short documentary (OVER)DOSE, How can we prevent medication errors? which will air on 29 June 2021.More about the event: https://www.linkedin.com/events/over-dose-howcanwepreventmedica6800062280823263232/ Video trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPKvDYSm1mI&t=29s Speakers in this episode:  David Kliff has been living with diabetes for over 20 years. He’s known as the Diabetic Investor, which is the name of the newsletter he’s been publishing for over two decades. Dr. David W. Bates, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lea Dias is the founder of a healthcare startup called Quaefacta. She is a Clinical Pharmacist by background and in the past worked as the CLinical Safety Pharmacist at the Perth Children’s Hospital. 

Phishing, Whaling, and exposure of patient data are a rising occurrence of the increasingly digitalized healthcare systems. 2020 saw more data breaches than previous years. What are the basics to know? Lee Kim is Director of Privacy and Security at HIMSS. In this episode, she talks about the basics of cybersecurity every individual should know, she presents the state of cybersecurity in healthcare and the outlook.Episode Summary: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f132-whats-the-state-of-cybersecurity-in-healthcare-lee-kimSee the video interview on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv1SM38siyo&t=25sThanks to our Sponsor: Health Resources and Services Administration: Receive up to $250,000 in student loan repayment in exchange for service in a community disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis. Learn more and apply to join STAR LRP - that stands for the Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery Loan Repayment Program. Applications Close on July 22, 2021

How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10? Pain is a very subjective matter and there’s plenty of research done and in progress to understand it better. In this episode Sara E. Berger, a researcher at IBM with over a decade of experience in the pain field talks about how science defines pain in the first place, how can pain be quantified given the variety of factors that impact it, and how does the research so far translate into clinical practice. Thanks for our Sponsor: Health Resources and Services Administration: Receive up to $250,000 in student loan repayment in exchange for service in a community disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis. Learn more and apply to join STAR LRP - that stands for the Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery Loan Repayment Program. Applications Close on July 22, 2021To read more about other topics as well go to www.facesofdigitalhealth.com.Faces of digital health is now also live on the Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEOzIOl_wIKtmoDmgfePhAQLeave a rating or a review on www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth

It is absolutely scary to get an infection and run out of options to treat it. Broadly speaking, existing antibiotics are and are going to keep losing their effectiveness, if antibiotics and antimicrobials are not used effectively. In this episode, you will hear a discussion with Mr. Oliver Schacht, a corporate finance professional and expert in the molecular diagnostics industry. He is the CEO of OpGen which developed cloud-based software to identify, track and predict antibiotic-resistant infections. In this episode, he talks about the factors impacting the global issue of antimicrobial resistance, the role of rapid diagnostics in the process of effective prescribing of antibiotics, and also the political and economic factors impacting the development of antibiotics.Enjoy the show, and if you’ll like what you hear, subscribe to be notified about new episodes automatically. And if you prefer podcasts, find Faces of digital health where ever you listen to podcasts.  OpGen: https://www.opgen.com/Episode recap:Go to www.facesofdigitalhealth.com to browse through other episodes as well.Leave a rating or a review www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth

Bianca Rose Phillips is a Global Digital Health Law theorist from Australia, and the founder of a Digital Health Think Tank. In her legal work, she is focused mostly on Australia and the USA. Many people know her by her framework of the so-called 8 pillars of digital health law-making. Bianca also contributed to the recently published book, Voice Technology in Healthcare, she is a lecturer and she also runs two podcasts - Too nice for law and Digital Health Law series.In this discussion, she talks about the current state of digital health law in general, why she opted out of My Health Record, why patients need to be responsible about their data, the legal standpoints in data privacy and ownership, and more.Episode SummaryMore about Bianca: Website: www.biancarosephillips.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biancaphillips/Join the Voice for equality event on 28 April Browse through other episodes as well at www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

Casey Ross is an investigative reporter for STAT News, where he covers AI development in healthcare and medicine. Last year he analyzed over 160 AI product market approval submissions cleared by the FDA between 2012 and 2020. As it turns out criteria for assessment and the dataset submitted differed a lot. Only 7 of 161 AI products cleared by the FDA in recent years, included any information about the racial composition of their datasets. Those devices were cleared to use AI for the diagnosis of a wide array of serious conditions, including heart disease, strokes, and respiratory illnesses.In this discussion, Casey talks about the state of trust in AI solutions in healthcare, what have we learned from the development of IBM Watson, and more.Enjoy the discussion, which you can also listen to wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’d like to see other topics and episodes as well, do go to www.facesofdigitalhealth.com.Episode Summary

Two-thirds of people who file for bankruptcy in the US cite medical issues as a key contributor to their financial downfall. It’s understandable since if you get sick, you might lose a job and your health insurance. Even if you have health insurance, you might have high deductibles and face the threat of high costs. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, The number of uninsured nonelderly Americans is increasing. It went from 26.7 million in 2016 to 28.9 million in 2019. Billing claims can get denied by health insurance companies and patients are faces with surprise billing costs. This leads to stressful disputes. Sometimes patients get creative. When Stacey Richter's husband landed in a New Jersey emergency room, she took an unusual step. Instead of simply signing the hospital’s financial and treatment consent form, she first crossed out sections calling for her to pay whatever amount the hospital charged. Instead, she wrote that she would only pay a rate of a “maximum of two times” what the federal government would pay under Medicare. Stacey is the author of the Relentless health value podcast and she explained this situation thoroughly in one of the shows. New York Times also reported the story. The guest of this show is Ric Sinclair, the Chief Strategy and Product Officer of Waystar. Waystar is a health tech platform helping streamline payments for over half a million healthcare providers across the US. Ric discussed how does billing looks like and what problems are present and addressed in US healthcare. Episode Summary