Products, Insights, and Perspectives from HLTH 2021

In my previous article, I highlighted some of the most interesting insights and perspectives from the start of HLTH 2021 along with some of the culture of the conference.  Plus, hopefully you got a chance to read Colin Hung’s article about Health Equity at HLTH 2021.  Now I’m going to share a number of products, insights, and perspectives I saw and heard at the conference.  With over 6000 attendees, 300 speakers, and hundreds of exhibitors, there was a lot to chew on at the event and I certainly missed a lot of things.  However, I think you’ll find a number of things interesting and useful.

One company that I found fascinating was youturn.  They help reduce stress and substance misuse.  At the core of their product is a bunch of content to help those dealing with substance abuse.  Although, what Shay Houser, Co-Founder and CEO of youturn shared with me was that they were having a lot of success having their content shared with the families of an addict.

Often times everyone is focused on the addict, but the families of addicts go through their own trauma and need help as well.  Plus, many of these families want to know how they can help the addict, but they don’t know how to do so in a healthy way.  By providing these videos to the families of addicts, it helps them understand what their loved one is going through and what they are experiencing as well.  Plus, this educational content helps the counselor who then has to spend less time with the family and more time helping the person that’s addicted.  Pretty cool approach.

As we look at things like food disparities, I’ve wondered how we scale to the problem.  One interesting approach to this might be using all the food kit companies out there similar to how healthcare organizations are using Lyft or Uber for transportation issues.  I met Max Goldstein, Dietitian at Nutrition for Longevity, to learn about their healthy food kits.

The motto for the company is literally Food is Medicine which is something we often hear in healthcare.  We all know it’s true that the food we eat (or in some cases don’t eat) really impacts our health.  It makes sense that a healthy food kit could have a big impact on healthcare.

What I found most interesting about Nutrition for Longevity was that they told me that there’s a way for Medicare to pay for their food kits.  I asked them to send me the details on that, but haven’t received them yet.  Once I do, I’ll update this article.  There’s something great about the idea of Medicare paying for healthy food for people that need it though.  I did later wonder how easy these food kits are to cook and if those in need are able to cook them.

I had a chance to talk with Gurpreet Singh from Ellkay who told me “It’s important to understand data and not just interfaces to do interoperability effectively.”  Very interesting look at what’s happening with interoperability now.  Many just do interfaces and don’t actually provide the data in a way that can be used quickly.  Definitely a framework I’ll be using as I talk interoperability with companies now.

Props to Dedalus for the creative marketing about letting Data Loose (That’s how you pronounce Dedalus).  We all want data doing more for us in healthcare and Dedalus is dedicated to that effort.

Lisa Esch from NTT Data Services painted a really interesting picture for me about how NTT Data Services is going to help healthcare organizations gain access to a wide variety of innovations on top of the data and integrations they’d already done.  This is a big problem for healthcare organizations that want access to the most innovative startup companies, but have a challenge working with so many vendors.

Esch also shared that her big takeaway from the event was how murky it’s getting between payers, providers, and tech companies.  She commented how this trend has been happening for a while, but she just feels that the overlap has become really apparent lately.

I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about Clarify before the event and I didn’t have time to talk to them at the event either, but I did enjoy this talk they did with Deepthi Bathina from Humana. How cool is the idea that we all like Happy Patients? It’s amazing how often healthcare organizations lose focus of that though. Bathina also mentioned that Humana served more than 1 million meals to patients who had food insecurity. They used machine learning/AI to know who may need it. Plus she talked about Humana using their mobile app to predict mental health issues using how the patient types and swipes. I want to learn more about this technology and effort.

If you want to see someone passionate about health IT, talk to Bevey Miner from Consensus.  She understands the evolution of healthcare so well and framed it so interesting.  Plus, it was great to see the eFax solution roll off on its own under the new brand Consensus.  It was interesting to hear how many are still using a regular fax and haven’t even moved to a digital fax.  What a mistake.  More on this in a future article.

Michael Petersen from NTT Data Services offered this perspective on what he saw at the conference,  “Though I’m encouraged by the health industry conversations around health equity and mental health, there will continue to be technological and data challenges to drive longitudinal seamless engaged experiences.  It was refreshing to see so many health care executives of color elevating the call to action that health equity is a business and moral imperative”

One of the highlights of my time at HLTH was when I met Effie Parks from the Once Upon a Gene podcast.  She’s an extraordinary person that won a Wego Health Patient award for her podcast at the event.  Her podcast is one of the most real and raw podcasts I’ve heard.  She’s so brave as she talks about life and her experience living with a son who has a rare disease.  I couldn’t help but be inspired by her experience and stories and how she’s bringing hope and life to the rare disease community.  Be sure to subscribe to her podcast to see what I mean.

In a similar way, I was grateful to run into the Savvy Coop team and their beautiful puppet reminder to #AskPatients.  If you’re not sure how, ask Savvy and they’ll help.

I shared my #1 Takeaway from the conference with Blake Dodge from Insider.  Here’s what I replied:

Trust is trending…and some healthcare organizations aren’t on trend.

What were your takeaways from the event?  What did you see and hear?  Let us know in the comments and on social media with the hashtag #HITsm.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

Categories