As lawmakers in Washington fight over the new healthcare law, innovation and progress is being made in healthcare. The new healthcare law has a few good aspects to it, but for the most part it is just more big government and more reasons to spend our money. What both side do agree upon is that cost are out of control and the patient needs to be empowered to manage their health.
This is my personal story of living with our healthcare system. I have worked in Healthcare technology for 15 years. I have a deep understanding of where our system is broken and what needs fixed. I believe we can do a better job fixing healthcare, not by government mandates, but by allowing cost saving innovations and patient choice and empowerment.
Most of the innovations we have see in healthcare for the last 20 years has been around extending life, or providing some comfort for a patient. For example when I first got into healthcare I worked for a large regional hospital. Our town had 3 competing “5 star hospital” systems. I say “5 star” because these facilities where as nice as any “5 star” hotel I ever stayed in. These hospitals competed for patient with comfort and attractions, the same way hotels compete for customers. The problem is patients are not paying the bill, so price does not matter. We eat what we want, do what we want, go to the doctor when we want, without the concern cost. What we need is better consumer tools to help us manage our health, tools to empower us to choose better lifestyles, tools to help chronic patients understand the areas where they need better control and where they are doing a good job in managing their health.
My daughter has been a diabetic for 10 years; she was diagnosed when she was 3. The innovation we have seen in diabetes over the years has mostly been around comfort. We can test my daughter’s sugar level with meters that need 2 micros of blood instead of 4 micros of blood and we get her results in 3 seconds instead of 6 seconds. Most of the meter vendors compete on the same thing, fast reading, less blood needed, more test sites, and more accurate. Instead of being 98% accurate they are now 99.9 percent accurate. They have not fundamentally empowered patients to take care of their health. Our normal routine has been, see her doctor every 4 month for a checkup, make some tweaks to her treatment, and see them again in 4 month. We were rigorous about testing her blood sugar and watching what she ate. But we lacked good tools that gave us insight into her day-to-day successes and failures. Her doctors did not have access to a complete set of her blood sugar reading between an appointment and the software tools that came with her meters where hard to understand and did not help us pinpoint where her trouble spots where. After 9 years on that “hamster wheel” and a scare at one of the quarterly doctor appointments, I finally had enough. I decided to use my technology background, healthcare experience and personal experience of caring for a diabetic and solve our problem.
I own a small technology company and had just released a business intelligence application to help business manage their operations and finances better. I started using this toolset to manage my daughter’s diabetes. I created dashboard that allowed me to view her trouble spots, the way I wanted to see the information. I could share this information with my doctor, her school nurse, the baby sitter, whoever and whatever we choose to share. I added Facebook like tools so I could interact with other patients and families like mine where we could share stories, chat about our challenges, and share our successes. I added tools to allow us to track her medicines and when they need reordered. I even setup the system to log activity and keep track of rewards for healthily behaviors. I give my daughter an iTunes every week when she uploads her data from her meter into the system. I did all of this because I wanted my daughter to live a healthily and long life. We reduced my daughter’s A1C level (the amount of sugar in her blood) by 1.5 points and over the last 2 months her average blood sugar readings are in range. When someone asked my daughter what she thinks about what her dad has done, her answer is “I don’t know, I just feel better”. What more could a parent want?
As other patients heard about what I was doing they asked if they could use the system. I made changes to the system based upon patients feedback, and created a process to automatically get information from any medical device. I tried to make the system accommodate the patient not the other way around. I did all of this as my night job, after hours, until I turned into my day job. I created a new company called s5Health and open the system to the public. Any patient can use our system by creating an id at https:\\demo.s5health.com. We have worked for the last 15 months to change how people manage their health. We are now in talks with Dell, Microsoft and a major insurance company about our toolset.
I did all of this not because of something Washington did, but because I had a personal need and worked to solve that need. From my perspective what we need to fix healthcare is not more government but more entrepreneurs stepping up to fix their little corner of healthcare. That is my idea of healthcare reform!
James Jordan
Founder S5health
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