#49 - Words To Wash Your Hands To
The Handout returns, Ro gets ambitious, and this pesky coronavirus
Things That Happened
Ro Ro Ro your Bo. Ro may have started life flogging cheap generic Viagra delivered discreetly to your door, but they’re now keen on becoming much more than that. In visiting their website you’ll find they think of themselves as “The patient company” with a self-description of “a patient-driven telehealth company that aims to be the patient’s first call for all of their healthcare needs.” Their next rung on the ladder towards this vision, according to Christina Farr, is to test offering a slate of generic medications for $5 per month alongside tele-visits with Ro-employed doctors to write prescriptions.
This puts them in direct competition with Walmart’s $4 per-month generics program, but with the minor differentiator that you never have to leave the house to get your drugs from Ro (Walmart requires that the first prescription be collected in-person). I’m not about to make a prediction around how Ro does in this space, but the takeaway here is that Ro is a company with big ambitions, and probably one to watch.
The online pharmacy space is certainly heating up. Here’s a roundup of 8 other online pharmacies from Lydia Ramsey.
Tear down the wall. HHS (and various offices within) released on Monday their final version of new data sharing rules for EHR vendors and insurance companies. The (extremely) short version: these data-hoarding entities must now make that data, be it clinical health records or claims data, programmatically available to patients and any entities the patient authorizes. With standardized data access across all providers and payers, it has just become a much friendlier development environment for applications that will help patients move their data around, wring insight from it, and otherwise empower them to better manage the information related to their healthcare. The WSJ has a good write-up.
Farzad Mostashari, who was a part of the government’s initial effort for broad digitization of American healthcare in the late aughts, contextualizes the rule and why it took so long to come about in this thread:
I can see CRISPR now. Doctors have performed a procedure to reverse inherited blindness using CRISPR technology. What’s novel here is that this procedure was done on a live patient, rather than on tissues that have already been removed from the body. We’ll know in about a month if the procedure worked, but experts are optimistic. Here’s a quick primer on CRISPR/Cas9 for the curious.
Filter Muzzle. When it comes to apps that provide information about COVID-19, Apple is rejecting new submissions from anyone who isn’t a trusted source of health information (think governments and hospitals). While this is probably a good thing, it’s just a microcosm of the larger conversation that’s happening around the role of platforms and the spread of misinformation. For what it’s worth, platforms seem much more willing to wade into the fray in the midst of a crisis:
Facebook is removing all ads/commerce listings selling medical face masks
Amazon is policing its marketplace for products with claims around COVID-19
Facebook and Twitter grapple with conspiracy theories about the virus
Failing the test. Testing for COVID-19 in the United States is lagging far behind other countries’ efforts (regardless of relative size). Neel Patel, writing in the MIT Technology Review, argues there are two main culprits for the delay in testing:
uncharacteristic technical sloppiness from the CDC in preparing their tests (they bungled the control portion of the test, calling into question the accuracy of the results)
the federal government waiting too long to lift the rules that prevent non-government labs from developing their own tests
Opening the floodgates. While the CDC scrambles, private funding is trying to help fill the gap. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping fund a project to provide at-home test kits for COVID-19. The initiative is, at least initially, focused primarily on the Seattle area.
Things To Read
Look no further.This is the best source I’ve encountered for well-cited & data-driven information on COVID-19. The authors, Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie, are updating it regularly.
Because of course it exists, here’s a Top 10 list of COVID-19 tracking dashboards from the good people at the MIT Technology Review.
“From a national perspective, this is known as one of the cool places for health care reform, where people are trying new ideas, where there is leadership, where there is community, where there are all the critical elements to get something done,” Colorado is emerging as a hot-spot for innovative health policy, with lawmakers there focusing on consumer protections through legislation that has halted surprise billing, lowered exchange-based premiums 20%, and capped copays for insulin, among others.
“Some subjects are much more likely to transmit the virus than others. They are referred to as ‘superspreaders.’” David Shaywitz looks at superspreaders, network effects, and how our epidemiological models might not account for these well-networked actors.
The various digital tools being put forth to help combat COVID-19, now listed and described by the good people at mobihealthnews.
Thanks for reading The Healthcare Handout, a regular update on tech and business in healthcare from Isaac Krasny. Criticize, praise, hire, or otherwise get in touch with Isaac via isaac@healthcarehandout.com, or on twitter @isaackrasny
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Hand washing chart via washyourlyrics.com