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Innovator Spotlight: Kit Check’s Kevin MacDonald on Helping Pharmacies Become Safer and More Efficient
This week in our spotlight series on innovators, we interviewed Kevin MacDonald, co-founder and CEO of Kit Check.
Hospitals in the US alone spend more than $2B annually sorting through kits – OR kits, code trays, emergency boxes and others; nearly 20% of those kits have expired and incorrect medications. Kit Check provides web-based software and an innovative scanning station that is easy to install and use. It enables hospital pharmacies to manage kitted inventory by providing visibility into exactly what is in the hospital and where it has been, and management of consumables in the life sciences supply chain. According to the company’s website, Kit Check also reduces the time to process kits from 20-30 minutes down to a matter of seconds while simultaneously increasing accuracy.
We spent a few minutes with MacDonald to find out a little about his background, what inspires him, and where he gets his drive for innovation.
CTH Blog:
First, please tell us a little about yourself and how you became interested in health and technology.
Kevin Macdonald:
My background has been in technology. The underlying technology in Kit Check is RFID, and I’ve been working with RFID in one form or another since the early days of the Wal*Mart mandate.
I became interested in health technology (and specifically hospital pharmacy kits) after hearing about the processes that pharmacists go through every day. I suspected that by applying technology, we could free the pharmacists to do more valuable work. It was mind-boggling to think that someone as highly trained and highly compensated as a hospital pharmacist would spend huge amounts of time looking at tiny vials for expiration.
CTH Blog:
Being an entrepreneur must be very rewarding and exciting, but also quite challenging. What is the passion that drives you?
KM:
There’s something very rewarding about solving a problem that is widely experienced. When our customers tell us that we are making a huge difference in both safety and the satisfaction of their staff, that keeps me motivated to broaden our reach.
CTH Blog:
How did you get into your current field? How long have you been working on Kit Check?
KM:
I’ve been in software for more than 15 years, but started with RFID about 12 years ago at Sun Microsystems. It’s been an interesting ride seeing RFID both highly hyped and severely dismissed as being irrelevant.
I started Kit Check about two years ago. It all began with a conversation over dinner with a hospital pharmacist who was having a bad day checking kits.
CTH Blog:
What do you think is the most exciting innovation or trend happening in health care right now?
KM:
The emergence of “accountable care” in a more widespread sense across the United States is fascinating. It is really the first step toward creating real efficiencies in the system.
CTH Blog:
Describe your vision of the future of health or health care.
KM:
Health care needs to develop to a point where good care is delivered in an efficient way without waste. It means that reimbursement is based on actual improved health outcomes rather than raw delivery of service.
CTH Blog:
At Kaiser Permanente, we think of “total health” as a combination of mind, body and spirit. What does total health mean to you?
KM:
To me health is a state of well being where people are able to physically and mentally achieve what they want to.
What Research is Telling Us About the State of HIV/AIDS in the United States: Interview with Expert Michael Horberg, MD
Michael Horberg, MD
Kaiser Permanente recently hosted the 8th Annual HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, and STI Conference. The event brought together physicians, advanced practice providers, research scientists, and other care providers, offering a constructive atmosphere for exchanging ideas, learning from national experts, and networking with colleagues from across the nation. For insight into the conference, we spoke with Michael Horberg, MD, national director for HIV/AIDS at Kaiser Permanente and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.
CTH Blog:
Tell us about the 8th Annual HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, and STI Conference you recently hosted.
Michael Horberg:
The goal of the conference has always been to bring together physicians, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals, and researchers to determine the latest knowledge and best practices in HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. We want to gather all of the people involved in HIV/AIDS care and share our best knowledge and practices.
The idea is to promote the key areas of learning in these fields: new knowledge and new medications for hepatitis; how to care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients; and new aspects of quality HIV, hepatitis, and sexually transmitted diseases care. Most importantly, we wanted to continue developing the Kaiser Permanente community of committed HIV and hepatitis care teams and community providers.
CTH Blog:
You presented a research study at the conference on the “HIV Engagement Cascade,” with participation of many of the HIV clinical and research leaders in Kaiser Permanente. I understand this was presented earlier this year at the very important Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. Can you give us some background for those unfamiliar with that concept?
MH:
For a while now, we’ve known that antiretroviral therapy (ART) can significantly improve health outcomes for people living with HIV. We consider ART to be successful when it reduces the viral load of a person living with HIV to undetectable levels. For years, clinical research has shown that people who have undetectable viral load in their blood are more likely to live long and healthy lives and are less likely to pass the virus on to others.
The CDC developed a standardized care order for how HIV care proceeds from diagnosis to ART success. It’s a series of steps or an engagement “cascade”:
1) HIV diagnosis
2) Linkage to HIV care
3) Retention in care after diagnosis
4) Prescription of ART
5) Reaching an undetectable viral load
Each of these steps presents a challenge to an HIV-positive person and to the health workers who try to guide them through consistent care. One particular challenge for HIV-positive individuals is Read the rest of this entry
Innovator Spotlight: CarePort’s Brenda Tea, RN
At the TEDMED reception held at the Center for Total Health in April, several innovators in attendance were introduced to the crowd. What drives these innovators is something we wanted to delve into a little more deeply, so over the next several weeks, we will be spotlighting each individually. Today, the first in this spotlight series, we speak with Brenda Tea, RN, director of compliance and quality assurance for CarePort – a teleRehab system that shortens the timeline to reach patient outcomes and concurrently reduces re-hospitalizations. Careport promotes adherence to a prescribed home exercise regimen, and increases data capture and intervention to important patient changes.
CTH Blog:
First, please tell us a little about yourself and why you became interested in health and technology.
Brenda Tea:
I love helping people and am passionate about improvement. Technology is exciting – it gives me advantages as a clinician and as a leader of care providers.
CTH Blog:
Being an entrepreneur must be very rewarding and exciting, but also quite challenging. What is the passion that drives you?
BT:
A busy mind! I wake up thinking about how today can be better.
CTH Blog:
How did you get into your current field? How long have you been working on this project or company?
BT:
I have a deep caring and work ethic (Thanks Mom and Dad!). I found being flexible and forward thinking with every opportunity that crossed my path took me to the next really good project. Most recently, I have been in post acute care/home health for the last twelve years.
CTH Blog:
What do you think is the most exciting innovation or trend happening health care right now?
BT:
At the moment, it’s mobile and wireless health applications. Access is key.
CTH Blog:
Describe your vision of the future of health or health care.
BT:
My vision is helping people to a healthier, better quality life where technology is the vehicle and human caring and concern are (still) the drivers.
CTH Blog:
At Kaiser Permanente, we think of “total health” as a combination of mind, body and spirit. What does total health mean to you?
BT:
Certainly, the meaning of total health is individual to each person, but I think it is reaching optimal potential: having power over how you live, to the greatest extent possible, and for as long as possible.
PBS’ City Walk Series: How Walking is Transforming U.S. Cities
The simple act of walking offers tremendous benefits for your health, the economy and the environment. City Walk, a new six-part series that premiered earlier this month, is showcasing how walking is transforming cities across the country and, in the process, reconnecting us with our bodies.
Expanding on short films produced for everybodywalk.org, City Walk explores walking for public television networks KCET and LinkTV from the perspective of experts and pedestrians. It also captures a growing nationwide effort to reverse the trend of a sedentary lifestyle by spotlighting walkable neighborhoods in major cities. The call to action: discover urban areas by foot.
“We are excited to offer an innovative multi-faceted series to our viewers and invite them to explore their public urban landscape with multiple engagement opportunities on the air, online and beyond,” said Juan Devis, vice president, Arts and Culture Programming, KCETLink. “We are pleased to help shepherd urban exploration into the public consciousness through walking and encouraging a healthier lifestyle.”
We’ve written a lot about the Every Body Walk! campaign often on this blog. As a reminder, Every Body Walk! is a campaign to get adults walking 30 minutes a day, five days to achieve better health. While everyone is starved for time, a 30-minute walk can be spliced into your day by walking to transit, walking to work, walking to lunch, walking the dog, and even taking the stairs. Try just a few of these options; you’ll be surprised how quickly the time adds up.
City Walk brings Every Body Walk! to television, tablets, laptops and smartphones, making messages about walking accessible wherever people are.
“It’s a well known fact that the human body was built to walk. As a family physician, I talk to patients everyday about the importance of walking and I even write prescriptions for walking. A 30-minute walk, five days a week can change lives and improve health,” said Bob Sallis, MD, Kaiser Permanente, Fontana, Calif. An avid walker and advisor to Every Body Walk!, Dr. Sallis has walked in many of the locations featured in the City Walk series.
Footage in the City Walk series is brought to PBS in part by Every Body Walk!, which has filmed inspiring stories about walking and walkable cities across the country. The campaign interviewed city planners, academics, physicians, elected officials, executives and parents who can’t say enough about what walking means for their cities and communities.
The next episode of City Walk airs tonight on Link TV: DirecTV 375 and DISH 9410. Cities featured in the upcoming episode include Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Boston. Learn more about walking in downtown Los Angeles, the Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and the Greenway in Boston.
Check your television or cable listing for monthly airdates through September 26, or watch the show online anytime at kcet.org/citywalk. For more resources on walking, visit everybodywalk.org.
Talking Code-A-Thons with Kaiser Permanente’s Madhu Nutakki
At the Code-A-Thon this week, we spent a few minutes with Madhu Nutakki, vice president for digital presence technologies at Kaiser Permanente. Nutakki shared insight about the event and what KP’s new open API, Interchange, means in the short and long term.
CTH Blog:
So tell us about this Code-A-Thon event. What is it about?
Madhu Nutakki:
Today at the Center for Total Health in beautiful Washington, D.C., we’re holding a Code-A-Thon built around Interchange – an API that Kaiser Permanente EVP and CIO Phil Fasano announced Monday at Health Datapalooza. Interchange is going to start enabling innovation not just within KP, but also outside of our four walls. We feel that’s the way to expand our footprint and applications for our consumers, and we can do it in a way that’s secure and private. With it, our consumers can get much better user experiences built for them.
CTH Blog:
So who are the people participating in this Code-A-Thon, and what will they be doing over the 36 hour-long event?
MN:
We’re fortunate to host about 80 people here, both internal and external to KP. We have about 10 physicians that are going to help us out, we have 20 people we refer to as catalysts, and we have 40 developers here.
The physicians are going to be focused on something called iThrive, which is about wellness and how we as consumers at Kaiser Permanente can better manage our total health. The physicians will help us think through what those options are.
The catalysts serve as product managers, in a way. They’ll enable us to build out these applications, think about what functionality we should have in them, and invigorate the teams.
The developers are the most important people in this room. They’ll be working on this for 36 hours, and they’ll be building out these applications.
It’s a fun-filled event, and many of these people will work through the night. We have Thrive breaks scheduled throughout the 36 hours to keep people feeling good. We also have a midnight “Zombie’s Run,” for two miles, so anybody that’s interested can join us. We’ll have a judging session at the end of the event where we’ll pick the top applications in eight different categories.
CTH Blog:
What do you find so valuable about Code-A-Thons?
MN:
Code-A-Thons are an extreme way to trigger innovation. Typically, software development is a long, drawn-out process, taking months to a year. A Code-A-Thon brings everybody who is interested in a concept together. When you have people together, ideas flow much more freely. And because they are co-located with the developers, any changes they want to make can happen that much more quickly. So the product that comes out of a Code-A-Thon is that much more thought through and that much more reliable.
CTH Blog:
What do you see as the future for Interchange – beyond just apps benefitting Kaiser Permanente?
MN:
When we thought about Interchange, we thought about it very much as Kaiser Permanente’s contribution to the community. API is a new concept for health care. If you look at the retail market, Netflix and others have done it very well. Our foray into this space will hopefully trigger innovation in general in health IT.
At the end of the day, Interchange has three purposes: One is for consumers or KP members – hopefully they’ll get a better user experience by apps that are developed both internally and externally. Second is for developers – developers now get access to our public data, and hopefully they can build interfaces from that. And third is for Kaiser Permanente – we can expand our app portfolio that much more quickly.
Forum Brings Together Leaders to Discuss Keys to Behavior Change, Building Healthier Habits to Address Obesity
As we discuss often on this blog, the obesity epidemic in the United States is a rapidly growing public health concern. Earlier this month, Kaiser Permanente presented the Forum for Healthy Behavior Change in Washington, D.C., along with the American Heart Association and the National Business Group on Health, to address this pressing issue. The forum brought together 200 health care leaders, policy makers, community leaders and other experts, who discussed how to effectively support healthy lifestyle changes, such as healthier eating and increased physical activity, in both clinical and community settings.
The video below highlights some additional topics and discussions from the forum, including how to use “baby steps” in ultimately creating successful behavior change.
TEDMED’s Jay Walker and Kaiser Permanente’s Philip Fasano Talk Imagination and the Future of Health Care
In March of this year, TEDMED’s Jay Walker and Kaiser Permanente Executive Vice President and CIO Philip Fasano had a conversation about imagining tomorrow’s health and medicine at Walker’s Library of Human Imagination. Recently, the tables were turned, and in a first for the Center for Total Health Blog, Fasano conducted his own Q&A with Walker – about his library’s collection, his role in TEDMED, and what he thinks about when he contemplates the future of health care.
Watch a video of Walker’s conversation with Fasano below, and read on for Fasano’s follow-up Q&A with Walker.
Philip Fasano:
Your Library of Human Imagination is impressive. For people unfamiliar with the library, can you briefly describe what it is? Where did the idea come from and how did you bring that vision to life?
Jay Walker:
The Library is a 3,600 sq. ft. wing of my home containing about 30,000 books as well as maps, charts, artworks and a wide variety of historical objects. Everything in the Library was selected or created to illustrate something about human imagination…from a Gutenberg Bible page to one of the original 1957 Russian Sputnik satellites (a backup that was never launched). The room combines traditional architecture with high-tech art, sound and lighting, plus unusual design features such as floating platforms and an invisible glass bridge. The whole look and feel was inspired by the paradoxical spaces of M.C. Escher.
Fasano:
What prompted you to get started collecting?
Walker:
About 15% of the human population has the collecting gene. I’m one of them. After I’d been collecting for several years, I asked myself, what is the common theme that runs through all these incredibly diverse items? I realized that every book or object appealed to me because it was an example of imagination at work. So about 12 years ago when we built our new house, I made sure to include this Library as a showcase to promote understanding of human imagination and, hopefully, inspire a sense of wonder and curiosity.
Also, my wife said I had to keep all my stuff in one room.
Fasano:
If you had to distill your library down to one or two items, what would they be and why would you select them?
Walker:
Tough assignment! One thing I usually show visitors is the Harmonia Macrocosmica by Cellarius. This 1660 atlas included the first published heliocentric depiction of the solar system – a map that divides the Age of Faith from the Age of Reason. So it’s a dividing line between two highly imaginative ways of looking at the universe.
For people in the health field, I like to show the “flayed angel,” published in Paris by the anatomist and artist Gautier in 1745. This painting is considered by many to be the Mona Lisa of anatomical artwork. It’s a three-foot-high, color portrait of a nude, seated woman, viewed from the back with her face turned in three-quarter profile. Her back is slit open up the spine, and her skin and muscles are peeled aside on both left and right to reveal the ribs beneath. It sounds grotesque but it was created for educational purposes and the image is actually quite beautiful.
Fasano:
What motivated you to become the curator of TedMed?
Walker:
I have been an enthusiastic member of the TED community, the “ideas worth spreading” conference, for 25 years and have served on TED’s brain trust for many years as well. When I was invited to speak at TEDMED in 2010, I fell in love with it and so did my partners. We believed TEDMED could become a great vehicle for progress in health and medicine, a place where people make the unexpected connections that lead to new thinking and unusual collaborations. We also saw TEDMED as a safe meeting place to have the kind of multi-disciplinary dialog around wellness that everyone says we need, but which just isn’t happening anywhere else. So we got involved and, together with the growing TEDMED community, are doing our best to support all of that.
Fasano:
What prompted your interest in health care?
Walker:
I have always been passionately interested in the sciences, including medical science, even though I am not an MD or a PhD. I see health care as an important facet of the much larger field of health and medicine generally. It’s the one subject that directly impacts all of us. It’s also the place where so much of today’s intellectual excitement of discovery and invention is happening.
Fasano:
Where are you making investments that are technology and health care related today?
Walker:
TEDMED itself represents a major investment and we’re investing in more ways to serve our community, with support from generous sponsors and partners. For example, this year TEDMEDLive expanded the simulcast of our Washington, DC conference stage program to 50,000 people in 87 countries and the U.S. We’re also investing significant time and resources in several concepts and ventures that we believe will leverage technology to serve public health in innovative ways. But it’s a bit premature to go into detail at this point.
Fasano:
When you think about the future of health care, what comes to your mind?
Walker:
I think about the fact that the consumer is just arriving at the party in a serious way for the first time and that, no matter what health professionals or policymakers expect or want, in a free market and in a democratic society the consumer is going to drive the direction of health and medicine.
I think about the fact that new technology and wearable biosensors are going to connect all of us to the network. When the day comes that every organ has its own IP address and is providing real time feedback to our doctors 24/7, our behavior will change and how we interact with the health care system, our environment, our food, our employer and our health insurance will change. Radically.
I think about the fact that there are unlimited opportunities for business acumen and imagination to be applied to create products, services and businesses that not only make healthy revenues, but that also make America healthier in the process. And, I believe business has a social obligation to make this happen. Prevention, for example, should be a trillion-dollar industry in this country. And someday it will be, hopefully sooner rather than later.
So there is a revolution coming in health and in health care, a very positive and constructive revolution; and for all the change we’ve seen in the past decade, this is only the beginning. Hang on because it’s going to be an incredible rocket ride.
You can see a virtual tour of the Walker Library of Human Imagination here.
Q&A with New AHA Chair, Benjamin K. Chu, MD
Recently, Benjamin K. Chu, MD, MPH, MACP, group president for Kaiser Permanente Southern California and Kaiser Permanente Hawaii, spoke at his investiture as chair of the American Hospital Association. The AHA represents America’s hospitals and health systems, and Dr. Chu is leading the organization at a key time for the health sector.
Dr. Chu was kind enough to talk with us about his new role with the AHA, what the organization is focusing on with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and the changing nature of patient-centered care and the patient/health care team dynamic.
CTH Blog:
Congratulations on your chairmanship with the AHA. What will this new role within the organization mean for you?
Benjamin Chu:
The American Hospital Association represents about 5,000 hospitals across the country, and it’s governed by a 27-member board. One of the important tasks is advocacy — largely on the federal level – both in congress and among the federal agencies that have bearing on health policy.
But I think much more important from Kaiser Permanente’s point of view is that the American Hospital Association has been moving toward shaping care transformation across the country. For about the last half-dozen years, the AHA has focused on an effort called, “Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence,” which tries to bring together different ideas on quality improvement and innovation and then leverage that learning across the industry.
Last year, I was involved in the committee on research reports that focused on patient and family engagement. I was happy to be part of this effort, because one of the most important pieces of Kaiser Permanente’s Total Health agenda is much more than taking care of people during their episodes of illness; it’s trying to put into place all of the environmental changes and influences that could help people make healthier choices in their lives.
CTH Blog:
You are taking the reins at a key time in the history of health care with the implementation of the ACA. What do you anticipate the organization will focus on under your leadership? Read the rest of this entry
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