The next event is February 8, 2012, when Professor Clay Christensen will be discussing his views on how to improve various aspects of healthcare. No registration necessary.

For those of you who will not be in Boston on Feb 8th, the event will be filmed and posted on the Healthcare Initiative website. Please contact the HBS Healthcare Initiative with any questions and to be notified when the video is available.

Limited parking available for $12 (see Visitor & Permit Parking Lot). Attendees are encouraged to arrive early to allow for parking and seating.

Location

Website – www.copatient.com

Description – CoPatient audits and appeals medical bills on behalf of patients. We see a large and growing addressable market as employers continue to shift healthcare costs to their employees and providers continue to struggle to collect on self-pay accounts. However, few tools currently exist to help individuals know if the bills they receive are accurate and fair. This service can be scaled by bringing the experience online and applying a continuously evolving set of business logic and rules (sourced through the broader experience of the community) to guide the process.

Target clients – 1. Middle-class, employed consumers with chronic diseases who are likely underinsured 2. Employer groups who elect to self-insure and structure their healthcare benefits with various cost sharing strategies (co-pays, deductibles, coinsurance

Innovation – Truth be told, this patient advocacy service already exists; however, it is currently delivered in a very fragmented and isolated way, which makes it economically feasible only for patients with very large amounts of medical debt. As we scale the service offering, CoPatient will bring a higher quality service to a wider audience experiencing medical bills by: (1) bringing the experience online to aggregate and share data, (2) enforcing a standard nomenclature across disparate data sets, (3) leveraging electronic transactions with payers and providers, (4) codifying outcomes of audits into business rules and logic, and finally (5) applying best practices when it comes to appealing and negotiating bills. Our unique approach of applying technology, intelligence and consistency to medical bill advocacy will enable us to significantly scale and grow this historically low-margin service business.

CoPatient is seeking . . . We are looking for a technology expert who will be instrumental in building the platform and tools needed to efficiently and effectively audit and appeal medical bills. We are also looking for early adopters of our service – any individual faced with medical bills as well as employer groups looking for innovative ways to more efficiently manage their employee benefits and curb their spend on healthcare. We also love to partner with insurance brokerage agencies who see the value in bringing CoPatient’s audit and appeal services to their employer group clients.

What type of applicants does Blueprint look for? First and foremost, smart, passionate and coachable entrepreneurs!  Especially since this is early stage, it is very much about the people/team, the problem they are trying to solve and surrounding them with the right resources. Beyond that, Blueprint looks for health, healthcare, and wellness companies, typically with an information technology aspect (pharma and devices are not within the investment purview). Examples may include companies that improve communication in hospitals, help people improve their lifestyles, marketing tools for providers and plans, clinical decision support tools, health education, and tools to aggregate and analyze healthcare data to save money or for innovation discovery.

Interested in applying? The deadline to apply for the Winter program is November 13.  For more information and to apply, check out www.BlueprintHealth.org

As a disclosure, Christopher Tsai, Co-Founder of careinnovators, has joined Blueprint Health as a mentor.

For 50% off, use the link below

- Wayne Pan, Health Access Solutions, will talk about HIT, the importance of design, and his West Coast perspective
- Yumin Choi, HLM Ventures, will show examples of improvement in process as well as product design
- Richard Banfield, Fresh Tilled Soil, will host a design educational session
* Unfortunately Sachin Jain will be not able to join us.  In his place, we’ll have a great keynote from investor Yumin Choi and an interactive panel session with the speakers.

Read past the break to learn how to apply!

On November 29, the Mid-West Innovation Exchange Summit will also be piloting for the very first time a “virtual” participant that will communicate with the Innovators using a tablet PC and a real-time remote communication application transported to each Innovator “pod” by an event facilitator. The virtual participant concept was conceived as a way to overcome logistical and scheduling issues for interested organizations as well as to enhance the scalability of the Summit series.

BluePrint Healthcare IT was founded in 2003 to provide security, privacy, compliance and risk management services to hospitals and healthcare systems. Since the enactment of HITECH, BluePrint has aligned its services and products to “accelerate meaningful use and health information exchange,” which now forms its central mission. In 2010 BluePrint launched Meaningful Use and HIE consulting services in addition to HIE Secure and EMR Secure, to expand beyond hospitals into integrated delivery network (IDN), regional, and state health information exchange. Building on its knowledge of hospital information workflows, BluePrint developed software products supporting security, compliance, information systems management and bed management.

The BluePrint Health IT Innovation Exchange Summit Series website provides more information on participation options for each event and its Advisory Board. Interested hospital and health IT consumer organizations looking to participate in the Mid-West or West Coast Summits should contact Mike Squires at mike.squires [at] blueprinthit [dot] com or Pam Kaur at pam.kaur [at] blueprinthit [dot] com. The BluePrint Health IT Innovation Exchange Summit Series is produced in collaboration with HIMSS.

Want a makeover?   Submit your website, HIT product, or mobile app by October 17! Details here.

Why Should I Attend?
Health reform and market forces are driving the creation of new Health IT solutions such as Accountable Care Organizations and Medical Homes.  These innovations need to coordinate care among more users, from clinicians to patients to administrators.  And these applications must work across Desktops, Tablets, Smartphones, and other Remote Monitoring devices.  Meanwhile, users have become more sophisticated and expect improved usability.  Increasingly, market choices on health IT systems are coming down to design and usability.

Appetizers and drinks included – come sample great local craft beers from Blue Hills Brewery!

Who Should Attend?
* Health IT entrepreneurs and companies
* Health IT developers, marketers, and product development leaders
* Industry Consultants
* Investors
* Designers

Tickets 50% off until Sunday, Oct. 16 midnight! Attendance is limited.

Join an interactive discussion on these issues and more during the free webinar, “The New Face of Personalized Medicine: Targeting Disease Diagnostics and Treatments with Big Data Analytics”.  The moderator is Bio-IT World Editor-in-Chief Kevin Davies PhD, the author of The $1,000 Genome: The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine, and will include an exciting panel of three distinguished scientists who are shaping the new face of personalized medicine:

-        Eric Schadt PhD, Chief Scientific Officer Pacific Biosciences; Chairman/Professor of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director, Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York

-        Felix Frueh, PhD, President, Medco Research Institute

-        Colin Hill, CEO and Co-Founder, GNS Healthcare

Send your questions for the panelists ahead of time to personalizedmedicine [at] scratchmm [dot] com or on Twitter use hashtag #pmchat.

Register here for this free event on October 6^th, 2011, 1-2 PM EST.

Missed the event? No problem – you can access the available video and slides here.

Why aren’t all the videos and slides available? A few speakers gave live demos at the event and did not have any slides, while others preferred that their presentations not be available after the event.

Did you attend and want to watch the sessions again? Simply access the content by logging in with the email and EventFizz password created during registration.  If you attended the event but did not register yourself, please reset your password using the email address where you have received Health Tech emails.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions on the event and/or videos? Email us so we can improve for next year!

The keynote speakers for the first event on September 27 will be Dr. Susan Windham-Bannister, President and CEO, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center and Dr. Winston Patrick Kuo, Director of the Harvard Catalyst Laboratory for Innovative Translational Technologies.

Apply to present as part of the Innovation Showcase!  This will be an opportunity for young companies to gain valuable exposure to a multidisciplinary and diverse audience.  If you’re interested, learn more here.

IGNITE is organized by Steven Munevar, President/CEO of Munevar & Associates and Pam Gardner, CEO of Biotech Vendor Services (BVS).

As a supporting organization of IGNITE, careinnovators is able to offer our community a 25% registration discount off the current early bird registration rate through September 5th.  Use the code: IGNITE25 when registering.

Location –

CEO – Sombit Mishra

Description – What the Wii Fit is to the living room, EveryFit is to the smartphone. EveryFit’s patent-pending solution is the first to identify physical activity type for cardio, strength, and posture-based activities (e.g. yoga, Tai Chi), as well as everyday activities from walking up stairs and carrying objects to sitting and sleeping. This rich level of context-awareness gives rise to valuable benchmarking feedback, peer-to-peer support, tips, gaming and rewards to help even the most inactive users make achievable changes in exercise and nutrition. By identifying activities automatically and contextualizing interaction, EveryFit also enables corporate wellness providers and insurers to streamline health incentives. In an 8-week corporate wellness pilot, EveryFit catalyzed immediate, measurable changes in behavior: *Gym utilization of pilot group increased by one day/week, 3x more than that of the control group. *Drove 20% increase in client’s health site traffic, compared to 70% decline for control group.

Target clients – Self-insured employers

Innovation – EveryFit is the only solution that can identify physical activities automatically, which provides a differentiated advantage to contextualize rich, activity-specific content. Furthermore, competing sensor-based solutions focus on the direct-to-consumer channel, where seeding adoption is difficult beyond the small segment of hardcore athletes, gym rats, and technology/gaming enthusiasts. For the other 78% of mainstream users, it is critical to bring costs down while making engagement and compliance more seamless, fun and achievable. EveryFit’s business model and user experience target group settings (e.g. corporate wellness), which share EveryFit’s vision to provide affordable and engaging solutions to consumers.

EveryFit is seeking . . . Customers: large self-insured employers that prioritize wellness at the senior management level; Hiring: Java Developers, Ruby/Groovy/Django Developers, UX Developers; channel partners invested in corporate or personal wellness; Raising Series A investment in Summer 2011.