LSQHA Blog Reviews

It's a sunny afternoon in San Francisco and health care is in the air. I'm sitting at the the Peet's in the SF Ferry Building eating a vegan ginger cookie and waiting for Matthew Holt, founder of The Health Care Blog and the leader of Health 2.0 conference to show up for an interview. He arrives wearing shorts and a Health 2.0 t-shirt, and has his dog with him. He tells me he jogged to our location on the bay from Health 2.0 headquarters seven minutes away. It's a beautiful day - and here in the United States, the health care reform bill just passed. ReadWriteWeb's founder and leader, Richard MacManus, joins us, and we dive into a conversation on the revolution underway in cloud, mobile, and social health tools. By the end of the day, we were left with one question: Will health care reform build a health Internet, or will entrepreneurs do it because they can? Sponsor A Brief History One nice thing about profiling the thoughts of bloggers is that they leave a trail to track them down. Here are a few of Holt's social and technology posts on The HealthCareBlog : A new campaign against childhood obesity Aneesh Chopra on txting in Haiti PatientsLikeMe buys ReliefInSite Here are a few of MacManus' posts at ReadWriteWeb that track to health care: McKinsey: Get Ready For Sensor-Driven Business Models iPhone Apps For The Masses: Health & Fitness Health 2.0 Through the Eyes of a Diabetic - One Year Later Health Care Reform is like Ice Skating in San Francisco A phenomenon I see every year in San Francisco in December is the setup of the ice-skating rink. Palm trees and skaters. For children and adults alike, it's a way dream about a past and present, whether real or fiction. And, yet, while good for humanity, something about it doesn't quite hold the spirit of the pristine pond and cabin by the lake. We know, even though the ice is icy, generators are pumping along the edges. It's not quite pristine, and it's not quite ours. That's how health care reform feels - a victory indeed - but for some reason not a personal win. Somehow, reform feels artificial and hard to grasp. A small part inside of me wants to scream out, "is there an app for that"? Is it One Big Health Cloud? To get the conversation started, I asked Holt and Macmanus, "What is your take on cloud computing for healthcare?" Holt asked in return, with a grin, "What exactly is the cloud? Is it a thing, or is it a collection of services that are connected together?" We discussed this question in practical terms Holt : "Here's a question: Will Salesforce's cloud be merged with other organizations' contacts, and will we have shared controls? Is that the difference between cloud computing and SAAS?" We came back to our business, blogging. Blog software like Moveable Type (RWW) and WordPress (The Health Care Blog) generate common feeds in simple formats (RSS) that can be used and mashed up in all sorts of ways. But, that doesn't mean that MT and WordPress themselves are hot swappable, as there are controls, widgets, and other tools that are optimized in the application layer. Perhaps, in this way, EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems can be thought of as a blogs, where people are the categories, and events are the posts. If so, what is needed for health care information exchange is a basic feed for key members of the exchange: doctors, patients, pharmacies that connects new systems on top of it. For health care exchange, connecting patients is so much more than connecting infrastructure, platforms or software. Like all good software, it's about finding the shortcut. We should endeavor to find, build, and monetize the simplest exchange that will drive the future generations of meaningful interoperability. As we spoke, a light turned on. Is Health Part of the Internet of Things? Macmanus : "Health devices are one of my favorite use cases for the Internet of Things. Let's take the example of a blood pressure monitor. It's a portable device that augments your life and well being, and the promise of connecting to other things and streams is real". Holt : " ...and look at these devices closer - we see they are intelligent, self adjusting, and include feedback loops and reminders. Thse devices are starting to connect to the Internet and to people." "And what about the Wii," he continued. "The Mii is already virtual me, and the WiiFit is compelling and network enabled". All of us noted that Nike's work in this area is inspiring - from ease of use to business model implications, there is something great going on with the Nike + sensor and the company's broader ambitions. We realized that technology has already started a revolution in health - and it's getting traction. Macmanus : "I'm fresh from SXSW and have location on my mind. We heard that FourSquare is at work on a next-generation feature on websites, where checking in will connect virtual and real worlds. Also, with innovations like self-tagging StickyBits and Microsoft Tag floating around, real-world augmentation is starting to take form and connect with the Internet world." Holt : "UPC tag scanners, such as mobile phone bar code readers like ScanAvert connect real world things to facts about them, such as ingredient and nutrition information." We were reminded of the Quantified Self movement. This is a meetup that has growing momentum in the SF Bay Area and around the country. It is a place where self-reporters get together and share war stories. Organized by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, it combines what's on the cutting edge and our overwhelming fascination of creating a digital diary through logging data about oneself. And, best of all, the meetings focus on "What did you learn about yourself," which focuses the meetup on us, not just technologies or business models. We learn that our motivations matter. Let's Run it All on Amazon and Get Scale The tools are ready, entrepreneurs are on board, and we all believe that the cloud is here. But, what about the data? That is a tougher question, and a familiar storyline of permissions, identity, matching, EDI, XML - it's enough to make you sick considering all of the potential work to align it all. In the spirit of the shortcut, the three of us came up with an idea: What if instead of connecting all of the hospitals, instead we connected every person in the U.S.? What if we would each have a server in the cloud, tuned to receive and share our own health transactions? This health server on the network would run software to receive files, add streams and connect devices under our direct control. The three of us did a bit of back of napkin work and believe that we could outsource the entire thing to Amazon for about US $1 billion yearly. This would cover server fees and data access for every American to have their own instance of server optimized for transmitting health information Here's our math: 300 million people [multiplied by base fee of $30.00 per year multiplied by the .1 concurrent utilization rate. Build a cloud architecture that reduces the cost by 10 times by leveraging computing systems that spin up on demand and therefore dramatically reduce physical costs. We think this type of math, however crude (and perhaps wrong), is worth thinking about as we spin up the servers for health care reform. We're Convinced: People Eat, Sleep, Pirouette, Take Pills By the end of our conversation, Macmanus, Holt and I were left with an invigorating idea about the new health care reform: It isn't a thing, it's a moment in time. Innovations for health care are already springing out of the Web and will thrive on their own merits, so the job of health care reform technology should be to instigate this innovation, stat. What would you do if offered a fixed bid contract for $1 billion annually to build a new health cloud for America? Who would you bring along to get the work done? Photo credit: abhijittembhekar Discuss

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Healthcare Reform is a Cloud: Interview with Matthew Holt & Richard MacManus

From knowing who to hire next, to ethical and legal concerns, to how to interview the best candidates, to how to evaluate them once they're hired - startups have their work cut out for them when it comes to hiring. If you can afford to hire a trained professional, someone who's skilled in evaluative testing, do so. But if not, you need to learn as much as you can about how to hire the right people. Here's our contribution to your endeavor. Sponsor How Does a Startup Know Who to Hire Next? First it must be said that each startup has different needs. But in general, a startup that's still in pursuit of funding requires a sales-oriented team, whereas a startup with funding sources that have begun to stabilize can focus its team on more specific objectives. In general, Anthony Cerminaro of AllBusiness says that the classic hiring stage starts with hiring someone to build a prototype. Then a manger is hired to turn the prototype into a product. Then a business manager is hired to coordinate business opportunities for the product. Then a lawyer is hired. Finally, someone is hired to focus on overall business development. What Kind of People Are You Looking For? To find the answer to that question, you need to understand the work ethic of each generation. Yesterday Ypulse interviewed the president of LifeCourse, Neil Howe. With a background in history, demographics and economics, Howe offer this advice: "If you want visionary leadership, if you need to redefine your corporate culture, go to your Boomers. If you need to apply incentives in a creative out-of-the-box way, if you need that cost-cutting, reality shock therapy done to your department, get your X'ers to do it. But if you want a group of people to come together in a team and to design a system and a protocol to get everything working effectively in an organized fashion, if you want to improve the morale of the group, get your Millennials to do it." Ethical and Legal Requirements Laws protect us from discrimination based on age, race, gender, religious and political beliefs. These laws are not as easy to follow as you might think. But some of the most common hiring advice given to startups is to treat your job candidates with respect. As blogger Rands in Repose says : "...a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You're not striving to be everyone's pal; that's not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other's reliability, truth, ability, and strengths." Finding this on a resume and from references, and from face-to-face meetings is not easy. The atmosphere around you is critical. Essential Ingredients of a Successful Interview TechStartups suggests that the ultimate disrespect is to interview someone in public. A quiet office or home is an essential atmosphere to put your potential new star employee at ease. If you are using a computer during the interview don't peer out at them from behind it. Set the interview space up so you can easily look at the screen together. Don't surprise them with a room full of partners staring them down. If they'll be meeting other partners let them know ahead of time who these people are and how they can learn more about them prior to the interview. Do your homework on how to interview. This means no generalized questions, no storytelling or memorized presentations about what your company does. Get detailed and specific right away. Demonstrate to them the type of professional rapport you'll be expecting in the workplace. Who's Best and How Do You Get Them Started? Have you ever been told by someone that they don't like the business side but they love the work they do? Don't hire those people! People who are enthusiastic about the business side are far more cognizant of how teamwork and problem solving affects the bottom line. An additional quality is someone called a "Driver." Online product marketing guru Eben Pagan explains how a Driver doesn't slack off on their work if their boss is too busy to give them a crucial answer. The Driver keeps pursuing the boss rather than using the lack of response as an excuse to slack off. As Pagan explains in the video below, if you want to know if you hired a Driver give them their first task, tell them who to work with and then let them get the work done with as little supervision as possible. At the end of each day ask them to take five minutes to send you a very brief email describing how their day went. And again, don't supervise them or send them in-depth guidance in a reply - just take a step back and see how they respond to the real world. Pagan explains that shifting from high expectations to neutral will reveal if you have a real Driver. In the long run, no one is served by keeping an employee around who can't relate to the drive for success that you are putting into your startup. Do you have more hiring tips. Or do you have horror stories about hiring or being hired by a startup? Let us know in the comments. Image from Wiki Commons . Discuss

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5 Hiring Tips for Startups

What is the effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems on cloud computing? Well, there have been quite a few if you look at where Sun's best and brightest have moved on to in the past few months. Tim Bray is the latest Sun star to move on. You may know Bray as the co-founder of XML. Eve Maler is also a co-founder of XML. She had worked with Bray for many years until her departure from Sun last Spring to join PayPal. Eve as many of you many know, is one of the leaders in developing identity standards and initiatives. Sponsor Perhaps the clearest example is evident at Rackspace where five developers from Sun were recently hired to work on Drizzle, a heavy duty system for high scaling applications in the cloud: When it's ready, Drizzle will be a modular system that's aware of the infrastructure around it. It does, and will run well in hardware rich multi-core environments with design focused on maximum concurrency and performance. No attempt will be made to support 32-bit systems, obscure data types, language encodings or collations. The full power of C++ will be leveraged, and the system internals will be simple and easy to maintain. The system and its protocol are designed to be both scalable and high performance. According to Rackspace, the service will "keep the good and remove the bad," from MySQL. And here is where we see the power of open-source. We interviewed Bray today. He pointed out that open-source is developed outside the walls of the company. So, in the midst of corporate upheaval, developers can move onto new places and not face any interruption in their work. That's exactly what we see with the Drizzle team: It feels like Oracle has lost a huge opportunity in the open-source community. The lucky ones are the companies that are picking up these talented people with faith that the open-source way represents the future of cloud computing. Discuss

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The Oracle Effect: Sun's Best and Brightest Move On to New Places

Google Analytics offers site owners an easy and free way to gather highly detailed analytics about their websites' visitors. A lot of people, however, don't feel comfortable with the idea that Google can track their every move on the Internet. After all, even if you don't use any Google product yourself, you will still send personal data about yourself to Google through programs like Google Analytics. According to an announcement the Google Analytics team just posted on its blog, you will soon have the option to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Sponsor How Will This Work? It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a "global browser based plugin." This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don't know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google's best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail. Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks. Will this Make Stats Useless? If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts . What About Other Analytics Tools? It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale , Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well. Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village Discuss

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Google Will Soon Allow You to Opt Out of Google Analytics Tracking

Ten year old local business rating company RateItAll has released a white-label location based mobile social networking platform called DoubleDutch . Events organizers, companies that work with multiple locations and others can work with DoubleDutch to offer their patrons a branded check-in app targeted specifically to their use case. You might say that DoubleDutch is to Foursquare what Ning is to Facebook. I think it's a smart effort to make location based social networking more mainstream. We caught up with CEO Lawrence Coburn at SXSW and found out how the service works. Sponsor DoubleDutch customers get to remove all branding from the apps but their own, they can design custom badges and they can weight their favored geo-location data higher for their app users than data for other locations in a given area. A college could have dorms show up higher on a list of nearby places than bars in an area, for example. Customers also get a tab on the app interface that they can populate with whatever content they choose. Events schedules might be a good fit, I suspect. RateItAll says it has 5 million business reviews in its database. Coburn hopes that local reviews plus mobile geo-location will equal more meaningful context for both sides of that equation. If geolocation is truly useful for people other than just geeks, then offering event-specific geolocation apps sounds like a great strategy. Everyday people may have little interest in checking-in to every place they go during real life, but night time events or lunch at a trade show? That makes a lot of sense. If anything's going to make location sharing and check-ins mainstream, custom apps specifically targeted for keeping in touch with your friends at topical events could be it. In addition to his work on RateItAll and DoubleDutch, Coburn is also co-authoring The Next Web's new sub-blog about location services. You can read a more in-depth interview with him about the service there . Discuss

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DoubleDutch: Build Your Own Check-In App For Your Event, Business or School