Kate Land, M.D.

UCSF Receives CDC Grant as one of 10 National Regional Centers for Public Health Preparedness and Response UCSF has received a five-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control as one of 10 regional centers for Public Health Preparedness and Response (PHPR), an effort to ensure the country is ready to meet any future health threats, from pandemics to extreme weather events. Public health emergencies such as COVID-19, hurricanes and extreme heat have underscored the critical need for a more robust and resilient U.S. public health system, the CDC said. UCSF received the grant as the lead institution for the newly established Region 9 Pacific Southwest Center for Emergency Public Health, which covers California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and Pacific territories controlled by the U.S. “The Regional Centers will play a vital role in advancing the development and implementation of evidence-based strategies and interventions across communities, enhancing their ability to prepare for and respond to public health threats,” Lisa C. Barrios, DrPH, director of the Division of Readiness and Response Science at the CDC, said in a letter announcing the grants. Read full article at https://lnkd.in/gQczUGhi

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UCSF Health’s new web-based self-scheduling system is a game-changer for patients with cancer. This innovation allows patients to book appointments with cancer specialists or intake navigators within days, improving access and streamlining the care process. By placing control in the hands of patients, UCSF Health has significantly improved the patient experience and increased patient volume. Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/eRwR5rX6?

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DHCS’ Chief Quality & Medical Officer and Deputy Director of Quality and Population Health Management, Palav Babaria, contributed to a new report on primary care's role in advancing health equity in California. The report provides 10 actionable recommendations to strengthen primary care and advance health equity in California. The link between primary care access and improved health outcomes is undeniable. We have a roadmap for change, from involving communities in policymaking to expanding pipeline programs for underrepresented groups. Now’s the time for positive change. Read more: https://ow.ly/y5fB50TgL8a #HealthEquity #PrimaryCare #CaliforniaHealthCare

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Amit Sachdeva, MD, and team: Ratnabhushan Mutyala, MD, Neha Mantri, MD, Shiyun Zhu, MPH, Edward McNulty, MD, and Matthew Solomon, MD, were funded by Kaiser Permanente Northern California Community Health and collaborated with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research to answer this important public health question.  Article: https://lnkd.in/gr8dEWkD Citation: Sachdeva A, Mutyala R, Mantri N, Zhu S, McNulty E, Solomon M. P2Y12 Inhibitors in Acute Coronary Syndromes: A Real-World, Community-Based Comparison of Ischemic and Bleeding Outcomes. J Interv Cardiol. 2023 May 20;2023:1147352. doi: 10.1155/2023/1147352. PMID: 37251366; PMCID: PMC10224789.

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I'll be honest, I'm a little reluctant to share our inaugural Threshold Health blog post. 😬 We don't highlight AI even once! Instead, we share some of the easiest ways healthcare orgs can immediately and rapidly level-up patient engagement. Front and center is the idea that there is no such thing as a silver bullet for engaging populations. Ultimately, the winning strategy (and the winningest at-risk organizations) are going to leverage modern platforms to rapidly learn about their populations and iterate, iterate, iterate. Luckily, with our platform, we're helping operators start with optimized templates and making iteration easy and rapid. And of course, AI is a means to that end. But it's not what we're highlighting to our partners. Check it out below, and keep an eye out for a couple more announcements this week! https://lnkd.in/gifpf3ce

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ICYMI: At #ACC24, we spoke with Ankeet S. Bhatt, MD, MBA, of Kaiser Permanente, about an analysis of patients with prior myocardial infarction in the NUDGE FLU trial and the potential of electronic nudges in improving health care. https://lnkd.in/eFwFuvGm #Cardiology

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In the #340B Spin Room Predictably, covered entities and their advocates are in full spin mode following the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSAgov), HHS, announcement that the program expanded by an astonishing 24% last year. The spin room’s spin doesn’t seem particularly convincing to me, but, more to the point, it ignores the patient. Here’s the spin as catalogued in a (very interesting) article by William Newton at the 340B Report, citing an impressive array of covered entity #advocates: 1) “The growth in total 340B purchases last year was largely a result of drugmaker #price increases….”; “Exploding drug price increases” are the primary reason for the program growth. I think not. As IQVIA has reported, “[o]verall spending growth in the U.S. market for #medicines slowed to 2.5% in 2023”. The 24% increase in 340B is almost 10x that rate of growth. Indeed, the article concedes a fundamental point that should have DECREASED 340B sales, measured, as HRSA did, based on dollars. As the article notes, quoting an advocate, “a new provision of the #InflationReductionAct“, which was implemented in 2023, “began penalizing #drugmakers for raising prices faster than #inflation, leading manufacturers to SLOW the rate of price increases….”. 2) The #HRSA report, another advocate says, “did not offer a side-by-side comparison to the non-340B prescription drug market”. Sorry. Nope. See above. The increase in the total market, inclusive of both non-340B and 340B, was 2.5%, while 340B increased 24%. 3) “Broader #healthcare trends” are “increasingly shift[ing]” care “from inpatient to outpatient settings”, and 340B is an outpatient only program. Well, sorry, that doesn’t really explain last year. Though it’s certainly true that, over the last 20 years, #inpatient services have declined and outpatient services have increased, #outpatient visits per 1000 people increased ONLY 0.3% from 2022 to 2023. But, for me, all of the sturm und drang over expansion isn’t even the be all and the end all of the debate; the patient is. And that’s where the spin really falls short. There’s no assertion in the spin room that assistance to patients at the #pharmacy counter has increased by 24%—or anything approaching that. Indeed, when IQVIA looked in 2022 at #patient assistance at contract #pharmacies, it found that a meager 1.4% of those patients received #assistance. Nor is there any suggestion in the spin room that charity care increased 24%. In fact, charity care percentages are moving COUNTER to 340B expansion. According to the Pioneer Institute, 340B hospital charity care ratios FELL by 46% from 2013 to 2022, with just 2.28% of operating expenses devoted to charity care in 2022. The spin just isn’t convincing. #lifesciences #drugpricing #patientsfirst #medicaldebt #affordability #Medicare #Medicaid #copays #coinsurance #costsharing #insurance

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The newly updated Parent and Caregiver Handbook for Sickle Cell is a comprehensive 160-page guide that was refined based on feedback from community organizations through focus groups conducted across various states. This resource is the product of collaboration between UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland Sickle Cell Center, the California Department of Health's Genetic Disease Screening Program and the Sickle Cell Disease Foundation. Learn more: https://buff.ly/3ZZNbtN

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An excellent and very thought-provoking podcast interview with Ronald Amodeo, our Chief Strategy Officer at UC Davis Health. He talks about growth and the natural progression of organizations and how leadership and teams can find ways to successfully innovate. For example, he describes “fitness landscapes,” which refer to adaptive landscapes (types of evolutionary landscapes) where resources are moved to areas where optimization can occur. Change in strategic ways. Much more below:   https://lnkd.in/g3KYAXE6

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Had the privilege of chatting with Trilliant Health’s Dr. Sanjula Jain for the most recent #HealthcareStrategiesPodcast about the current parameters of the narrowing telehealth market. As always, Dr. Jain follows the data, which shows that telehealth demand is slowing amid an enduring preference for in-person care. This means that stakeholders must adjust their strategy to align with the realistic market opportunity for telehealth tools and care models. “I think that it's really hard for the industry to grapple with facts sometimes,” she said. “I think we have this idea of hope. Hope is not a strategy. We think something should be X, and it makes sense. But the data, for all the reasons we've already talked about, doesn't support that.” Here is the podcast: https://lnkd.in/gttauZqt And the accompanying article: https://lnkd.in/gWbcu6BS

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I’m excited to share what we've been obsessing over for the last six months! Introducing Threshold Health, a unique patient engagement platform that puts healthcare operators in the driver's seat of modern care gap closure campaigns. Shockingly, only 1 in 20 US adults is up to date on their recommended preventive care, such as cancer screenings or blood pressure testing. This statistic is paradoxically low, especially given the increasingly direct financial incentives tied to increasing population-level care quality. When my longtime friend and now cofounder, Dr. Doug Murad, and I started exploring why patient engagement is so low, we quickly discovered a recurring pattern. Time and again, we heard from passionate operators across diverse healthcare organizations who struggled to mount effective patient engagement campaigns, often waiting until the last few months of the contract year to close important care gaps in their patient populations. In almost every case, these operators seemed to be building campaigns from scratch, deploying blunt tools like bulk SMS, physical gift cards, and manual call centers, and relying on lagging indicators of success. Unsurprisingly, these efforts were operationally expensive and often fell short of their targets. Dr. Doug and I aim to empower healthcare operators level up their patient engagement with campaigns that are cheaper, better, and faster than building something themselves. To do this, we’re building a self-serve platform that makes it easy for operators to rapidly launch and iterate on modern campaigns that integrate well with their existing care coordination workflows. If we’re successful in this first step, we will have a vehicle to deliver an increasingly sophisticated library of campaign templates and next-generation patient engagement technology. So far, we’ve developed a prototype that allows operators to go from zero integration to a modern deployed campaign in fewer than 10 clicks. We’re excited to run our first pilot in mid-July and continue developing the product with 2-3 launch partners through the rest of this year. There's a lot left to learn -- I plan to post regular updates and lessons here. Reaching this level of conviction took a lot of time—not just from me and Dr. Doug, but from numerous experts across various fields who have been extremely generous in sharing their expertise and feedback. I especially want to thank our network of advisors: Daniel Croymans, MD, MBA, Benjamin (Benny) Axt, Indira Gowda, Ivo Vlaev, Suruchi Kothari, MD, Melissa G., Christian Spier and many others; our investors Jane Wang and Saumitra Thakur at MedMountain Ventures; and our first full-time employee Joe Bonneau. Also, shout-out to Shirley Mao and rvnway for designing and building our new website: https://threshold.health With all that said, we’re open for business! Let’s chat :)

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🚨The First Togather Member spots are officially LIVE! Learn how to grab one of the 50% off First 100 slots by going to the **new** Togather site. The link is in the comments. Bootstrapping our way to creating and opening up the first-ever collective care platform for healthcare providers could not have been done without the incredible and dedicated Founding Member team (now 13 strong!). And while I #buildinpublic I have a bit of honesty for you. Creating this new website for our community has been A LOT of work (on top of the App development work!). Shout out to Jeremy Denton for donating his web development expertise. Even having an expert so ready and willing to help, having to research what it takes to make an impactful and accessible website was more than I bargained for. There is a reason there are whole teams of copywriters, graphic designers, UX/UI, front-end developers, and many more. (IMO they should all get raises.) But it was worth it because it pushed me to reach out to my community and ask for support. At Togather we talk a lot about growth edges. Mine showed up around perfectionism and asking for help. Thank you to my community for helping me expand that growth edge through this project. I am SO proud of the new website and its ability to convey the important message of Togather: #collectivecare. -- 🔔 Follow me as I build Togather openly, honestly, authentically, and with all the failings, learnings, and successes that go along with doing something new. 👩🏽‍⚕️ If you're a healthcare provider looking for community, education, support, connection, and guidance on the journey to a more equitable healthcare system-- then JOIN US! Because you can't build a better world if you're burnt out. #community #startups #healthequity #entrepreneur #healthcareonlinkedin #nursesonlinkedin 💪🏿💪🏾💪🏽💪🏻 Founding team: Rinki Varindani Desai, Audrey Rose, Catherine Putko, NP-c, Kay Nikiforova, Sunni Jones-Ford, LCSW, Dr. Vignette Ching, Erica Livingston, Rita Molestina, Runjhun Pandit, LPCC, LPC, Faisa Ali, MPH, Jess Romeo, Patrice Minor, Jessica Grant-Domond

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My one and only co-founder Jan Jannink on the tailwinds of AI! in addition to the technical unlock, the business tailwinds in healthcare create the perfect storm. Imagine the upside when the following trends happen at the same time: - LLM capability unlock - Shrinking margins in HC administration - Consolidation motion in HC verticals - Healthcare tech skipping the SaaS revolution The opportunity is unprecedented, the opportunity is now. Synthpop - Healthcare AI

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“Can I ask about acne medication at my annual exam??”🧼 This question was recently asked by a PHYSICIAN 👨🏽‍⚕️in a social media group. Why does this bother me so much? 😠 Because it illustrates how the intervention of insurance harms the doctor-patient relationship. Generally if you “step outside” of the covered benefits of your annual preventive exam, you can get hit with a surprise bill! 🧾 The problem is what is “covered” during your annual changes depending on the person, gender, age & risk factors. It’s not standard for every patient. So who knows what’s covered?? Additionally, any added fees and the amount is not disclosed upfront. So rather than speak up about their concerns, many patients self-silence to avoid breaking the rules and avoid additional fees.🤐 This foolishness doesn’t exist in #DirectPrimaryCare. ================================ If you find this content valuable, then you’ll LOVE the Building DPC newsletter!! Subscribe Today! https://lnkd.in/eQTYkR-n

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Check out this guide with straightforward examples to make Medicaid documents and forms easier to understand!

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