I would like to announce our next event, which will take place on October 18th at DesignThinkers Amsterdam.

This event will have a special focus on hospitals and patient experience inside and outside these institutions.

Agenda:

18:30     -   Networking & “Healthy Snacks”

19:00     -   Introductions & OpenZorgData hackathon update (Eugene/Atilla)

19:30     -   Hospitality App, dr. Marlies Schijven

20:00     -   Synappz Medical Apps, Erik van der Zijden

20:30     -   Networking

Our first presenter will be Marlies Schijven, who is a surgeon at the Amsterdam Medical Center and also a recent winner of the “Vodafone Mobiles for Good” prize competition in the “Healthy aging” category. This competition took place at the recent PICNIC Festival right here in Amsterdam.

The Hospitality App, focuses on the experience inside the hospital and allows an elderly person to be accompanied by a medical student assistant to, and during a consultation with a doctor. The patient then has a less stressful walk through the hospital, is able to follow the consultation better, and may ask questions about the provided information afterwards.

We will also hear form Erik van der Zijden from Synnappz Medical Apps, whose flagship product is an app that helps patients track, record and report their bladder trends. While a very niche product, there is an amazing need need to bring continuous real time feedback and improve the current paper-and-pen method in order to improve patient experience and therefore improve patient health.

We will close with an update of the OpenZorgData hackathon that is taking place in Rotterdam, this Saturday October 13th, where Ministry of Health will be opening up additional data sets for our community to come up with entrepreneurial ideas to improve our healthcare system. See more information on my blog

Looking forward to continue building a strong Health 2.0 community here in Amsterdam, and as always please continue to provide feedback. Best place to reach me is on Twitter

Since this is a FREE event and the space is limited, please only RSVP with a yes if you are sure you can make it. You can always reach out to me for last minute changes.

Will I see you there?

This Saturday I had the pleasure of helping organize a hackathon that was put together by the Open State Foundation (HackDeOverheid). The theme was “Open Data, open for business” and took place at a very unique place in Rotterdam - WORM (an institute for avant garde recreation). It was a perfect spot to gather almost 150 people from all disciplines and sponsors/partners ranging from the Hogeschool Rotterdam, TNO, Internet Valley Rotterdam to name a few, but also a contribution from Health 2.0

Open health data is relatively a new initiative within the Open State Foundation with a simple but strong message:

“Open Zorg Data is an initiative to build a community that utilizes open healthcare data, encourages innovation & entrepreneurship, improves transparency in our healthcare system and most importantly turns healthcare into health for out digital citizens”

In the last few weeks, we worked with the Ministry of Health (Ministerie van VWS) to plan out the OpenZorgData Workshop and help inspire the community of developers to use the data for social and entrepreneurial good.

The turn out was great!!  We have more then doubled (2X) the number of attendees to the workshop from the previous workshop that took place in Amsterdam. First up in the morning data pitch session was, Ron Roozendaal (CIO of the Ministry of Health), who took a few minutes to introduce all the stakeholders within the Ministry and the newly opened data sets. His enthusiasm and excitement exuded itself for sure!

Our workshop kicked off at 11:45 with standing room only, but when I asked how many people were hackers planning to use the open health data, only one guy raised his hand (but noted that he had no plans of doing it that day). Here we are: room full of people, Ministry of Health in the room and not one single individual was planning to hack away at the data. We carried on with the presentations where Lany Slobbe, Hans Loonen & Christian Gonzales presented their respective data sets. The workshop presentations finished off with Seth van den Bossche from TNO presenting their open data & Atilla Erdodi showcasing an open API he put on top of the KiesBeter data (opened up back in June of 2012).

This is when I saw a few more young guys on the floor and these were the guys that saved the day for Open Zorg Data. Jan-Willem Manenscijn, Jens de Waard & Rik Nijessen, students from Delft decided to use the data form TNO and combined it with Rotterdam open data from GGD to create a small app that would allow citizens, to look for specific zip code (Rotterdam only for now) and get a rating of the neighborhood based on healthcare, environment, lifestyle and safety scores - all that in just under 6 hours. 

I was honored to be on the judging panel with Geerten Eijkelenboom, Director of Rotterdam Internet Valley, Paul Rutten who is an influential researcher and two others. We had a tough decision to make for the three prizes (1 for Mobility, 1 for Health and 1 for overall business concept). Together we decided not to award a mobility prize given the app did not fully use the data elements, however that same team did win the overall business concept prize (the idea is similar to Blue Book Car Value).

For health, we did decide to award the 500 Euro prize sponsored by Health 2.0 to the one and only team that showcased their innovation in pulling together disparate data sets. But here are some more great news: all three guys also got awarded FREE conference tickets to Health 2.0 Berlin as well as a second 1,750 Euro spot prize form the Rotterdam Internet Valley if they take their concept further.

This is great news for OpenZorgData community to inspire more developers to use health data to create apps. This is also great news for the Ministry of Health, since the next release of the above app, will use the additional data sets already opened to overlay into the overall score (for ex Cost of Illness data).

But most importantly, this is great news for the citizens of Netherlands - the seemingly small but sure steps that the Ministry has taken to show the importance of working with the community to help us, the digital citizens, make better choices when it comes to health!

Once again congratulations to Jan-Willem Manenscijn, Jens de Waard & Rik Nijessen for helping OpenZorgData off the ground!

I look forward to continue growing this young community of innovators!

Are you?

On behalf of the Open State Foundation & HackDeOverheid, I would like to extend a personal invitation to the #openzorgdata workshop which will take place on October 13th in the city of Rotterdam. We would love your participation in this workshop to discuss the future of open health data and come out with actionable next steps to continue growing this community. While health is personal, there is a greater social impact on the future of the relationship between us, the digital citizens and our governments. This socially impacting community of open health data can and will drive innovation, spur entrepreneurship and drive transparency into an industry that is prime for a transformation. Together, we can connect, create and ultimately cure!

This workshop will kickoff at 11:45 and we are honored to have the Ministry of Health present current and new open data sets which will include:

Kosten van Ziekten (Cost of Illnesses) - this is breaking news and was just opened up today, October 1st

BIG-register which provides information on over 400,000 registered caregivers, last updated in August of this year

KiesBeter (Choose Better) - this dataset was opened up in June with the latest update this past August and provides information on hospitals: name, address and contact details, specializations, polyclinics, general services and medical facilities (how about a mobile app?)

Regelhulp - no official announcement on the open data that will be provided so stay tuned. This portal provides content and information on healthcare, welfare, parenting and more. 

Jaarverslagenzorg - no official announcement on the open data yet either but hold your horses - it is coming.. Take a look at the site to imagine what data could be opened up publicly.

This hackathon is also sponsored by Health 2.0 with a prize of €500 for the best prototype app based on the open health data available. If you know great developers, hackers, geeks please spread the word to register but this is obviously not limited to only that audience. We do want practitioners, physicians, nurses, caregivers and all of us, healthcare consumers, to participate in building this community!

For details of the HackDeOverheid Rotterdam hackathon, please visit http://HackDeOverheid.nl 

To sign up for OpenZorgData Workshop, please register at http://bit.ly/QHJeSF

Thank you very much and please spread the word

So what are you waiting for?

1. Open Health Data will get more open. US and UK are certainly leading the pack by opening up significant datasets that not only include annual report data but actual claims data (deidentified of course) to inspire entrepreneurship and innovation in an industry that desperately needs a disruption. (ICG will be publishing a qualitative report on open health data by year end so stay tuned)  My prediction is that other Western countries with pre-existing (pun intended) open health data initiatives will expand their datasets but also put programs in place to nurture this nascent community of brilliant people. Wide spread mobile health adoption will drive developing countries to formulate these initiatives from the start and without a heavy legacy of regulations and platforms that are slowing these initiatives down.
2. mHealth will get healthier - as much as I think mHealth has tremendous and unprecedented benefits, 2013 will be a year of shedding. There are over 13,000 healthcare SmartPhone apps (not fact checked but you get the idea) and growing and consumers are just confused. Physicians will flock to begin prescribing apps that are not just stand-alone silos of data, but can integrate into their workflow and improve patient care and decision making abilities. Patients will look for more then just iTunes reviews to make decisions on selecting these tools via companies like Happtique or mHealth clinical recommendation engines. Qualification of an app as a medical device will get more scrutiny from regulators and hence will start a slide down the supply curve of new apps with actual value & business models - i.e startups will die and consolidation in this space will begin towards a pseudo-equilibrium.
3. Crowdfunding - there are plenty of ideas but each one of them needs people, passion but also pockets to execute. The good thing is that pockets don’t need to be deep these days and so crowdfunding is a perfect way to raise enough social and financial capital to give your idea a try and ensure early adopter market viability. Every idea has a following and so platforms like Medstartr give passionate entrepreneurs a chance and a growth path. And once again it also helps validate the product viability for the next round of acceleration, incubation and ultimately VC fund raising if needed.
4. Health Innovation will also get serious. There certainly has been a tremendous buzz around the topic, with incubators and accelerators launching all over the world like BluePrintHealth, Healthbox, RockHealth, HealthXL and many more. (see a great summary by @Bart & team at HealthStartup.EU) One things is different now: In a very short amount of time large corporations are jumping on the bandwagon and realizing that working with internal teams to innovate just takes too long, so we will see these externally-facing budgets increase substantially in 2013 with more and more corporations starting their own venture capital arms and pumping money into early stage, first and second round investments into viable companies that provide long standing data driven business strategy and enhancing patient care.
5. Healthcare co-creation is already happening at great companies like Kaiser but also non-profit entities like the local Amsterdam WAAG society with their Creative Care  lab which I am hoping to visit early in the year. While good amount of the problems are local, the overall healthcare challenges are global so we will see much more cooperation between the local chapters and organizations driving global problem resolutions via sharing of ideas, protocols and truly embracing the sharing economy of today.

Happy and Healthy New Year to everyone and I am hopeful that 2013 will bring unprecedented wave of sustainable innovation in the global healthcare system. Do you?

Hello Amsterdam Health 2.0 Community,

I am glad to announce our next event at DesignThinkers which will take place on November 27th at 18:30PM. I am very proud of the community we have grown in such a short amount of time, we went from no members to almost 100.

I also wanted to tell everyone that this will be our last event for this year and we will resume again with an exciting agenda in January. All of you should be very proud of yourself for spreading the word, for attending the meetups and contributing to the great and actionable conversations which helps all of us connect, create and cure!

The next event will focus on solutions in the market place that touch over 10% of the population in Holland - Mental Health Disorders. It is certainly a topic that is difficult to talk about. One of our presenters, Valentina Rao was invited to speak at the “unmentionables” panel at the Health 2.0 Berlin that took place last week (more about Valentina below)

Agenda:

18:30     -   Networking & “Healthy Snacks”

19:00     -   Introductions & Health 2.0 Berlin update (Eugene/Atilla)

19:30     -   IPPZ My Therapy, Joris Moolenaar, Co-founder

20:00     -   Blues Buddies Social Network, Valentina Rao, Founder

20:30     -   Networking

Please take note below on some statistics that were put together by the European Commission in a Mental Health Briefing Sheet. The statistics are astounding but there is hope with new tools that us, the entrepreneurs, are building:

• Suicide: According to EUROSTAT standardized suicide rates per 100.000 persons in Netherlands vary from 8.8 to 9.5 for the period from 1995 – 2006.
• Depression/anxiety: A total 12.4% of all the adults in the Netherlands have had an anxiety disorder in the past year and 19.3% have had a mood disorder at some point in their life. More than 700.000 people a year have a depression. Approximately 15% of the elderly people in the Netherlands have clinically relevant depressive symptoms.
• Children’s mental health: Of all the schoolchildren in the11-17 age group, 12% are in the clinical area as regards internalizing problems such as depression, anxiety and loneliness, and 11% for externalizing problems.

Joris & Daan will present myTherapy, which is a online treatment platform for the Mental Healthcare sector in the netherlands. With this platform doctors en patients co-create care, create en deliver treatments. Patients get empowered they receive blended en self-management treatments, share with pears and care tailored to their needs.

Valentina will present Blues Buddies which is a social network that allows people who suffer from mild to moderate depression to find others in the same area through geolocation, and encourages them to engage in positive interaction and mutual healing though its gamified knowledge base and real life meetings.

Currently in alpha, the project aims to offer a prevention tool for more serious depressive conditions, based on different kinds of therapy approaches and scientific research on behavioral change.

Looking forward to seeing everyone to close down the year! Health snacks and maybe something extra will be awaiting?  

RSVP now

Existing datasets

BIG-register which provides information on over 400,000 registered caregivers, last updated in August of this year

KiesBeter (Choose Better) - this dataset was opened up in June with the latest update this past August. We already have an API that was put together by Atilla to access this data via a web service - more to come at the workshop

Kosten van Ziekten (Cost of Illnesses) - This data has been open since October 1st - so go ahead and take it for a ride!

New datasets 

Regelhulp - content is still king, so now you can use Regelhulp and embed it into your site or use the SQL database they provided which has content in it for you to use as is.

Here are some more details on access and the datasets:

• The service can be accessed and viewed via the following hyperlink: 
• Application can be accessed through: Beheer omgeving
• Username: hackathon Password: hackathon2012

Furthermore content has been provided exclusively for the  hackathon (SQL database) of all Regelhulp content items. I uploaded and shared all the associated documentation and css files here

Jaarverslagenzorg - Datasets are now available in Excel and SPSS formats and can be found here

Will you be there to change healthcare into health?

Agenda:

18:30     -   Networking & “Healthy Snacks”

19:00     -   Digifit / Virtuagym, Paul Braam, Co-Founder

19:30     -   Magic Mind, Yosef Safi Harb, Co-Founder

20:00     -   Closing remarks & Discussion

20:30     -   Networking

The company Digifit was founded early 2008 by Paul & Hugo Braam. Digifit develops new applications in the field of health, lifestyle and fitness, using smart technology to support and motivate people to live healthier, more active and happier lives. TheirVirtuaGym platform boasts over 2.5M users and they just recently closed another round of investment which was lead by Sanoma Ventures. Congrats and we are all looking forward to what the two brothers have in store for 2013.

A healthy and fulfilling life comes having a good set of beliefs. These beliefs in turn become your actions and the habits that form your life. Positive psychology teaches those beliefs and has been around for ages, but in the past 30 years it has taken a more structured and methodic approach that has demonstrated more success in creating lasting behavior change. What is very interesting is a lot of these processes are found naturally in a video game experience. The way a game is designed allows you to have an empowered mindset where you: try and try again, find ways to succeed, are focused & committed and are encouraged to set goals to achieve your objectives. Unfortunately, this kind of mindset is not always transferred to the real world. We are investigating how to create a reflection process to the real world, so the game mindset can become your real world mindset by bringing the worlds of “positive psychology” and “video games” together. Yosef Will present their product but more importantly the philosophy of MagicMind

Since space is limited, Kasia and I ask you to only RSVP is you
are interested in the topic and can absolutely attend the event and as always please provide us feedback on the format, speakers, venue - this is your community and the only way we wil make an impact is by communicating openly!

See you all on Jan 17th!

Kasia & Eugene

On September 20th, we had out first Health 2.0 Amsterdam Chapter Event. Unlike the first meetup we had in NYC 4 years ago, with only 4 people in the room, 25 enthusiastic attendees showed up to hear our first brave presenters. NYC is now bustling with healthcare startup activity and we are hoping to do the same in Amsterdam. As always, we opened it up with a networking session for about 30 minutes, and I love to see our members exchanging cards, ideas and exercising the 3xC’s (connect, create, cure). 

Arnold Breukhoven, CEO of Drimpy kicked us off with an overview of Drimpy and the benefits it will bring to both consumers as well as practitioners. Rob Halkes was there to support and took us further into the Drimpy discussion, taking the audience through the problem at hand and how Drimpy is positioned to solve it. Unlike a 7 minute time-slot we gave in New York, we let the two first presenters really spend some time on their products and the Q&A was cut a bit short (we will adjust for the next time). the overall platform looks great and especially with e-visits being reimbursable in Netherlands it has tremendous potential in cost savings. But here are some initial thoughts and constructive criticism of Drimpy (Arnold & Rob this is done form the bottom of my heart : ) 

• As always, patient consent is key to any platform adoption and I would love to see an incentive system for patients to join.
• The platform is currently based on self-reported data. That is a tough nut to crack in people’s busy lives especially with a huge advent of tools in the QuantifiedSelf arena (Fitbit, Withings, Zeo, etc) - Thanks Joost Plattel for coming out!! 
• Given that integration with hospital management systems is also a tough nut to crack, what does the use of the platform do to the practitioner’s workflow and does he or she have enough information (for ex ICD-10-based diagnoses) to even conduct an e-visit.

Rob and Arnold did acknowledge that the biggest question they get asked by the practitioners is “Where is my free time?”, but I am sure the team at Drimpy is hard at work to cover the above. Good luck and keep us posted.

Next up was Roel Lakmaker, CEO of Promedas. We had some technical difficulties with the internet access where Roel wanted to showcase the platform live (sorry Roel!) but he did great with just the slides. Promedas is working on a decision support system for practitioners and their algorithms plus the ability for clinical personel to share and work on diagnoses together brings a powerful platform to life. They also have an API now that allows other platforms to integrate and are considering putting together a consortium around their platform.

Once again, my personal constructive criticism:

• What really differentiates Promedas in the marketplace: is it their intellectual property of  the amassed clinical algorithms or their platform itself with an API?
• While Roel showcased a screen that looked like an integration between a HMS (hospital management system) and their platform, the adoption of that will be key.
• Where does the claims data about the patient actually stored? Is it a realtime engine that passes data into the magic API and returns results?

It is never enough time to go through all the audience questions, so we appreciate the time the presenters gave us and looking forward to many more!

RSVP for the next event that will take place in October.

It’s been a while since I have written a personal blog, but felt that I needed to express myself when I saw the Washington Post piece on Zenefits: 

What the turmoil at Zenefits reveals about Silicon Valley’s big problem with health care

First and foremost, if you haven’t followed the news, Zenefits got hit over the head for not obtaining licenses in individual states to resell insurance. Bad bad bad! I am in no way condoning meeting quotas on growth and bypassing regulations, but I also wanted to put a different perspective on this topic. 

My main question: is it Silicon Valley’s problem with health care or the health care incumbents and regulators problem with Silicon Valley (and beyond)?

Many many entrepreneurs are trying to change health care around the world and given the speed of change in this highly regulated industry the choices are to work within the system (marginal) or outside of the system (disruptive).

Let’s take this apart logically:

Impact to patients?

The health insurance industry in US is complex, complicated and very difficult to navigate for individuals consumers, but in this case for small and medium size businesses partially driven by regulations and small regional / state “oligopolies” (not to mention the recent M&A activities with the big insurers). Zenefits brought to the table an easy(ish) way to navigate, choose and manage employee benefits, but they consciously (or not) decided to work outside of the system. I am curious to understand what was the impact to the ultimate consumer of the brokered services: us the healthcare consumers? My bet is NONE (but do let me know if my hypothesis is flawed). The impact was to the regulators who could not collect the licensing fees, the impact was to other competing brokerages/brokers who most likely lost the transactional fees and invested in the licensing and finally to the insurers themselves since it brought maybe more transparency to the process as well potentially less revenue. 

Free is good enough for me

Whether you are a believer in the FREEmium model or not is irrelevant. In many products, it just simply works. People want to see, feel, get personal & personalized value out of the “service” and only then pay! In order for a company to do this great, service and value are key to drive the conversion rate. 

“The company had previously run into resistance when the state of Utah in 2014 sent a violation letter to the company, alleging that the free software it provided — a key part of its disruptive strategy — amounted to an illegal kickback. “

I will not debate the legalities of this but to me maybe, just maybe the regulations are not keeping up with new business model?

Keep on changing the healthcare consumer experience! 

I want to be very clear here, laws exist for a reason:  - whether they move and adjust quick enough is a whole different discussion. I command Zenefits on quick response and being committed to fixing the issue, but I also want to urge the innovators in this complex healthcare ecosystem to do what is right for the healthcare consumers, patients and their caregivers. Drive with passion, enthusiasm and the ultimate goal of happier and healthier lives for 7B people on this planet!