Our May 19 meeting of Health TechNet focused on technology support for special needs and safety net populations, a subject of growing importance in light of potential changes to the Affordable Care Act and to the Medicare Advantage Program.
Leading the discussion was Bradley Weaver, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Health Services for Children with Special Needs, a Washington DC organization that contracts for some of the District of Columbia’s neediest Medicaid populations. He was joined by several other speakers who further explored the intensive support needs for these special populations, and how technology can help.
We also received an introduction to the topic of Blockchain by Jeremy Epstein. Jeremy is the CEO of Never Stop Marketing, and has 20 years of international marketing experience in helping to bring innovative technologies into the mainstream. Most recently, Jeremy was VP, Marketing at Sprinklr which grew from a $20 million valuation and 30 people to $1.3 billion valuation and 900 people in 3 years. A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, secured from tampering and revision. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block. By design, blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the data — once recorded, the data in a block cannot be altered retroactively. We will explore the use of blockchain in health IT at a future meeting in more detail.
Click here to view Mr. Epstein's presentation.