Josh Bowen

Mango Health: A Mobile App For Rewarding People Who Stay On Track With Prescription Drugs | TechCrunch →

smarterplanet:

Adherence to prescription drugs and supplements is a problem that not only puts the long-term health of millions of patients at risk. It’s a problem that may add an extra $100 to 300 billion in health care costs in the U.S. alone.

Enter Mango Health, a startup that’s adapting some of the triggers and rewards from the social gaming industry to the complex world of health care. The startup is bringing an app into beta today that helps patients stay on track with their prescription medications and supplements. Mango Health has raised nearly $1.5 million from a stellar cast of investors including First Round Capital, Baseline’s Steve Anderson, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Square’s chief operating officer Keith Rabois.

“People have a really hard time staying true to their treatment programs,” said co-founder Jason Oberfest, who is a former vice president at Ngmoco, the mobile gaming network that Japan’s DeNA acquired for up to $403 million in 2010. “The more we looked into it, we realized that many of the most common diseases that people have are ones where the consequences of the diseases are the most deferred. So can we use what we’ve learned about gaming to actually change behavior?”

The app includes daily reminders to take drugs at different points. Patients can self-report that they’ve stayed on schedule by taking photos of their drug containers. The more they stay on track, the more rewards they get. Mango Health is working with a number of unnamed brands right now to offer users rewards like magazine subscriptions, discounts on groceries and gift cards.

AdhereTech is addressing a portion of Mango’s market.

‘Smarter’ Software to Power Minnesota Health Insurance Exchange →

smarterplanet:

Minnesota’s health insurance exchange will be data-driven. As a subcontractor to Maximus, IBM will support the two-year, $41 million project with its Cúram software platform, the company announced Monday, July 23. “This contract is a significant milestone in the design and development of a Minnesota health insurance exchange,” Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said in a press release. “We can now move forward on developing the technology backbone of the exchange, a user friendly tool that will help more than 1.2 million Minnesotans choose the quality coverage they need at a price they can afford.” The website, which is expected to launch fall 2013, will help people and businesses in the state choose a health insurance plan, similar to how Expedia or Travelocity help people find plane tickets. The software developer, called Cúram, was acquired by IBM in 2011 and is now used in more than 80 government agency projects internationally, according to IBM.

Performance. Feedback. Revision.

Avoid assumptions. Question everything. Test everything.

In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future →

Company already chasing this —> http://www.n-of-one.com/

“While no one can say that Dr. Wartman is cured, after facing certain death last fall, he is alive and doing well. Dr. Wartman is a pioneer in a new approach to stopping cancer. What is important, medical researchers say, is the genes that drive a cancer, not the tissue or organ — liver or brain, bone marrow, blood or colon — where the cancer originates.

One woman’s breast cancer may have different genetic drivers from another woman’s and, in fact, may have more in common with prostate cancer in a man or another patient’s lung cancer.

Under this new approach, researchers expect that treatment will be tailored to an individual tumor’s mutations, with drugs, eventually, that hit several key aberrant genes at once. The cocktails of medicines would be analogous to H.I.V. treatment, which uses several different drugs at once to strike the virus in a number of critical areas.

Researchers differ about how soon the method, known as whole genome sequencing, will be generally available and paid for by insurance — estimates range from a few years to a decade or so. But they believe that it has enormous promise, though it has not yet cured anyone.”

I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

— Excellent article on adults being busy vs. being tired.

(Source: The New York Times)

Get after it.

The single best thing you can do for your health, no matter what health condition you might have? #exercise

(Source: whitecoatwanderlust)

It’s an odd fact that our capitalist system—our brutal, unsentimental, Darwinian, sink-or-swim system—relies almost entirely on its protaganists’ ethical behavior to function. Our entire economy relies on trust. You probably don’t think about this much. Most people don’t think about it at all.

— http://reactionwheel.blogspot.com/2012/06/great-riches-and-low-theft.html?m=1

One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally. But listen hard to what’s going on and — please, I beg you — take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.

— Nora Ephron, ‘96 Wellesley commencement address (via, via)

In business and in life - take it personally. That’s being the most genuine you available 24/7

“One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally. But listen hard to what’s going on and — please, I beg you — take it personally.”

giantrobotlasers:

Caine’s Arcade: 5 lessons for entrepreneurs

Caine can do anything. Love this kid.