Smithsonian Channel and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions will team on a new documentary debuting in May that will examine racial health disparities and practices in the United States.

The documentary, The Color of Care, premieres May 1 and chronicles how people of color suffer from systemically substandard healthcare in the United States, and how COVID-19 exposed the tragic consequences of these inequities, according to network officials. Using testimony from those who lost loved ones to COVID-19 and frontline medical workers in overwhelmed hospitals, expert interviews and powerful data, the film exposes the toll of racism that is embedded in our healthcare system, said the network.

“People of color have long endured the fatal consequences of racial health disparities and the COVID-19 pandemic made these inequalities plain for all to see,” Smithsonian Channel Head James Blue said in a statement. “I hope our documentary event, The Color of Care, will be a catalyst for action. I am delighted to partner with Oprah Winfrey and Harpo Productions on this vital project.”

Added Winfrey: “At the height of the pandemic, I read something that stopped me in my tracks …I read a story about Gary Fowler, a Black man that died in his home because no hospital would treat him despite his COVID-19 symptoms. As we continued to hear how the racial disparities in our country were exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic, I felt something needed to be done. This film is my way of doing something, with the intention that the stories we share serve as both a warning and foster a deeper understanding of what changes need to take place to better serve us all.”

The Color of Care will serve as part of a broader effort driven by Smithsonian Channel to move conversation and action around health equity. The film will also prepare future doctors, nurses and medical professionals to play an active role in combating systemic racism in the delivery of healthcare, according to the network. ■   

In the old days, doctors used to make frequent house calls. More recently, these visits have become the exception than the rule, as patients typically went to a treatment facility, such as a doctor’s office or a hospital to seek treatment. The public health emergency has reversed this trend. 

As more people sheltered and resorted to telehealth for treatment, new and improved solutions were introduced and became widely adopted and regulators loosened reimbursement. This sudden adoption of digital treatment modalities opened the innovation floodgates, unleashing digital acceleration on an unprecedented scale and scope across the industry. 

While many of the digital solutions being used to date are not new, the pandemic caused providers, patients, and regulators alike to overcome hurdles and resistance and embrace them because they had no choice. Today, digital health is an exciting and fast-growing industry receiving massive investment and growing attention from investors, vendors, and providers alike; it is expected to grow at a 14.8% rate between 2021 and 2026.

Widely adopted during the early days of the public health emergency, telehealth is an expedient, if imperfect treatment modality. Today, more advanced solutions are being deployed. For example, post-surgical patients are provided with a kit to monitor vitals at home. 

Similarly, patients with chronic illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes are also given an ensemble to monitor their condition at home. These Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) kits are an area that is exploding. In late 2019, the largest US insurer, United Healthcare, bought Vivify, an RPM vendor. 

But an even more exciting trend in healthcare is to bring the hospital to the home. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that patients heal better in their home environment. An industry wide effort is underway to bring care, even acute care, to the patient; Moving Health Home, with membership among major industry stakeholders, is advocating for the right regulatory environment to bring care to the patient, and young companies are developing solutions to enable the home hospital.

One notable vendor at the forefront of this effort, Medically Home has recently raised $110 million in a new funding round, from investors including Cardinal Health; this on top of $100 million the company received in May 2021 from investors including Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente. 

Home health presents a significant high-margin revenue opportunity for telecom service providers and their vendors, particularly as home health services could be paid for by health insurers, or other major healthcare players.

Some telecom service providers have taken notice and have introduced services aimed at enabling home healthcare delivery. One example is AT&T’s Virtual Care solution, an end-to-end, ready-to-use virtual care platform for telehealth, remote patient monitoring, activity tracking, personal emergency response system, and fall detection. 

But the telecom industry can do more to play a meaningful role in this fast-developing market:

These are by no stretch a comprehensive list. Home health is a dynamic and fast-moving area, and one where the telecom industry needs to step up to play a meaningful role. 

This is a relatively new research area for me. Please engage with me on Twitter at @offredo or email me  to explore the implications of this development for your business. ■

To say that healthcare has been turned on its head in the last few months is an understatement. We have seen massive adoption of virtual care on an unprecedented scale as patients shy from receiving in-person care for non-COVID conditions and as regulations around telehealth reimbursements are relaxed. By some measures, telehealth use grew eight times in just a few weeks. 

However, telehealth is only the precursor to a seismic shift in healthcare, with virtual care becoming a major component of care delivery. Virtual care delivery has numerous advantages:

Virtual care requires more than a broadband device for telehealth. Enter Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), which is essentially about the collection, transmission, evaluation, and communication of patient health data from electronic devices. The RPM market is exploding. For example, Philips recently acquired BioTelemetry, a provider of remote cardiac diagnostics and monitoring, for $2.8 billion. Dozens of RPM players are vying for a piece of the market; many provide specialized solutions (for example, Bardy Diagnostics for cardiac monitoring), others broader based monitoring (for example, Current Health). Some use AI for predicting medical events, enabling care providers to deliver pre-emptive care.

The significant premise of RPM brings into sharp focus a number of challenges:

These and other challenges point to the need for a provider that has the capability to provide home-based digital management solutions. Such a provider can take on the complex set-up, the on-going management of these solutions, technical (nonmedical) patient (and provider) support. Longer term, they have the opportunity to play a role as an aggregator that coalesces these often disaggregated solutions to provide a secure, single point of truth repository for patient data (possibly using blockchain).

Cable operators and other telecom providers with their feet on the street assets and with access to patients’ homes are well positioned to play a role in the deployment and management of these solutions and over time could develop advanced capabilities to play an even bigger role in this fast-growing market. Some operators, including Telus, are already playing in the IoMT space, which is projected to grow to $285.5 billion by 2029 from $24.4 billion in 2019, at an estimated CAGR of 28%. 

Television continues to be a dominating force for healthcare and pharmaceutical advertising. But while linear TV is the number one way for advertisers to reach audiences at scale, it lacks broad demo-based spot buying and offers few ways to measure campaign impact.

Simultaneously, viewership is changing. Older audiences are now embracing connected TV (CTV), ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD), and other over-the-top (OTT) options. Also, millennial cord-cutters viewing content on these platforms will increasingly become pharma consumers as they age. With cost-effective, precise, and transparent spot buys, marketers need to change their television advertising approach to gain a competitive advantage.

The Current Landscape

COVID-19 accelerated a shift in television consumption as consumers watched more shows while stuck at home. This massive viewing spike has held steady for months. However, only 7% of U.S. agency and marketing professionals maintained regular ad spending for linear broadcast and cable TV spots during the pandemic. The affected companies need to reallocate budgets thoughtfully as they will not grow their brands successfully unless they plan.

Healthcare marketers specifically should add technologies like CTV and AVOD to their advertising mix. CTV allows budget-conscious consumers to access free, ad-supported channels without a cable subscription. Contextual CTV campaigns offer improved performance, audience targeting, transparency, and visibility because buyers and sellers can vet inventory more closely using real-time attribution.

AVOD, by contrast, is like broadcast television because consumers need to watch commercials. But revenue for this free service rose 31% year-over-year once COVID hit, proving viewers will sit through ads if services cost less (or nothing). Adoption is snowballing, especially since many AVOD services boast libraries that rival subscription platforms.

Pharma brands have historically shied away from these technologies, but now is the time to capitalize on the opportunities they offer. By leveraging intelligent measurement strategies, brands (and the agencies representing them) can understand viewers in new ways, attract new audiences, and improve product awareness and understanding.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

In the past, many ad agencies believed pharma was not ready for primetime, so they did not shift resources to CTV or AVOD because they thought cable sufficed. However, these options offer accurate and consistent ways to measure advertising investment returns. Targeting is also more robust because marketers can analyze metadata, geographic information, and other factors to determine how their ads track with targeted households or adjust ads to be more effective.

One area that needs a long-awaited upgrade is measurement. Traditionally, pharma buyers and planners identified viewers by age or gender and evaluated programs through Nielsen ratings. They considered CTV and AVOD unproven even to consider.

But keeping measurement workflows siloed is like using diaries to track viewership (as Nielsen did in the 1950s). Customers recorded their viewing habits using paper and pencil, and the company compiled statistical models approximating the number of viewers. That approach doesn’t make sense in a digital world with more viewing options than ever.

TV ad buying and measurement now need to be as precise as digital, so healthcare marketers must adopt modern options more rapidly as part of their ad buys. CTV and AVOD are more cost-effective, with lower base rates. They allow pharma brands to avoid fraud, invalid traffic, or bad spending on open exchanges while remaining compliant with privacy laws. By accessing detailed and actionable insights, companies can also manage how often they run spots to ensure they do not over-target or waste money.

Making ad buys more cost-effective and transparent allows brands to measure outcomes more consistently. They can go beyond mere exposures, connecting numbers to real-world first-party data. This approach gives them valuable insights into clinical behaviors employing unified metrics to strengthen campaigns.

As TV continues to dominate in all its forms, pharma marketers need to take advantage of the advanced and connected tools at their disposal. By modernizing approaches and measuring more consistently, campaigns will deliver more impact with better performance.

DeepIntent is a leading healthcare marketing platform company purpose-built to influence positive health outcomes, connecting healthcare companies with patients and providers across every screen through unique data, premium media partnerships, and custom integrations.

Able Channel, a streaming service featuring original programming about consumer healthcare, plans to launch in early 2021.

Founded by Brian McCourt and Paul Goggin, the channel has secured carriage on AppleTV, IOS, Android and Roku devices.

The channel plans a free preview on Veterans Day (Nov. 11), with an original six-part series Surviving Suicide, about former service members who’ve tried to take their own lives.

The Able Channel said it has raised several million dollars from key healthcare investors, and in the process of getting additional funding. Current investors include: Andre Agassi Foundation for Education, Callais Capital, Healthcare Innovation Fund II, LLC, and StartUp Health.

A number of big names are directors and advisors for Able. Former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, exec MGM/United Artists executive VP Alan Cole-Ford and Steve Miller, CEO of Agassi Graf Holding are on the board. Executives from the Cleveland Clinic, the Nevada Health and Bioscience Corp., Anthem and Stanford University’s Longevity Advisory Council are also directors.

USA Network founder Kay Koplovitz is an advisor, along with former Disney VP Oliver de Courson, former Merck VP and chief diversity officer Deborah Dagit and Dan Gasby, CEO of B. Smith Enterprises.

“Consumers need a credible, accurate resource they can rely on to navigate their health needs in a marketplace that is often overwhelming,” said McCourt, who launched internal networks for companies including Novartis, Hard Rock Cafe and Disney.

Co-founder and COO Paul Goggin has spent the past 25 years building scalable media applications for companies including Think Interactive and Free All Media. Chief Content Officer Digger O’Brien spent 25 years at the NFL and NFL Films, including heading entertainment marketing for the league. CFO Keith Eckert was the CFO at digital entertainment subscription service Epix.

Able Channel plans to introduce new original series each quarter. The series will feature real stories focusing on relevant health topics including living well, cancer, the brain, aging, behavioral health, chronic illness and disability.

First quarter 2021 original series include the 20-episode diversity and inclusion series Together We Are ABLE, which profiles everyday people with disabilities who are smashing stereotypes and making a difference in the world, and Good Health Minutes, featuring daily health and wellness news and information in bite-size formats. They will be followed by more original series premieres in spring 2021.

CableLabs this week released a new video that shows how the industry’s wired broadband networks and increased focus on wireless connectivity in the home can play a big role in innovations that will be coming to the world of healthcare and telemedicine.

CableLabs released the video and associated materials, titled The Near Future. A Better Place, in conjunction with the CableLabs Winter Summer Conference in Keystone, Colo. It’s the second in a series in that vein that followed one released last year that focused on cable’s role in the evolution of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The video centers on an 86-year-old man who has become reliant on connected apps and services, including smart medicines, wearables, artificial intelligence, remote exams and an array of sensors, that aim to improve and extend his quality of life at home and to stay connected with loved ones.  The video also peers into how a new breed of autonomous vehicles will help him stay active and mobile away from home.

READ MORE:NCTA's Powell: 'The Near Future is Now'

Speaking at a press conference Monday, Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs said video was created based on a “personal inspiration” based on the experiences of his parents and grandparents to explain and describe how new the promise of these medically-focused technologies and services can improve home life for the elderly amid the struggles of more traditional healthcare programs and activities.

McKinney said the video is focused on “innovation with purpose” and “not just about speeds and feeds ,” by taking a closer look at the role of technology in the lives of individuals. He acknowledged that much of what is depicted in the video isn’t a reality yet, but hopes that the cable industry can work with and inspire those in the medical industry to bring some of these ideas to life.

At the same time, telemedicine has become a bigger focus for cable operators and their business services operations.  Cox Communications, for example, recently partnered with the Cleveland Clinic to form Vivre Health, a strategic alliance focused on bringing homecare to the home using broadband and other technologies.  Cox also has invested in HealthSpot, a company focused on patient and provider-driven telehealth technology.

RELATED: Cox Makes Home Healthcare Connection

McKinney said a challenge ahead is to simplify these technologies for the people they are intended for.

“We are not there yet today to make this future happen because of the complexity,” he said, noting that the video shows an always-on set-up that doesn’t require components such as a keyboard or a mouse.

Watch the video below:

Keeping itself focused on a key growth opportunity for delivering services tailored for healthcare organizations  and telemedicine providers,  the cable industry will be well represented at the annual HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition, taking place this week in Las Vegas.

Four MSOs will be participating in this year’s show – Comcast Business (booth 7830), Cox Business (booth 4400/T2113), Charter’s Spectrum Business unit (booth 12340), and Time Warner Cable Business Class. Notably, Cox recently acquired Trapollo, a provider of managed services to the health care industry that enables the deployment of telehealth and remote health monitoring.

Additionally, CTAM will be located in the Innovations booth within the Interoperability Showcase area at the Las Vegas event, where it will provide additional information on cable’s healthcare partnerships.

“The typical size for a Picture Archiving and Communications Systems image set — such as an xray — used by radiologists in everyday evaluations is 500 Megabytes,” said Steve Rowley, SVP of Cox Business, in a statement. “The size of these commonly-used imaging files tells us clearly that the healthcare industry has significant needs as it embarks on a massive migration to electronic health records and networked data exchange. We will work in lock step with our customers to ensure our solutions meet their ever-growing data demands.”

"Supporting healthcare technology will require a strong network backbone to ensure peak performance,” added Alexandra Sewell, VP of Enterprise Marketing, Comcast Business. “This is the foundation to building an effective healthcare IT delivery chain, which ultimately provides quality patient care – something that we’re all striving to do.”

 “As the healthcare industry is focused on providing the best possible care for patients and their families, the cable industry is supporting this mission with technologies, such as  advanced network and cloud solutions, that work together to help healthcare organizations stay connected, secure and compliant,” said Jeff Greenberg, Time Warner Cable Group Vice President Marketing, Mid-Market and Channels.

“Complexity in the health IT space is increasing and is likely to continue to grow in the foreseeable future," said Cynthia Carpenter, VP of Product Management, Spectrum Business. "With our high-capacity, fiber-rich networks for connecting providers, patients and facilities across the healthcare ecosystem, the cable industry is providing simple, reliable services that are easy to deploy and scale as healthcare customer needs evolve.”

Among the many metrics that tell the tale of healthcare’s technology transformation, one in particular stands out: 500 Megabytes.

That’s a typical size for a Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) image set — an amalgamation of X-ray, computed tomography and/or cellular pathology images used by radiologists in everyday evaluations.

The sheer size of these commonly used imaging files tells us something important about the needs of the healthcare industry as it embarks on a massive migration to electronic health records and networked data exchange: We’re going to need some very big pipes.

Thankfully, the cable industry has them. And increasingly, healthcare organizations ranging from solo practitioners to large regional providers are turning to cable to supply the connectivity that enables tremendous new capabilities in patient care.

One example is Cox’s partnership this February with Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic to create Vivre Health, a far-reaching initiative to deploy telehealth and home-healthcare solutions that connect patients and caretakers. Potential applications include video consultation via broadband and the use of in-home equipment to monitor patients’ recovery from surgery.

At the same time, Cox is looking ahead by investing in HealthSpot, a healthcare delivery platform that combines cloud-based software with health-diagnostic kiosks and mobile applications that connect to providers via advanced data networks.

These are just two indications of where the connected healthcare revolution is going, and how cable’s helping it get there. There are plenty of others. Recently, Comcast introduced its new Ethernet@Home service that allows doctors and technicians to examine medical imaging records and evaluate critical patient data from home. Cable is also making a big impact on patient experience, as health providers engage cable companies to implement in-room entertainment and Wi-Fi services that have a dramatic and positive impact on satisfaction.

Among the big technology drivers of the healthcare IT transformation are cable-powered Ethernet platforms that allow providers to deliver massive amounts of data rapidly and securely over private network pathways. Our industry is instrumental in helping healthcare organizations make a historic move away from expensive and relatively low-performance T1 circuits to fast, secure and affordable Ethernet networks that enable tremendous improvements in information exchange.  Almost every day we help another healthcare organization develop a custom solution to meet their needs in this area.

The most exciting part: We’re just getting started. There’s a huge opportunity ahead as a confluence of technology companies, healthcare providers and application developers revolutionize the way patients attain care. You can see the beginnings of this movement materialize as individuals begin to embrace personal health monitoring devices and technologies.

This evolution reflects a new paradigm: Rather than requiring patients and caretakers to come together in one regional medical center, we’re increasingly exchanging information across geographies between outpatient diagnostic centers, remote clinics, family practices, physician specialists around the globe and even patient homes. Like all businesses, technology can inject operational efficiency, improve speed and quality of care, and improves the customer experience. In this industry, it can also save lives.

Steve Rowley is senior vice president of Cox Business.