HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for February, 2008

Follow the Money

• Posted February 26th 2008
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• by Janice

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of HHS, has come out with a new report that projects that spending on healthcare will increase to $4.3 trillion – that’s trillion with a “t”—by 2017. That translates to 1 in every 5 dollars being spent on healthcare.

The full report, which is available on the Health Affairs website, projects an increase from 46% to 49% of the total to be paid by federal and state governments, as the baby boomers become eligible for Medicare.  That still leaves over $2 trillion in consumer spending. With that many dollars at stake, one thing is certain: advertisers will be targeting those consumer dollars.

So it is no wonder that there has been a surge in the number of consumer healthcare portals that stand ready to accept these ad dollars. Their current focus is on pharmaceutical companies as they transfer a growing percentage of their approximately $5 billion annual consumer ad budgets online. There’s no doubt that pharma ad budgets could fund quite a few consumer health portals. But, pharma companies aren’t the only potential advertisers. Medical device vendors factor in, too. Plus, with the growing demand for quality and cost data to help inform healthcare decisions, expect to see more medical practitioners (not just plastic surgeons!) and provider institutions, including hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and home health providers promoting themselves online.

 

Journals Need to Join the Online Social Mix

• Posted February 19th 2008
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• by Janice

A recent post by Dr. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, on Matthew Holt’s Health Care Blog chided the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for publicizing an article that “has important public policy ramifications but does not make available the full text of the article” [unless one pays a $15 fee or is a subscriber].  In the comments to Dr. Levy’s post, a reader questions why JAMA can’t emulate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which not very long ago began allowing free access to articles for readers who follow links from blogs that reference specific articles, as well as opening general access to a limited number of articles that have broad interest.

We think that medical publishers should indeed follow the example of the WSJ (which, under new ownership of Rupert Murdoch, is expected to greatly increase free access to the news on the site, but retain certain high-value subscription content). Why? Because there is a large and growing audience of both medical professionals and consumers who are interested in the content from major medical journals and these readers are motivated to read and possibly pass along information about the articles to others.

Whether through participating in services like Sermo, which is targeted to medical professionals, or via Web-wide social networking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace, or Facebook—and of course blogs—the payoffs to journal publishers are many. They include: increasing exposure, connecting more directly with engaged readers who are not currently part of their core subscription base, and remaining relevant to medical professionals as the conversation moves online. Look for a discussion on whether or not subscription revenue will decline as a result of increasing free access in a future post.

 

Technology + Content Is a Winning Formula

• Posted February 12th 2008
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• by Janice

Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, highlighted five trends in the information industry at last month’s SIIA IIS conference in New York. Among the five, he stated that “software and information are most powerful together”.

That’s the mantra InfoCommerce Group has been promoting for years, and one which by now should be obvious to anyone who has been using computers for decades to analyze data and search for content in online networks. There have been great advances in using technology to enhance value of textual data through wider use of taxonomies, automated entity extraction utilities, and search engines and ranking systems that rely on the underlying technology to improve the search experience for the user. More recently, we’re seeing wider-spread integration of content into the business process or work routine of professionals to increase their productivity and quality of their output.

With data and textual content under control, one of the next innovations will be in enhancing the value of image and video content. Wolters Kluwer’s recent investment in Logical Images, a digital imaging company that has applied taxonomies to their collection of images in their VisualDx system to allow searches to be carried out by descriptions of symptoms, not just by disease or condition, offers an example. The combination of searchable clinical content from Wolters Kluwer and searchable images from Logical Images creates what the press release calls an “easy online clinical decision support system”. 

According to the press release, “Together, Clin-eguide and VisualDx provide an unmatched clinical decision solution. We avoid using the term “solutions” to describe combinations of content and technology since the combined offering is rarely a standalone solution. But there is no doubt that improved productivity does result from the appropriate application of knowledge management principles and software to information, whether it be data, textual content, sound, images or video content. And, now that process improvement through IT is the mantra of the healthcare industry, we look forward to many more alliances between software companies and publishers that want to produce a winning formula for healthcare professionals by combining technology + content.