HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for March, 2008

Speeding Drug Safety Alerts

• Posted March 27th 2008
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• by Russell

Medem, a for-profit company formed by the American Medical Association and several national medical societies, has just announced the launch of the Health Care Notification Network (HCNN). HCNN is a timely new initiative to send drug safety alerts to physicians via email as opposed to slower postal mail. Medem is operating this new service on behalf of a broad-based non-profit initiative called the iHealth Alliance.

Everything about this new undertaking seems smart and laudable. The only potential fly in the ointment is that because you can’t send email to physicians unless you know their email addresses, physicians need to enroll in the HCNN program. Enrollment is free, it’s been made clear the email messages will be free of advertising or promotional copy, and email addresses will not sold to third parties. Again, it’s all simple, smart and much-needed.

It’s good to see Medem getting itself involved in a project that’s high profile, non-controversial and practical. Medem’s charter was to create useful ecommerce services that would connect physicians and patients. Nobody could doubt the long-term need, but Medem’s launch at the height of the dot com bubble was inauspicious. Further, the novelty and sophistication of its ideas and offerings have tended to leave the company far out in front of its market. Selling cutting edge ecommerce platforms to a market that is hidebound, paper-based and notoriously cheap is tough work. However, with the market finally starting to catch up to Medem’s vision, its strategy may well be vindicated in the not too distant future. In the interim, Medem can burnish its image in the marketplace

 

Consumer Health Sites Not for the Faint of Heart

• Posted March 21st 2008
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• by Janice

Steve Case, the keynote speaker at yesterday’s EconHealth seminar, and CEO of Revolution Health, used the phrase “not for the faint of heart” to describe the current environment for producing healthcare content for the consumer market. Chris Schroeder, CEO of the HealthCentral Network, repeated the phrase in the introduction to his opening panel. It’s an apt way of summing up the themes of the seminar that focused on the money flow in early-stage digital consumer health companies.

Case used the analogy of his experience getting consumers engaged in online communication at AOL and predicted that the time horizon spans 10 to 20 years before the full “sea change” occurs in the healthcare sector. Significant additional hurdles exist in the health market, which has a complex institutional structure with layers of agents that constrain consumer choice and behavior. The agents include employers who remain the primary payers of health insurance, the health insurance companies as payer-intermediaries between consumers and providers, and government agencies that create policy and regulations—and are also a major payer of healthcare services. Layers of constraints also exist for the physicians and other healthcare professionals who offer health services.

Still, Steve and other speakers did not present a gloomy future for health content start-ups and established healthcare publishers. There is overwhelming agreement that the US is moving toward a consumer-centric healthcare system and there are ample opportunities for companies that create innovative applications to improve the efficiency of healthcare consumption. But the timing of adoption by consumers is very difficult to predict, especially in an environment of constrained choice. Deep pockets help. And, it helps to have alternative sources of revenue to keep afloat while the “tectonic shifts” in healthcare settle. Without significant resources, the most likely future for most of today’s consumer health start-ups will be acquisition by a large more diversified health content or health IT company.

 

Health Content: Going for the Gold, Not Glitz

• Posted March 13th 2008
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• by Janice

Healthline, which maintains its own consumer healthcare portal site while also licensing technology and content to other healthcare sites, has announced an agreement with Aetna to supply Healthline’s search and related tools to Aetna’s new SmartSource healthcare search engine.

This deal serves as a reminder that the open Web is not the only place where healthcare consumers connect with online medical information. While much attention is being lavished on the glitzy consumer health portals, few have noted that most of them are too broadly focused and without differentiation. Everything from healthy lifestyle information, disease-specific information, to drug data, calorie counters, and social networking discussion groups are all thrown together on one site. Sites such as Revolution Health, WebMD, iVillage Your Total Health, About.com/Health are all beginning to look alike.

While the overabundance of content is becoming increasingly hard to navigate, the reason behind it is clear – ad dollars. All of these health care portals are following the money, and they need to keep building inventory to attract ever more advertisers. While the potential advertising pot is in the billions of dollars, it is unclear who, among the current crop of consumer healthcare sites, will attract sufficient traffic and ad dollars to be the long term winners in this very competitive space.

What does this mean for publishers of medical information and healthcare-related content. It means that expected revenue from ad-share deals with consumer healthcare portals on the open Web remains unpredictable, and wise publishers should also seek deals with alternative distribution channels like employee benefits sites that are sponsored by the healthcare payers: employers and health insurers. In the Healthline deal, the Aetna Navigator site is on the Internet with access by password. In other cases, employers host Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) on intranets and typically include information about all benefits programs. But regardless of the implementation, these sites deliver a sizeable audience that is craving content that is more tailored to their needs, and health content publishers would be wise to pursue these less obvious but still rich channels.

 

dCard: An Open Standard; A Needed Standard

• Posted March 7th 2008
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• by Russell

A consortium of nine healthcare technology companies and healthcare providers has unveiled a new standard for collecting, presenting and exchanging healthcare provider data. The new standard is called “dCard,” short for Doctor Card. It’s an important and needed initiative to be sure given the many tortured attempts over the years to organize basic provider information and keep it current.

We’ve spent many years in the area of claims data, thinking that the actual information used to cut checks to providers would be the key to building dependable provider databases. Not even close. It’s the same issue that has bedeviled the people behind the various physician identifiers that have been created: physicians tend to have multiple affiliations and even more addresses and phone numbers. They often have third parties involved in receiving payments. At any given time, many are not actively practicing medicine for various reasons. In short, it’s a case of volatility meets complexity.

This ongoing problem of getting control of even information this basic smacks right into two huge trends in healthcare: consumerism and improving care, while reducing the cost of care, through improved use of information technology.

How do you, for example, confidently rate the quality of a physician when you can’t even confidently supply that physician’s address and phone number?  How do you as an IT company develop an electronic health record when nobody can even organize and account for the people who will be entering data into your systems?

We wish dCard the best – we would all benefit from it success. And perhaps the standards that ultimately get traction will be based on open standards driven by voluntary consortiums – it almost has to, because other approaches haven’t advanced the ball very far.

 

 

EconHealth Seminar, March 20

• Posted March 6th 2008
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• by Janice

Our friends at PaidContent.org have extended a special offer to Health Content in Perspective readers and Health Content07 attendees for their upcoming EconHealth seminar in NY.  We’ll be attending and look forward to seeing many of you there.

PaidContent.org invites you to join our team and excellent panelists for a half-day seminar on March 20 from 1pm to 5pm in New York at the TimesCenter.  As a courtesy to the HealthContent audience, we extend a $50 discount on tickets for the event. Register here using the discount code “HC” to receive $50 off the $250 admission price. Since we’re keeping the discussion group more intimate, the seats are limited and will fly fast, so jump in now.

EconHealth’s specific focus will be the evolving business models for consumer health media companies, VC and M&A deals being done in the industry, the players in the industry, both big and small, and innovative services and disruptors in the space.

The format is simple: one keynote Q&A and three panels. We’re excited to announce that the keynote interview is with Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution LLC, a co-founder of America Online.

Panel topics:

– Competition for Attention: Health portals vs Portals with Health vs Oldline Publishers vs Service Providers

– Emerging models: Search engines, merging medical info with personal medical data, ad networks, and social media 

– Deals: Health and wellness media M&A and venture capital investments 

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution LLC, a co-founder of America Online
• Esther Dyson, EDventure
• Stephanie Dolgins, VP-Women’s & Lifestyle, AOL
• David Kramer, CEO, Digitas Health
• John Lambros, Managing Director, Savvian
• Morris R. Levitt, Managing Director-Life Science, DeSilva+Phillips
• Marjorie Martin, GM-Health, About.com
• Daniel Palestrant, CEO, Sermo
• Chris Schroeder, CEO and president, The HealthCentral Network
• Dean Stephens, president & COO, Healthline
• Benjamin Wolin, CEO, Waterfront Media/EverydayHealth

 

We look forward to seeing you there!