HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for May, 2008

Healthcare 3R’s Bring Pain and Gain

• Posted May 23rd 2008
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• by Janice

 Arguably the most powerful and actionable of all consumer health information, ratings, rankings ad recommendations (the 3R’s), present both opportunities and minefields, as the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) found out this week when a lawsuit was filed against them by the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS).   

GIC ranks physicians using cost and quality measures, and its rankings are used for  cost containment; patients have to pay higher copayments for doctors who rank in the lower tiers.  MMS, which has more than 20,000 physicians and student members, alleges that GIC’s system, called Clinical Performance Improvement Initiative (CPI), uses “inaccurate, unreliable and invalid tools and data”.  In particular, the complaint cites miscoding of procedures and inaccurate assignment of patients to physicians who were not responsible for their care. 

A different ratings approach is practiced by the department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS). Its CAHPS program  centers its rankings on patient satisfaction measures.   HHS was also in the news this week with a near-full-page ad in local papers in all 50 states promoting the use of the Hospital Compare site (http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/). As reported by AP, “the ads reflect an emphasis by the Bush administration to increase transparency in the health care system. Officials say greater public disclosure of costs and quality will drive providers to improve on both fronts.”

Currently, hospitals are penalized with a reduction in their reimbursement rates from CMS if they do not participate in the CAHPS program.  It is expected that HHS will continue down the path of pay-for-performance (P4P) as the CAHPS program develops.  

The 3R’s are shaping up to be a lively and controversial business, and Health Content Advisors and our parent company, InfoCommerce Group, will continue to monitor closely those information products that offer ratings, rankings, and recommendations, and you can look for them to continue to play a prominent role in this year’s Health Content08 conference.

 

ReachMD Facilitates Use of Audio Content

• Posted May 21st 2008
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• by Marji

ReachMD, a multi-channel platform for medical professionals, has partnered with the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute to broadcast a weekly series on gastroenterological issues, trends and technologies on XM Satellite Radio. The series will be broadcast on channel 157 and simulcast on ReachMD Online (www.reachmed.com).

 

The series, called “G.I. Insights” was slated to launch this past Monday.

 

The AGA is just the latest medical entity to sponsor programming on ReachMD. Others include the American Medical Association, the American Retina Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

As people’s information gathering habits change, information providers (in this case, a medical society) must evolve with them. To engage in this particular initiative, AGA officials must feel that they can reach a broader group of gastroenterologists over the airwaves than other, more traditional, methods.

 

It will be interesting to see how this segment of the medical community responds to “G.I Insights.” Depending on its success, it could possibly lead to a serious migration to “audio content” in the medical field.

 

It a way, it’s not surprising that these medical associations are trying radio to reach their audience. It’s not much of a stretch when you consider that the use of podcasts to disseminate information has increased in a relatively short period of time. Could audio content become a format of choice for many? Will it soon be a requirement for all content publishers to offer their information this way?

 

Google’s Personal Health Record Platform

• Posted May 20th 2008
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• by Janice

 The long-awaited release of Google Health (in Beta of course) makes it clear that there is a race on between Google and Microsoft to gain traction and share in the emerging market for personal health records (PHRs). 

At Health Content Advisors, we have shifted our view of the relevancy of PHRs to publishers of health content.  Previously, we tended to think that electronic health records were an IT utility for record-keeping and that they would take time to be adopted by a significant portion of consumers.  Yes, publishers should be cognizant of the need to integrate their content with electronic medical records and PHRs, but more timely opportunities seemed to exist in the creation of standalone applications for researching healthcare information.   We now view PHRs as a logical structure and filtering tool for health-related research and information seeking.  Even if users don’t register and import or input data into secure (one hopes) online sites, the architecture of a personal health record is a sensible one for designing a healthcare information portal. 

Google Health requires that users set up a profile that includes age, sex, height, conditions, medications, test results and more before allowing access to the specialized online health services included in Google Health (health topics from ADAM are the exception).  I for one will not be entering this information exchange bargain with Google, but I know that I guard my privacy more highly than some others.  Google is offering added privacy protection measures and will not allow advertising on Google Health, but it has said that it will aggregate anonymized content from Google Health to create trend data and other statistics that can be monetized via online ads or other means.

When viewed as a content service, Google Health sets the registration bar extremely high: imagine other content sites asking for such personal information before they allowed users to view content.  Not many users would complete the registration process.  However, when viewed as a utility for storing personal health information-and a utility that is promoted by one’s medical provider/institution–the same content becomes a beneficial value-added service.  But, in either case, Google is dependent on a high level of trust from users.  

Google doesn’t think small.  As Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch says, Google Health is “a platform” and they are striving to be the most popular platform for personal electronic health records.  We applaud Google for establishing a sound foundational architecture for personal health content and for bringing order to the scattered world of online health content. However, we have some issues with the conditions that are set for accessing the content.

(This is the first in a series of posts on GH.  Our next post will focus on content, search and content partners.)

 

Buy versus Build at HealthGrades

• Posted May 20th 2008
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• by Russell

HealthGrades, a publicly-held healthcare information company, initially rose to prominence on its tremendous success with an improbable business model: selling background reports on physicians to the consumer market. What made the model improbable was the relatively sparse content in most of its physician reports (with the exception of occasional sanction data, it was pretty much name, address, board certification and med school bona fides) and the fact it could sell them at all in an online environment drowning in free health-related information. But sell reports it did, in vast quantities. And HealthGrades continued to innovate, now offering a limited number of physician reports for free where a hospital has agreed to cover the cost for its physicians. Another nice upside of this approach: it links its successful consumer offering to its hospital rating and marketing offerings. Smart.

Arguably, the key to HealthGrade’s success is its ability to get products to market fast, and adapt them rapidly to changing market demands. The key to this agility is that HealthGrades elects to buy rather than build its content, content that HealthGrades then integrates and markets. This preference for content licensing is true of its physician profile product, and it’s true of its newest offering, a prescription rating and comparison tool for consumers.

This offering, just launched a few weeks ago, draws on content licensed from IMS Health and Hearst’s FirstDataBank unit. Integrate the content, feed it into its remarkable online marketing machine, and a successful new product is the likely result.

And lest you think HealthGrades views licensing as a one-way street, consider its announcement yesterday that it is licensing its physician and hospital content to Google Health. It’s a wonderful move to build even more traffic to HealthGrades content, which makes HealthGrades more important to hospitals to which it sells both ratings and consulting services. At the same time, the HealthGrades cash register continues to ring with sales of physician profile reports to consumers. It’s a powerful virtuous circle that favors content marketing over content creation. That’s not a formula for everyone, but it certainly seems to be the right formula for HealthGrades.

 

NextBio Launches Free Search Engine

• Posted May 19th 2008
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• by Marji

NextBio last month announced that is has launched a free version of its life science search engine to the general public. Now researchers and clinicians can search more than 10,000 experiments, 16 million articles and billions of data points. In addition, users can add their own experimental data into the search engine to share it with other researchers, creating a collaborative environment.

 

Among the specific functions users will be able to conduct include finding topics of interest quickly by using a semantic auto-complete search feature and making correlations across six species, which will enable the exploration of animal models relative to human studies. Users can also search NextBio to validate or generate novel hypotheses before investing in new experiments and they can also gain a better understanding of their own study results by correlating them with existing experimental data. User profiles can also be created to promote easier collaboration among scientists.

 

This launch should serve a couple of purposes for NextBio. The free version will provide researchers with easy access to valuable content, and encourage a collaborative platform in the process. It will also likely draw more attention to NextBio overall and generate interest in NextBio’s paid subscription offering, which is a more robust product that combines content with functionality.

 

While it can sometimes be difficult for search engines, especially for niche ones like NextBio, to offer free access to their valuable content, they understand how such a model is really beneficial for a healthy dissemination of information. The sharing of such information needs to be encouraged so scientists will be inspired to conduct more valuable research.

 

In addition, such search engines recognize that most Web users seek free resources when conducting online research. If you don’t give them a free pass, they will look elsewhere. For NextBio and others, this “free” strategy ensures that their valuable content will get the exposure and support it deserves. And it can certainly serve as a valuable marketing tool to lead users to paid offerings that provide additional value, this is a benefit that NextBio will most likely receive.

 

Monetizing Online Health Communities

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Janice

 My colleague, Russell Perkins, writes this week about how a partnership between Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) and iGuard.org is selling access to the information collected in patient community sites to investors, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare industry stakeholders.   

Sermo, one of the participants in our Health Content07 conference last fall, is now providing paid access to market researchers in the medical field who want to poll Sermo’s communities of experts.    

The Wall St. Journal reported earlier this week about another company, EmergingMed, that is leveraging its online patient communities by playing matchmaker between existing patient community sites and the medical research teams that are seeking recruits to test cutting-edge treatments in clinical trials.  According to the WSJ article, one survey by Harris Interactive revealed that 75% of cancer patients would have been willing to enroll in a relevant clinical trial “had they known it was possible”. 

These are all great examples of market-driven information products and show how social networking sites can broaden their revenue base beyond online advertising.

 

SearchMedica.com Expands Content and Functionality

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Marji

SearchMedica, a search engine for medical professionals, announced this week that it has added electronic Medicines Compendium (eMC) to the GP section of Searchmedica.co.uk. Now, users can access drug information from a variety of sources in just one search.

This announcement by SearchMedica, a unit of CMPMedica, UK, comes just two months after an alliance was formed between SearchMedica.com and Advanstar’s ModernMedicine.com. This particular partnership called for SearchMedica to power ModernMedicine’s web searches to yield users more robust results.

SearchMedica ranks search results based on relevance but also sorts results to make them more actionable for users. It organizes results into categories such as practical articles and news, research reviews and editorials, evidence-based articles and meta-analyses, practice guidelines, clinical trials for patients, continuing medical education, and alternative and or complementary medicine.

Both announcements illustrate CMPMedica’s commitment to expanding the content and reach of SearchMedica. They will help SearchMedica achieve goals of providing relevant information to medical professionals and making it easier for them to locate that data in the process. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content in the world if users can’t access it. These two alliances are combining to enable SearchMedica to provide both extensive content and search capabilities to its users–two vital components of the online information industry. It will be interesting to see if CMPMedica forms additional alliances in the short term to further bolster its offerings to the marketplace.

 

Medical Tourism Site Launches

• Posted May 14th 2008
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• by Marji

CPR Communications, a healthcare marketing and communications company, has launched YourMedicalTravel.com, a web site that provides information about medical tourism to consumers.

Specific information accessible on the site includes travel tips, cost comparisons for various procedures, legal data and insurance facts. Site visitors can also find information about treatments as well as particular regions (from India to Singapore and Thailand).

The new site complements another CPR Communications offering, MedicalTravelToday.com, a site for businesses that participate in the medical tourism industry.

CPR has launched this latest site to capitalize on a trend of individuals traveling abroad to find more affordable medical treatment. However, recent media reports suggest that the market for such content is not as large as previously thought. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal cites a McKinsey & Co. study that revealed that not as many people are interested in traveling abroad for medical treatment as was assumed. Yet, the study does note that the industry is still poised for strong growth.

In addition, the article notes that the Medical Tourism Association doesn’t size the medical tourism market because there is no firm definition of the market.

Still, for CPR Communications, the launch makes sense. It really does fit nicely with the company’s MedicalTravelToday.com offering, and the organization is certainly on its way to creating a solid portfolio for the medical tourism market. Although the McKinsey study found the market to be smaller than originally thought, it is still predicting growth; and CPR Communications is extremely well-positioned to capitalize on that growth.

 

New NCPDP Database Boasts Increased Functionality

• Posted May 14th 2008
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• by Marji

The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs launched a new database for pharmacies, pharmacy benefit management companies and health insurers. The application, dataQ, is a new version of the NCPDP’s standard pharmacy database that includes information on nearly 75,000 pharmacies. According to news reports, the goal of the database is to provide information to make pharmacy claims more accurate.

The new web-based database offers users a variety of new features. In addition to instant look-ups and custom reporting functions, the database can also help users with pharmacy network development and credentialing; data validation; drug utilization and product recall monitoring, as well as the ability to pull all of it together through market research and analysis.

Anything that will improve the accuracy of pharmacy claims is a good thing. This database seems to contain all of the content and functionality required of databases today. While a vast number of listings is vital, today’s databases are not nearly as valuable without abilities that make their data actionable. The NCPDP has all of the necessary components here – components that will help users perform their job duties more efficiently and effectively.

 

Consumer-Driven Health Care Drives Demand for Ratings

• Posted May 8th 2008
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• by Janice

The proliferation of doctor ratings sites continues unabated and is likely to continue. The two main drivers of growth are both related to the consumer-directed healthcare movement: 1) the demand for information about healthcare providers from consumers/patients and 2) the focus on measuring quality and satisfaction in healthcare. 

The recent traffic records achieved by Castle Connolly, the publishers of the “Top Doctor” guides, during their promotion of “Long Island’s Top Doctors” on Newsday.com demonstrates the strong demand for the data.  Searches for doctors profiles in the database (accessible via Newsday) resulted in over 1.2 million profile views on just one day.   

On the quality and satisfaction front, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of HHS, has led efforts to compile standardized ratings of healthcare providers and practitioners through their Consumers Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program.  CAHPS originally measured satisfaction with health plans, but has branched out into measuring patient satisfaction with hospitals, and has begun  measuring satisfaction with physicians through the CAHPS Clinician and Group survey.  The availability of the CAHPS Clinician survey benchmark data (beginning Spring 2009) may spur even more entrants into the doctor ratings business, but it should also raise the bar for the quality of the ratings sites that survive in this competitive field.