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Archive for September, 2008
Eli Lilly to Launch Physician Payment Database
- Posted September 30th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Marji
Eli Lilly and Co. last week announced that it plans to become the first pharmaceutical research company to disclose its payments to physicians in the U.S. The company will launch an online registry of physician payments in 2009.
Earlier this year, Lilly endorsed bipartisan federal legislation, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, that would establish a national registry of payments to physicians by medical device, medical supply and pharmaceutical companies. (U.S. senators Charles Grassley and Herbert Kohl introduced the legislation last September, but it has not yet been passed by Congress).
The public will have access to an Internet database listing Lilly’s payments to physicians. The registry could launch as early as the second half of 2009 and will contain 2009 payments to physicians who serve the company as speakers and advisors. By 2011, Lilly plans to expand the registry’s reporting capabilities to resemble the Sunshine Act legislation. The registry will be updated annually to reflect the previous year’s payment information.
In a press release announcing Lilly’s plan, president and CEO John Lechleiter, Ph.D. noted that the creation of the registry will help Lilly become more transparent about its business, and will also help the company build the public’s trust. The company decided not to wait for the Sunshine Act to be passed before taking action.
This announcement shows Lilly’s commitment to becoming more open with its business practices. The company already has a plan in place to bolster the content and functionality of the database within the next few years, as it recognizes the potential value of such a venture. Lilly claims to be on the leading edge of this trend; it will be interesting to see if other pharmaceutical companies decide to launch similar databases in the near future.
Patient Education is Essential to Consumer-Driven Healthcare
- Posted September 29th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Patient education is in the interest of all of the stakeholders in the health industry: the payers, the practitioners, the providers, the patients–and the policymakers. However, it too often is the missing ingredient in our healthcare system.
Consumer health sites with strong patient participation are helping to fill the gap by including disease-specific research and allowing users to share information and experiences. Still, more is needed to tie the patient’s experience to the information and instructions that patients receive from their doctors.
This presents a huge opportunity for publishers of evidence-based medicine (EBM) tools for professionals to create patient education spin-offs. Furthermore, these patient education tools can complement, supplement, or incorporate the information being published by consumers and professionals on the consumer health sites.
However, it should be noted that patient-oriented resources require different interfaces and marketing programs. A recent post on the Learn to Live blog addresses these divergent needs of marketing a similar product to these two very different audiences in a hospital setting.
Earlier today, Thomson Reuters announced that they have teamed with the Tigerlily Foundation to offer cancer treatment decision support tools for young women affected by breast cancer. “The cancer Profiler Tools provide a step-by-step approach to help users better understand diagnostic tests, treatment options and, in some cases, possible outcomes based on the experience of similar people treated within clinical trials. All of the information is based on a database of peer-reviewed clinical research.”
This is just one example of adapting professional resources for a consumer audience. For more, join us at Health Content08 where we will highlight other initiatives that offer professionally vetted patient education resources in a variety of environments. The Lively up Your Content session, which is devoted to the topic of patient education, includes:
Megan St. John, Managing Director, InfoCommerce Group [Moderator]
Deborah Breen, Director, Medical Market Development, EBSCO
Helen Hoart, President, Staywell Consumer Health Publishing
Nina Sossamon-Pogue, Vice-President, BenefitFocus Media
See you there. Only 43 days away!
Headlines for September 29
- Posted September 29th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Consumer site that provides images of skin diseases to help with diagnosis. From Logical Images, wich also provides professional medical diagnosis applications.
Pfizer, with largest pharma R&D budget of >$8B, reallocates R&D resources to cancer and away from heart disease research. (subscription site)
Website that helps consumers evaluate their risk of developing 5 most common diseases and learn how to prevent them.
Special section in NY Times with group of articles that cover variety of health info available on Web.
NY Times Reporter on pitfalls of self-diagnosis via Web sources w/o physician assistance. Good case study of how socialnetworking health 2.o sites can be useful.
“Emdeon, a leading provider of revenue and payment cycle management solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today that it has acquired GE Healthcare Information Technology’s patient statement business, a bulk printing and mailing services provider. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The acquired business currently serves more than 400 hospitals and physician groups, providing timely delivery of correspondence such as statements, invoices, claims and appointment reminders for patients.”
NY Times on state of directories of doctors. “[T]here is growing demand for information that is more reliable than a friend’s recommendation and goes beyond the rudimentary details available online: a doctor’s hours, educational background and ZIP code. Unfortunately, it is very hard to get. There are very few good quality measures available to assess individual doctors, so consumers must be prepared to do some research if they want to find a physician they can work with comfortably.”
Paula Hane from InfoToday on collaborative research tools, particularly for scientists.
» Thomson Reuters to Provide Online Cancer Treatment Decision Support Tools for Tigerlily Foundation
Thomson Healthcare teams with Tigerlily Foundation to provide EBM tools for cancer patients thru its NexCura cancer Profiler Tools.
From the press release: Clinical Xpert Charge Capture 2.0 allows physicians to record charges and procedures via their BlackBerry smartphones and Palm® and Windows® Mobile handheld devices, regardless of location. Charges are delivered to a centralized Web portal for use by hospital and physician practice administrators and coders and also for integration into practice management and billing systems. The Clinical Xpert suite (originally developed by Mercury MD, which is now part of the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters) includes solutions for mobile and Web-based clinical data access, clinical surveillance, electronic backup of core HIS systems, medication reconciliation, and streamlined care-team communication.
Review of Kaiser’s 2008 Employer Health Benefits survey with links to full report.
Media Post article includes statements from Waterfront Media (Everyday Health) and WebMD.
Headlines for September 26-28
- Posted September 28th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Obama’s plan for science & innovation includes a proposed doubling of funding at NIH over ten years. Large number (61)of nobel winning scientists have endorsed his plan. Harold Varmus leads his science advisory team.
Social networking on patient sites highlighted as the “panacea” to the health care crisis. Gross overstatement in my view, given current state of even the best disease-specific sites. Granted, info found on sites can be useful and sites can collect useful outcomes data, but we’re a long way from providing consumers/patients with sufficient resources on the Web to guide well-informed decisionmaking. See my post on Monday 9/29 for more analysis on what is needed in patient education.
Good post by medical librarian (Pilgrim Tinker)in hospital setting about the challenges of providing patient education resources that are appropriate for point of care usage by both professional and consumer audiences. Interface, search, terminology, & level of assistance required vary depending on audience in order to provide “the right information, the right amount of information and in the right format”.
MedPlus, the health info exchange div. of Quest, reports on successful testing of its service.
Replacing some medical encounters with online services could yield $6.95 in monthly savings per Medicare beneficiary and $3.36 per member of commercial health plans, according to a study released on Thursday by the actuarial firm Milliman, Government Technology reports.
Cigna’s sending surveys to member asking them to evaluate their treatment by mental health providers, including ease of getting appts and condition of the office–and plans to eventually post a numerical rating on each of them.
Pharmaceutical Care Management Assoc. (which represents pharmacy benefit management firms) responds to restrictions in recent DEA proposed rule to permit eprescribing of controlled substances.
“People familiar with the company weren’t surprised to hear of the possible elimination of jobs, saying the sales team was overhired and the network sites weren’t always happy with how much money they were making off the ads. Glam has a mix of owned and operated Web sites that reach 44 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S.” Nor am I surprised….
Headlines for September 24-25
- Posted September 26th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Site on EHR info and news
Hospitals are increasingly subsidizing (partial) costs to encourage physicians to adopt electronic health records, under exception to Stark law. Article also mentions incentives from insurers, gov’t, & employer coaltions to offer incentives for EHR adoption by physicians.
Good post on using checklists in hospitals to prevent errors; also points out that hospitals won’t adopt error reporting practices unless requirements are in force.
Blog for medical tourism portal PlacidWay.
Press Ganey, leading vendor for HCAHPS surveys, describes gains in patient satisfaction measures since initiation of HCAHPS. Note, program is new and base year reporting low, so large increases are not surprising.
Videocasts from WK’s Innovation and Technology Day. Registration (free) required to access.
Times reports that Zerhouni will retire end of October. Also reports on flattening or declining budgets since 2005: “Dr. Zerhouni’s greatest challenge has been a difficult budgetary environment. When he was appointed in 2002, the agency’s budget was in the midst of being doubled under a bipartisan plan intended to restore its luster as the world’s pre-eminent sponsor of scientific work. But from 2005 through 2007, the agency’s budget remained stuck at $28.5 billion, although this year it grew to $29.5 billion. Since about 80 percent of the agency’s budget is used to finance initiatives at universities across the country, the flat budget led to a growing sense of alarm among academics. As budgetary realities have gone from bad to worse in recent months, the mood among many biomedical researchers has gone from alarmed to depressed.”
“According to benefits consultant Billet, clients are finding that the programs aren’t reaching return-on-investment thresholds in the expected two- to three-year timeframes, enrolling enough people or making enough progress with the people they do enroll.”
AllOne Health Group will integrate its s/w with MSFT’s HealthVault to allow consumers to transmit health info via cell phones. Uses Health Level Seven messaging standards. see: www.allonehealthgroup.com
Partnerships Creates New Service for Women’s Health Information
- Posted September 25th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Marji
The non-profit National Women’s Health Resource Center (NWHRC) and Health Advocate (HA) this month announced an alliance aimed at helping women take care of their health and the health of their families.
NWHRC provides information on the latest women’s health information (disease, prevention and wellness issues). HA is a health advocacy and assistance company that provides health-related services to its clients. It helps those clients understand and negotiate insurance bills, find physicians and care facilities and assess treatment options. HA was once just available through employer-sponsored plans, but consumers can now join its Health Proponent service directly.
Combined, NWHRC and HA plan to provide a service that offers both healthcare prevention and management assistance. Essentially, the organizations are pooling their resources to become a one-stop shop for their target audience. This is a solid plan, and one that should help both entities grow as they support the needs of that audience. Becoming the main source of content and services is certainly the goal for most healthcare-related entities today, and NWHRC and HA have the combined offerings to accomplish just that.
HEAL Global Partners with Citi
- Posted September 24th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Marji
HEAL (Health Empowerment Access Links) Global Inc. has launched a social media wellness company through a partnership with Citi and Andrew Young, a former ambassador/Atlanta mayor and current chairman of GoodWorks Intl. The goal of the company is to provide people with information, products and services that will help them achieve what the organization refers to as the four key facets of wellness: physical, emotional, financial and spiritual health.
Citi’s Wallet Wisdom video series will be featured on the financial health channel of HEAL Global’s beta social media network, HEALMYBody.net. Citi will use its strength in serving consumers in the financial services market to provide content to the new offering.
It’s certainly not everyday that a partnership in the healthcare information space involves a financial services player. So, for that reason alone, this is a very unique and innovative proposition. However, it certainly fits within HEAL Global’s mission of address overall wellness–and specifically, the financial component.
Signing on a prominent financial services firm, such as Citi, is definitely a coup. By aligning itself with such a powerhouse in the industry, HEAL Global brings more credibility to its offerings, which should bring more interested consumers over time.
Headlines for September 22-23
- Posted September 23rd 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Vijay Goel, MD, on Health 2.0 business models: companies need to be able to pair traction against one of these issues with a business model that someone is willing to pay for (including advertisers). [These issues=medical decisions, info sharing, med technology, and funding.]
Dave Kellogg, CEO Mark Logic, commenting on speech by Elsevier Health’s CTO about role-based in-context search applications and tying information to the user’s process.
Eclipsys, s/w vendor to hospitals, acquires MediNotes, a EHR and practice mgmt s/w vendor to physician practices. “Atlanta-based Eclipsys will pay approximately $45 million–$17.55 million in cash and the rest in stock–for West Des Moines, Iowa-based MediNotes.”
Due to rising expenses and the state of the economy, Americans are cutting back on non-acute healthcare expenditures, including doctor visits, tests, and prescriptions: “The number of prescriptions filled in the U.S. fell 0.5% in the first quarter and a steeper 1.97% in the second, compared with the same periods in 2007 — the first negative quarters in at least a decade, according to data from market researcher IMS Health. Despite an aging and growing U.S. population, the number of physician office visits also has been declining since the end of 2006. Between July 2007 and 2008, the most recent month for which data are available, visits fell 1.2%, according to IMS.”
InHealth Launches New Site
- Posted September 22nd 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Marji
The Institute for Health Technology Studies (InHealth) has launched a new website (http://www.inhealth.org), an online community where site visitors can obtain the latest medical technology news and information.
The portal, Delivering Evidence, contains news, journal abstracts, research, reports, blogs and other content that addresses the social and economic impact of medical technology. It also features interactive capabilities and tools that enable visitors to comment on news regarding specific medical areas (such as cardiovascular and orthopedics) and share their opinions with other site visitors. RSS feeds are also available for visitors, as well as podcasts and videos.
The portal is targeting a wide range of users, such as policy developers, regulators, industry leaders, academics, economists, patient advocacy groups, the medical community and the news media.
InHealth’s new site offers exactly what most online health information sites feature these days: a combination of content and community. Those are the two main components site visitors seek these days. They want a broad range of content in a variety of formats–from traditional articles to blogs and videos. They also want the experience to be more personal, which InHealth is also accomplishing through a community setting that enables visitors to comment on the content their read and share their thoughts with others. It’s clear that the InHealth folks did their homework before launching the site, and it should certainly help the non-profit accomplish its goal of educating interested parties about medical technology.
Headlines for September 20-21
- Posted September 22nd 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Science.gov launches version 5.0 of its site, using Deep Web Technologies’federated search.Science.gov now federates 200 million pages of authoritative information, including research and development results. Science.gov is also the United States information contribution to WorldWideScience.org, a global scientific research portal.
Dean Giustini review’s Infovell, a new search engine for scholarly pubs, which offers a free trial as of 9-22.
Site on medical tourism by UK medical communications company founder.
Perseus LLC, a PE firm, acquires Physicians Interactive from Allscripts. “Our goal is to create a company that has the leading suite of alternative channel marketing and sales products and programs to serve pharmaceutical, biotech and device customers, including direct mail, eDetailing, video detailing, eCME, market research, surveys, eSampling, eNewsletters, blogs and social networking.” (Norman Selby, Senior Managing Dir at Perseus)
Lilly’s “Orion” project for enhancing its drug pipeline intelligence system listed on InformationWeek 500 for innovation. Orion is ” a centralized portfolio management system that helps Lilly’s managers understand the potentials and risks of all the drugs in its pipeline”.
Weekly blog by FDA Commissioner that summarizes week’s activity. The FDA this Week: Andy’s Take
Weekly blog by FDA Commissioner that summarizes week’s activity.
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