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Archive for November, 2008
Headlines for Nov 25-30
- Posted November 30th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Post by Elsevier software architect on how they are experimenting with using 2ndLife.
Merck manuals Web and mobile versions made available in “digitally born” formats through Unbound Medicine, a healthcare knowledge management company.
Cmed Group, a CRO based in Horsham, PA, receives 5M GBP from Scottish Equity Partners to fund global expansion of Timaeus, an intelligent data acquisition & mgmt solution for gathering clinical data.
Med Ad News spotlights 4 innovative pharma marketing companies: 3FX, Aptilon, HealthTalker and Phreesia.
Article about follow-on studies of drugs using larger more diverse populations than in clinical trials.
Now in its 2nd year, Xconomy, on web-based technology publication and events producer, raises 1st tranche of 2nd round. Xconomy covers the “exponential economy” with focus on high tech, healthcare/biotech/devices, and energy in Boston, Seattle & San Diego. Founded by ex-Tech Review execs.
Boston-based Yankee Equity Solution has launced a $50M fund (YES Medical Technology Fund) to invest in medtech companies in Boston area.
Recent study by MSFT researchers (info retrieval expert and MD/computer scientist) suggests “suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.”
Global Lib. of Women’s Medicine launches in beta (11-19-2008). Open access. “The objective of this site is to support clinicians in their care of women. It is hoped that the information provided – which is designed to be up-to-date, expert and practical – will be a useful resource for all physicians and, in addition, that it may be of particular benefit where access to the latest textbooks and references is difficult.”
A survey article of online health resources for patients. Article lists lots of sites, with little or no evaluation.
Good interview with Steve Aylward, GM, Health & Life Sciences, Microsoft.
“A new tool for health plans, providers, portals, and disease management organizations, Ix Conversations help health care consumers self-manage major health issues like heart disease, diabetes, asthma, healthy weight, and smoking cessation.”
Drugs.com launches new tool, MedNotes, that helps consumers monitor and manage their medications. MedNotes is free and “can also be used to create printable personal health and medication records. Accessible directly at www.drugs.com/mednotes, MedNotes is linked into Google Health’s online health records system as a personalized drug safety management tool.”
Latest in Elsevier’s “Consult” product line of EBM resources, “Imaging Consult provides thousands of high-quality images and anatomic drawings that help radiologists identify typical, variant, and differential-diagnosis findings. The extensive reference material included with each topic contains detailed explanation of how the image findings correlate with anatomic and pathological changes.”
WSJ Health Blog on shortcomings in health care journalism.
ReachMD, AMDA Form Partnership
- Posted November 24th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Marji
ReachMD, a satellite radio channel created by medical professionals for an audience of medical professionals, has partnered with the American Medical Directors Association (AMDA), a professional association of medical directors.
This is the latest of partnerships for ReachMD, which also has alliances with several medical associations, such as the American Medical Association, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the American Gastroenterological Association Institute, the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the American Medical Student Association and Stand Up To Cancer.
ReachMD and AMDA plan to work together to expand the dissemination of healthcare information to medical professionals. The first initiative is a new series called Advances in Long Term Care Medicine that is in development. It will explore the latest happenings in long term care to ReachMD listeners. Hosting the series will be Dr. Eric Tangalos, MD, CMD, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and former chair, primary care internal medicine (1997-2006) and past president of AMDA.
Healthcare content certainly comes in a lot of formats, and this partnership should help raise the profile of that content being delivered via the airwaves. Online health information has likely become so popular in the professional space because of its general acceptance in the consumer space. The same thing could likely happen in radio. As more and more consumers sign on to satellite radio, it’s very possible that an equal interest in this medium could be sparked on the professional side.
ReachMD is certainly well positioned to benefit as it provides this unique platform for the dissemination of information to medical professionals. Aligning with AMDA will help ReachMD built its content out further, and it also adds more credibility to the channel and its offerings. Look for ReachMD to continue to add to its list of prominent partners who are just as interested in making this relatively new media model work.
WebMD, MTS Abandon Acquisition Plans; Opt to Partner
- Posted November 24th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Marji
WebMD Health Corp. and Marketing Technology Solutions (MTS), the owner of QualityHealth.com, have cancelled WebMD’s acquisition of MTS. The companies first announced the acquisition for $50 million in cash (and a possible $25 million earn-out) in September.
Instead, WebMD signed an advertising agreement with MTS and also acquired a minority preferred interest in MTS. As part of this deal, WebMD will sell some ads from QualityHealth.com.
It’s not surprising that WebMD has decided to partner with MTS and not move forward with an acquisition. This could becoming a growing trend in the industry as the volatile economic times make companies reluctant to make large moves, such as acquisitions, and instead opt for strategic partnerships that require less financial investment.
Even though WebMD has changed its plan, the company will still reap benefits from its new relationship with MTS. Perhaps an acquisition will happen at some point in the near future.
Headlines for Nov 24
- Posted November 24th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
WSJ Health Blog on shortcomings in health care journalism.
Reports on SciVee, a video technology platform “much like YouTube’s. SciVee enables scientists across a host of disciplines to create content in any field of science, technology, or medicine. Bourne says K-12 teachers and other educational users also are using SciVee to post videos like this for younger students to access. About 1,000 users have posted videos on the site so far.” Not open-access, rather they have a user-paid revenue model.
NY Times reports on ties between some health journalists and drug companies.
“Quality/EqualityQuality/Equality / Quality/Equality newsroom / News digest News releases Stories and articles News digest Perspectives and commentaries Grantee profiles Video and audio Media inquries Joint Commission Proposes Guiding Principles for Hospital ImprovementPrint E-mail Bookmark RSS Text size: A A A Nov 21, 2008 The Joint Commission has released a new report outlining guiding principles and actions for hospitals and providers in five core areas to better meet the needs of an aging patient population, improve patient safety and care quality, enhance financial performance, and address workforce shortages…”
Richard Saul Wurman and others revive TEDMED to be held in San Diego at The Hotel Del Coronado from Oct. 27-30, 2009. “The fifth annual TEDMED event is intended to serve as the same sort of forum for mesmerizing, rapid-fire presentations about medicine, health care and life sciences that Wurman created with the original TED event in 1984.”
“the Kaiser Family Foundation is starting a news service to produce in-depth coverage of the policy and politics of health care, both for an independent Web site and in collaborations with mainstream news organizations.” See also, Paidcontent.org for more analysis.
WKHealth’s Lippincott Williams & Wilkins’ “NursingCenter.com now provides over 900 peer-reviewed continuing education activities and free access to 11,000 articles from more than 50 leading nursing journals.” Interface updated, too with new interactive multimedia tools for CME and clinical research.
CCHIT site that follows developments in EHR adoption.
Informa Medical Publishing announces E-MedINFORM, a plaform for pharma companies to sponsor educational learning modules for physicians from Informa Medical Publishing’s clinical books, journals or customized content.
“Online health insurance portal GoHealthInsurance.com recently partnered with HealthDay.com ( http://www.healthday.com) an online health news syndicator based in Norwalk, Connecticut, to provide health insurance shoppers with the latest in health and health insurance news.”
Article makes point that big IT companies like Intel, Apple are eyeing healthcare sector for growth. Obviously, GE, Siemens and others already have major healthcare divisions, but continue to see growth in this sector.
Headlines for Nov 20-23
- Posted November 23rd 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
The standards org for EHRs, PHRs, and HIEs seeks to expand into eprescribing and beyond.
Crohn’s & Me, designed by Heartbeat Digital for UCB Pharma, wins online marketing award. Another example of pharma’s creating patient portals that goes far beyond marketing their drugs. “Not only does the site break ground within this disease category, it has influenced how pharma marketers view the entire channel.” “Crohn’s & Me elevates the potential of a patient-centric pharma website, from a purely marketing-driven effort to a service that really benefits the community,” Jan Jeffords-Schenck, a Senior Project Manager at UCB added. “And because it’s so sensitive to patients’ needs, we’ve been able to build an extremely powerful database of nearly 100,000 loyal, engaged and receptive people who care passionately about Crohn’s disease.”
Healia, “a patent-pending health-optimized search engine and online health community that guides people to trusted health information and personal support so that they can make the best health decisions for themselves and their loved ones. Healia is a division of Meredith Corporation.”
Video from our Health Content08 conference from icyou.com.
“Radius is a leading company in the discovery and development of a new generation of drug therapies for osteoporosis and women’s health. Radius has raised $106.5 million in private equity financing since its establishment in 2003 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Thanks to PE Hub for notification.
Follow-on story to Sunday’s spotlight on higher reimbursements to Mass General/Brighams relative to other area hospitals for same procedures. Will Mass. lead the way in creating price transparency in provider pricing and payer reimbursements?
NY Times on health insurers’ stance on universal coverage/mandated insurance trade-off.
As we saw at Health Content08 last week, the healthcare sector is the bright spot for investors and large corporates with healthcare interests alike. According to GE’s CEO Immelt: “Strategically, it’s a great place long term”. “The Fairfield, Conn.-based company’s health care unit plans to spend $200 million over the next five years to develop electronic systems for medical information and patient records. Its partners are among top medical institutions, including the Mayo Clinic and Montefiore Medical Center.”
A Bitter Pill
- Posted November 19th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Russell
Prescription data aggregators IMS Health and Verispan were handed a setback yesterday when a federal court rejected their efforts to overturn a New Hampshire law prohibiting the sale of data showing what physicians were prescribing what drugs. This is potentially very bad news for these companies and the pharmaceutical industry if other states follow New Hampshire’s lead. The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry depends heavily on these data to manage its large and expensive physician detailing operations, and many of its other professional marketing activities as well.
Interestingly, this New Hampshire law has nothing to do with patient privacy. Prescription data have been de-identified for many, many years. New Hampshire is in effect upping the ante by now creating a requirement for privacy around physicians and their prescribing patterns. The rationale for the law is that this information gives a powerful tool to pharmas to push up drug sales, presumably resulting in higher drug costs. If you find that reasoning a tad tortured, we would tend to agree.
Since 2006, the American Medical Association has maintained an opt-out registry allowing individual doctors to restrict the sale of their prescribing data. Couple this registry with this court decision, and the existence of a similar law in Maine, and a pending law in Vermont, and a worrisome pattern starts to emerge. The pharma industry will hardly collapse without access to physician-level prescribing data, but it does have the potential to up-end established and highly effective industry marketing practices.
Headlines for Nov 17-19
- Posted November 19th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Instead, WebMD will acquire minority interest in MTS (owner of QualityHealth.com) and have entered into an advertising services agreement,where WebMD will represent a portion of QualityHealth.com’s media inventory and will provide some of its inventory to QH.
Dr. Val provides the skeptical view of “crowdsourcing” from online social networking sites for clinical trials. My view: the medium shouldn’t matter. Good clinical trials could be set up online, if done with care.
Press release to announce increased use of “tall man” drug lettering to avoid confusion between drug names in the Medi-span drug databases produced by WK Health.
“President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming White House chief of staff challenged chief executives and other business leaders Tuesday night to join the new administration in a push for universal health care, saying incremental increases in coverage won’t be acceptable.”
Interesting article about how Google and P&G are collaborating to explore how each other’s approach to advertising (and company culture)could learn from the other’s. This article could apply to pharma companies just as well as CPG companies.
Summary of David Brailer’s speech at Harvard’s symposium on personalized medicine.
John Halamka on CMS’s announcement about pilot program in UT and AZ to allow Medicare patients to access their claims data from CMS dbs via GoogleHealth, NoMoreClipboard, HealthTrio and PassportMD.
Atypon, a hosting and CMS company that targets scholarly publishers (e.g., journals publishers), acquires eMeta from Macrovision (which bought eMeta for $35M in 2006). eMeta adds publishing services, ecommerce, and rights managements to Atypon’s portfolio.
Physicians’ Foundation conducted survey of 270,000 doctors; responses form 12,000 general practice physicians indicate that 60% would not recommend medicine as a career almost half plan to cut back on # patients they see or retire from practicing medicine.
Interview with Cella Irvine, former Digitas exec, who now heads About.com.
CVS.com and yourhealthconnection.com names best overall internet site and 2nd place health content site respectively by eHealthcare Leadership Awards sponsored by eHealthcare Strategy & Trends magazine.
Marydee at Info Today reviews DeepDyve’s free version. Mostly positive comments, but her comments indicate that the KeyPhrase algorithm requires a change in search strategy and even DeepDyve needs to clarify its advice on how to search using large chunks of content from a document.
Tellurian Networks “provides hosting services for 94 physician clients, such as practices or independent practice associations, at 565 locations representing 13,000 physicians. It will continue to operate facilities in Newton and Los Angeles.”
Commentary on big pharma’s plans to fight Medicare price negotiations. Article questions how much pharma will spend on a losing battle.
Health Content08 Review
- Posted November 18th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Our theme for Health Content08 was Incumbents, Innovators, and Intermediaries. The conference demonstrated through programming, presentations and executive panel discussions how IT and the movement toward consumer-directed healthcare are forever changing the way healthcare publishers produce and deliver information to patients, medical professionals, and healthcare payers and administrators.
At Health Content08, we brought together CEOs and strategists from leading consumer health media companies and professional medical publishing companies in our morning panels to offer, in the words of one of the panelists, a view of “industry-specific trends in the context of our respective strategies“. These morning panels, and the keynote by West Shell III, Chairman and CEO of Healthline Networks, were highlights of the event.
The afternoon sessions explored our main themes in more detail through case study presentations. EBSCO Publishing, HealthGrades, Staywell Consumer Health, Advanstar Communications, BenefitFocus Media, Trigram America, and Consumer Reports all offered insight into how they are transforming their information into interactive information tools and livening up their content with video, audio, and integration into customers’ workflow. We closed the program with a look at how personalized medicine will affect the production and consumption of health care information.
Wednesday afternoon’s Innovators Showcase proved to be a huge success. Eleven early stage health content companies took the stage and wowed our audience with their new approaches to helping consumers and professionals solve their information needs.
Once again, I would like to thank our superb speakers. One attendee went out of his way to tell me that he learned something in every session. We will have to work hard to outshine the quality of the panelists and presenters from this year’s event. It was our goal to provide the audience a better understanding of the connection between consumer and professional healthcare publishing and based on feedback from the audience-and speakers-we succeeded.
We will draw on the examples from Health Content08 in future posts to this e-newsletter. For those of you who attended Health Content08, thank you. It was a pleasure to meet all of you. For those of you who missed the event this year, we hope to see you at the next Health Content conference. ICYOU.com will have some videos from the event to share with everyone very soon.
We start planning for our next event immediately and will continue to report on notable developments in health content in our Health Content in Perspective blog/e-newsletter. We welcome feedback on the conference and would be delighted to hear from potential speakers and ideas for next year’s program.
Headlines for Nov 13-16
- Posted November 16th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
B. Globe on PatientsLikeMe and other social networking sites for patients and how the pool of participants are increasingly being used as research participants. A key theme at Health Content08.
Long investigative piece in B. Globe on lack of price transparency in hospitals, with focus on varying prices paid by insurers for same procedure in different hospitals. Article elicited large # comments from readers, pointing out some shortcomings, but data that are reported clearly hit a nerve.
New HHS site (AHRQ) that provides an aggregate look at all teh quality and performance improvement measures throughout HHS.
Press release from HealthCentral about their new ad network.
Press release from Icyou.com announcing Nina’s participation on the Lively Up Your Content panel at Health Content08.
David E. Williams on pros and cons of home monitoring devices, as relates to Intel’s new initiatives in this space.
HealthGrades is participating in sponsoring a portal (PlanSmartChoice.com) for federal employees to help them select their health care coverage, along with Asparity Decision Solutions
“QualityHealth.com is the leading provider of performance based targeted healthcare advertising and information on the Web.” Press release goes on to explain that QualityHealth.com ” QualityHealth.com offers consumers health savings opportunities along with insightful content such as our new ‘Expert Q&A’ section that can help people make the right choices when it comes to their health.”
Commentary on the slow pick-up of PHRs.
Health Content Innovators Take Center Stage at Health Content08
- Posted November 14th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Our Health Content08 Conference, held Wednesday & Thursday of this week was a resounding success. We’d like to thank the outstanding speakers, advisory board, sponsors and engaged audience for their participation. More reviews of the conference will be posted soon, as well as links to session videos for those who attended. For now, I append the press release that details the early-stage companies that dazzled us at the Wednesday afternoon Innovators Showcase. [Note, BodyMaps was unable to attend.]
—————————————————————————————-
Wed Nov 12, 2008 8:00am EST
Conference, produced by Health Content Advisors, convenes
commercial health content producers and syndicators in both consumer
and professional markets
PHILADELPHIA–(Business Wire)–
Health Content Advisors, (www.healthcontentadvisors.com) (a
division of InfoCommerce Group, Inc. (www.infocommercegroup.com) is
pleased to announce the winning entrants to present at Health
Content08’s Innovators Showcase being held today, Wednesday, November
12 from 2-5pm.
The debut Innovators Showcase is being held in conjunction with
Health Content08, a full-day conference that takes place on Thursday,
November 13, from 9 am to 5 pm, both at the Park Hyatt, Philadelphia.
It is being sponsored by Berkery, Noyes.
The theme of Health Content08, Incumbents, Innovators, and
Intermediaries, was chosen to highlight how technology and market
forces are driving health content publishers to innovate or partner to
meet new market opportunities.
The twelve early-stage health content companies selected to
present at the Innovators Showcase include:
BodyMaps, Paramount, CA
change:healthcare, Franklin, TN
eCaring, New York, NY
ENURGI, Singer Island, FL
DeepDyve(TM) (formerly Infovell), Menlo Park, CA
GenomeQuest, Westborough, MA
HealthWorldWeb, Staten Island, NY
Healthcare News Network, Cape Coral, FL
Healthy Humans, Wayne, PA
OneClickMed, Mesa, AZ
PatientImpact, Evanston, IL
RemedyMD, Sandy, UT
At Innovators Showcase, you will hear from companies that are:
– creating and transforming content to provide better sources of
healthcare information to consumer markets;
– creating infrastructure and integrating data with applications
to improve the flow of information between stakeholders; and
– capitalizing on the trend toward personalized medicine.
The value-added health care information and decision tools
produced by these innovators are transforming the market for health
care information used by all stakeholders in the health care industry,
including hospitals and physician practices, medical and clinical
researchers, consumers/patients, pharmaceutical companies, patient
advocates and other intermediaries.
Of special note, OneClickMed is making its debut at Health
Content08 and Infovell is announcing its new name and brand identity:
DeepDyve (TM).
The full program is available at: www.healthcontent08.com, with
detailed schedule at:
http://www.healthcontentadvisors.com/2008/11/05/schedule-for-health-co
ntent08/. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted
into your Internet browser’s address field. Remove the extra space if
one exists.)
ABOUT HEALTH CONTENT ADVISORS
Health Content Advisors provides consulting services to consumer
and business health content companies and serves as an industry
connector and arbiter of best practices and trends. It continually
monitors and interprets shifts in information usage in all sectors of
the healthcare market to guide publishers in their current business
and identify opportunities. Its blog, Health Content in Perspective,
is issued every week and can be accessed at
http://www.healthcontentadvisors.com/blog/. More information about Health
Content Advisors is available at http://www.healthcontentadvisors.comor by
calling 781-356-1766.
InfoCommerce Group, Inc.
Roxanne Christensen, 610-505-9189
rchristensen@infocommercegroup.com
Copyright Business Wire 2008
