HealthContentAdvisors

ER MD writes about loss of relationships between doctors & patients & how increased use of hospitalists may have contributed.

Good article that describe recent instances of data center projects by providers.

Good news for PE companies.

John Hussman, founder of Hussman Econometric Advisors, pledges $20M to U. Miami for genetic research. Genetics center has been renames John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.

Dana Blankenhorn on how Fast Forward (a medical foundation) uses SaaS computing.

Site with info on generic drug programs of various pharmacies.

Vendors of EHR systems for large hospitals are now targeting smaller providers, since 95% of large hospitals have already chosen EHR vendor. Cerner, Epic, Eclipsys, and Siemens are 4 big vendors singled out.

Links to reports by Berkman Center on copyright policies at private foundations.

Good evidence that healthcare analytics companies are well-positioned, with or without health reform. Private sector will increasingly study effectiveness of treatments using outcomes data & comparing them to costs.

Editor & Publisher on ebooks and newspapers. To read.

Good article on the placebo effect.

PharmaTimes reports that NEJM editor, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen and BMJ editor, Dr. Fiona Godlee, will argue next month at Oxford Union that clinical trials should not be conducted by the pharma companies that are developing the drugs due to conflict of interest.

American heatlh Care Association reports on letter sent by 31 state attys general to HHS sec’y Sebelius to critique CMS Nursing Home Five Star Rating System, which was put in place at the end of the last administration.

Description of how Intuit’s QuickHeatlh helps consumers interpret medical expenses; esp. useful for high deductible plans with HSAs.

Gary Price summarizes program for 8/28 conference at UC Berkeley about Google Books Settlement.

iAtros introduces eRoentgen, an iPhone app that helps in choosing best imaging test.

More reason to combat obesity: the research shows it leads to shrinkage of the brain, esp. areas used for decisionmaking.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center finds that “universal floor” where multiple patient types are grouped and care is coordinated by nurses. Sounds like the old model with a twist.

EPub versions of 1 million books now available on Google. EPub offers some advantages over PDF versions.

Long and quite detailed critique of WebMD the Magazine. Author criticizes the “woman’s magazine” nature of WebMD’s mag (and I would extend the comment to much of what is on the website for consumers). In efforts to make the information entertaining, author says that WebMD crosses the line by not providing scientific basis and important related information for much of the editorial info in the publication. Author also criticizes the acceptance of advertising by questionnable vendors. IMO, it is unfortunate that too much of the info provided on so-called consumer health portals is similar to the info that Dr. Atwood criticizes in this article. There’s a big gap between the scientific literature and the material produced for consumer audiences. Far too little info is published for intelligent motivated consumer/patients.

From Medical Connectivity, brief article on how doctors are using Twitter to communicate with patients. Best for mass communication, such as public health alerts and distributing info on clinical trials.

MIT lab turns toys into med devices. Good use of design expertise.

Some research on effectiveness of free text (fulltext) search v. search via taxonomies like MeSH in Medline. Results indicate that fulltext performs as well. My comment: combination is likely the most effective!

BI lays off pharma sales reps and more layoffs are purportedly planned.

High profile case where quality of life v. cost could be debated. Not everyone can afford the treatment Ted Kennedy received, nor will everyone want it.

A group of predictions for the future; some health oriented, some not.

Embedded IT trainers to help with transition to Eclipsys was key.

Information Week lays out basics of enterprise business management that should be applied to health care IT.

Sec’y Health in MA writes about Rand report that provides analysis of 12 possible interventions with highest likelihood of reducing costs. Link to full report included.

Amer Assoc Family Physicians (AAFP) has launced Delta-Exchange, a social networking site for primary care physicians.

Forbes appears to be pro-public utility for healthcare info exchange in this article. Patrick Soon-Shiong describes reducing the gap between medical research and clinical use (translational medicine), a topic that I just noted in the post about the Army & Navy project at Walter Reed.

Kodak partners with MMR (MyMedicalRecords.com) to resell Kodak scanning technology for digitizing and importing paper records into EHRs.

Article in chicago Sun Times says 28% of those seeking health insurance will look online to find providers. eHealthInsurance is profiled.

Wikimedia is testing a new policy that will insert an editorial review step before articles about living people are published or modified.

Rx Ohio Collaborative (RxOC), a coop for group purchasing of Rx drugs, expands to include all Ohio public sector entities & now has about 12 participants. RxOC replaces independent PBMs and is expended to yield greater savings.

Aon survey shows that cost of claims paid in 2010 will increase 10.5% over 2009. Many employers say they won’t pass higher costs onto employees (and some employers won’t have higher premiums due to composition of their insured base) since employees have already taken so many hits in pay freezes & increased co-pays. I like this quote: “Employer contributions are not gifts, they’re part of total compensation. And if you end up having a more expensive health benefit that your employer pays most of, that means that your wages aren’t going up as fast as they would have” (Joseph Antos, AEI).

Brief article on Microsoft’s increasing activity in health/biotech space.

Change:healthcare, a Health Content08 Innovator, is selected by Keystone Insititute for Translational Medicine as partner in consortium to help bridge gap between scientific discoveries in medicine and clinical practice. Congratulations Chris Parks, CEO, change:healthcare!

To read: article on Drupal, a popular open source CMS for Web publishers. Talks about their business model.

NaturalNews.com has launched NaturalPedia.com, a wiki with contributions from hundreds of individual authors on topics related to natural health, wellness, and disease. Note, minimal testing of NaturalPedia indicates that it is primarily a shopping site with content used to refer readers to books and other content for sale. The wiki format is clever and the site seems very steeped in contextual advertising. Natural Health is headed by Mike Adams.

Morningstar on health reform’s impact on public companies in pharma & managed care industries.

Nice comparative analysis of drug info on Wikipedia v. Medscape Drug Reference. I think the conclusion applies to almost anything on Wikipedia relative to authoritative sources that have been carefully produced with editorial guidelines: “Wikipedia has a more narrow scope, is less complete, and has more errors of omission than the comparator database. Wikipedia may be a useful point of engagement for consumers, but is not authoritative and should only be a supplemental source of drug info.”

NPR now offers archival transcripts for no charge. Makes good sense, esp. if they can gain addt’l advertising/sponsorship rev. as result.

Actually, the article is about the initial ARRA spending on health IT, which will go toward regional training and HIEs.

HealthLeaders writes on new regs that require patient notification of security breaches.

AHRQ will hold a free webcast on Sept 24 on the clinical & group CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems), with two case studies presented by clinics who implemented the clinical CAHPS.

Dan Roam provides an entertaining slideshow to explain healthcare policy reform options under debate. Interesting for 2 reasons: 1) does a good of explaining the issues clearly; 2) demonstrates how good simple storytelling using basic graphics and data can provide entertaining content. Publishers take note!

Nice entry by CMIO (chief medical info officer) at Phoenix Childrens detailing the key success factors of their implementation of EHRs. InfoWeek is providing some very useful coverage of health IT.

Interesting event planned by Mayo Clinic in Sept to discuss innovation in health care.

Some good arguments, but overall Felstein’s points make a case for a public option to sit alongside private insurance. The rich can afford the costly innovative treatments, which if proven successful, will become more widely available at lower prices.

Kru Research has prepared a brief video that defines the participatory class of epatients. Their conference in October “Epatient Connections2009″ will focus on what this emerging segments means to healthcare vendors and information providers. Health Content Advisors is on the program speaking about publishing information for ePatients.

Short article by Steven Spear reinforces my recent blog “Health Content is Rapidly Becoming a Commodity”.

To be released next year: attachment for Wii that measures pulse.

Overview of eprescribing role in Health IT & reform.

More detail on “medical ghostwriting”, which is in fact quite common. I don’t think the whole category of medical communications agencies that write on behalf of research organizations needs to be overturned, but more transparency is definitely needed. And, more guidelines on under what conditions doctors in academia can lend their name to research articles.

Ascend Media sells Allied Healthcare to Anthem Media Group and Practice Builders to undisclosed buyer. Allied provides traditional trade pubs in 10 healthcare specialities; Practice Builders provides consulting to help medical practices with business issues, including selecting and managing IT services for practice mgmt.

Gina Kolata reveals the lack of transparency in health care costs. Explains why shifting the burden to consumers via HSAs won’t help keep costs down.

Managing expenses helps hospitals improve their financial results in Q1 2009, according to Thomson Reuters study. Link to study included.

I got to say that I find Gartner’s Hype Cycle out of touch with reality. The basic curve and phases along the curve make sense, but their taxonomy and placement of technologies along the curve seem less helpful than throwing darts. I’m sure there’s some sensible analysis in the whitepaper, but I don’t find their visual models useful.

NPR doing a series on the role of Free in digital content. Increasingly, Chris Anderson’s thesis resembles the traditional B2B trade publishing model. “Plus ca change…”

Datatrak, an electronic data capture (EDC) company, improves its performance. Was delisted from Nasdaq. Compare to Medidata that went public recently.

another story about changes in medical school curricula & teaching methods.

As part of greater revenue cycle management (RCM) efforts, hospitals now rate patients on ability to pay and use risk calculations in estimating their revenue.

Large percentage (82%) of drug ads on Yahoo! lead to illegitimate pharma sites. (Bold thought: there is clearly a demand for a different way to buy pharmaceuticals; our existing system in the US isn’t serving needs of consumers. We need a change.)

Good point about lack of CMS director.

John Moore of Chilmark will moderate panel on PHRs at upcoming AHRQ event.

Advice for redesigning Rx drug labels to make them less likely to be confused by patients; and for label inserts to have greater relevance & usability for patients.

Paul Levy, CEO BIDMC, writes of Consumer health Quality Council, founded by Health Care for All, which is seeking stories from patients or caregivers about their experiences with hospitals-esp. experiences that involve avoidable errors.

NPR does story on Patient Central, a site from Consumers’ Checkbook. At first glance, yet another site that offers patients a chance to rate doctors. Most aren’t very good. What I like about this one: they get lists of doctors & patients from insurance companies and sent surveys to patients, which gives them a good base and higher # ratings per doctor.

InfoWeek reports on Vanguard Health’s joining the Dossia consortium and writes on the role of employers in providing PHR info to employees. Seems to me that role of employers has been underreported by other media in the helath reform debate.

Innocentive, a Boston-area company that offers online communities to help solve scientific problems, gets 2nd round funding. Pharma represents major client base.

Good article that 1)makes it clear that lots of research and CME material are funded by Pharma and 2) offers some tips on uncovering the funding behind research & cme programs.

MDEverywhere, an RCM vendor to physicians, teams with DoctorsManagement to market provider credentiallying services, coding audits and seminars, insurance contract negotiations, and group purchasing services.

Healthport, a health IT provider in Alpharetta, Georgia, files S1 for IPO. Hopes to raise $100 million. Healthport is owned by ABRY Partners. Thanks to PEHub for notification.

One Equity invests $75M in ArthroCare Corp, a producer of minimally-invasive surgical devices.

A site devoted to Twitter usage by pharma.

Full art. avail only to subsribers. Covers effect of recent restrictions banning gifts from vendors to doctors, including meals.

Hospitals earn bonuses from CMS for meeting quality benchmarks, but as article points out, they lose other reimbursement money from CMS due to fewer admissions.

Anil Dash names the Exec. branch as most interesting start-up for its .gov online data initiatives. Data.gov, recovery.gov. ITspending.gov. Good post.

Interesting piece on how our brains seeks out more info to support what we “know” rather than info that contradicts what we “know”.

Rational decisons about the ethics of costs for advanced medical technology aren’t sufficiently discussed, according to medial ethicist Callahan.

Verizon offers some health apps for some Verizon phones, but the costs start at $5.99/mo.

Vitality, a Boston area company, creates “GlowCaps” for medicine bottle caps, which are connected to the Internet and blink and play a tune when it’s time to take medications. We noted this company before, but the GlowCaps just went on sale via Amazon (exclusively) yesterday (8/13/09). Vitality thinks payers (and possibly Pharma) will subsidize cost in future; for now, patients pay.

Long thoughtful post on Elsevier’s article of the future experiment. I don’t agree with everything author says, although I need more context to understand his comment about explaining content of scientific papers for lay people’s not being justifiied by scholarly publishers.

“Health insurance plans have begun using digital games to improve health.” Esp. with children (but I’ve read other cases where Wii games are used with seniors). Humana’s chief of consumer innovation says they “want to encourage healthy behavior…and show people how to have fun doing what is good for them”.

Usage of Google’s Knol has drifted down and it seems likely that it won’t last much beyond 2 years.

Quest Diagnostics, mostly known for their lab testing, also has eprescribing s/w, Care360 app, for medical practices.

Sony will adopt ePub format, an open standard developed by group that includes some large publishers (Random House, HarperCollins) and use Adobe anti-piracy s/w for their Reader, which allows limited sharing & copying, dropping their own proprietary closed systems with very restricted anticopying s/w.

FDA clarifies rules for providing access to investigational drugs for patients. Some could be available as early as end of Phase I. Link to FDA rules in article.

Article calls for comparative effectiveness info to be put on drug inserts.

Rodale’s Prevention magazine’s annual survey of over 1,000 consumers indicates that consumers who are likely to respond to DTC ad by asking their physician about a drug is down >5% in 2009. Rodale analysts assumes economics and lower level of DTC print ads are the cause.

Survey by Medical Group Management Assoc. of CO reports that implementing an EHR was the 3rd highest challenge for physician group practices (62% consider selecting and implement EHR a major challenge). Note, revenue management or RCM rated 1st with 73% rating operating costs that are rising faster than rev. as a considerable or extreme challenge. Link to summary report included in article.

Emdeon’s IPO raises $365.7 M, with shares priced at top of range & 10% more offered than originally planned. Sign of positive outlook for health IT providers, especially in the RCM/cost containment space.

In response to the high-priced TEDMED event ($4,000), some folks created a sister conference called BIL:PIL. The BIL:PIL event will focus on innovations in social media and med technology. Oct. 30-31, San Diego State.

Long article that describes slow progression toward cloud computing for healthcare providers. Some good examples and quotes.

Premier healthcare alliance, a consortium of 2,200 not-for-profit hospitals, will use 1SYNC for its standardized product identification network. Using 1SYNC will help standarized identification of all items purchased by healthcare proviers and improve efficiency of information exchange between supply-chain partners.

Interesting app on Wolfram Alpha that helps patients understand medical lab tests/results.

More activity in the “revenue cycle management” (RCM) aka claims processing segment of health IT. Intermedix (Ft. Lauderdale), which provides IT services to emergency providers has acquired HRA Medical Management (San Diego). HRA provides emergency physician and hospitalist billing services in Calif. and Nevada.

More focus from NY Times on use of de-identified patient data–and in this case–identified patient data used for marketing. In this case, Rx data is the focus.

Vince Kuraitis adds his voice to the MSFT HealthVault v. GoogleHealth comparison.

Thomson Reuters Healthcare releases its latest (Aug 10, 2009) Top 100 Hospitals list. Fmly Solucient, which TR acq.

Related to Dr. Seibel’s use of music in patient education, I found this home page from NIH for patient education for kids. Good uses of games, music, riddles, humor, art, etc. to engage kids.

Medical billing advocate: a new field spurred by the complexity in figuring out and appealing medical bills. Article also describes the high incidence of errors in medical bills. There’s an opportunity here for a “TurboTax” for medical bills for patients (and Intuit has already created Quicken Health).

Very interesting: Elsevier’s Gold Standard introduces drug info toolkits for consumers. Will be distributed via pharmacists and health info web sites. Developed from Gold Standard, the ELS-owned drug-info resource for health professionals. Good to see publishers of professional healthcare resources adapting the high quality content for a consumer audience.

Good article that describes organizational changes that are needed in provider and practitioner environments in order to adapt to outcomes-based performance models. Biggest change: aligning physicians objectives with hospital/providers’ objectives. Seems like a good idea to me! But, there are other subtle changes related to autonomy of physicians’ decisionmaking that are not as obviously beneficial, depending on one’s point of view.

Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals offers iPhone app called Blackbag that provides info & tools for docs to stay uptodate on medical news, journals summaries, conference coverage, videos, podcasts related to their areas of interest. Interesting.

Gilberrt Guide, founded in 2004, is a leading senior care website that offers a directory of service providers and related resources for seniors, their families and advocates to find providers. Recently, several elder care directory sites have come to my attention. Definitely a growth area, but still fragmented.

Salesforce invests about $10 M in Practice Fusion, a SF bay area SaaS EHR vendor which has annual rev of about $1M.

Counter to moves being made by large companies like Safeway and Walmart, financially troubled Boston Globe shuts down its on-site health faciility.

Prevention is important in keeping down high costs of avoidable illnesses, but there remains a question of whether additional focus on prevention will lower costs of our healthcare system. Depending on the incentive structure, providers will find “prevention and wellness” procedures, tests, programs, supplements and devices that will be costly (my opinion).

Larry Lessig, Prof. at Stanford, speaks at Berkman Center on topic “Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraies in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement” held 7/31/09.

Based on HCAHPS survey data, the foundation of the HospitalCompare.gov site, Consumer Reports has created more detailed patient satisfaction ratings for over 3,400 US hospitals. CR incorporates info from the Dartmouth Atlas about intensity of care and correlates with the patient satisfaction data. Results show that more conservative care (which results in shorter stays and lower costs) is correlates with higher satisfaction. The ratings will be available to subscribers of Consumer Reports.

Describes new iPhone health apps, including Chief Medical Officer for Google Health.

Todd Park, who co-founded Athenahealth with Jonathan Bush 12 years ago, will resign his board seat in order to become CTO of HHS.

Article describes some of the shortcomings in MA health reform, including cutbacks in funding to Boston Medical Center, which treats the city’s poor.

Step therapy, an approach where patients are started with less-expensive drugs and only given the more expensive Rxs (often the latest drugs) when the first are not effective, is described in this post.

Good article on why open data that can be shared and used to build value-added applications is key trend.

Interesting piece on Wolfram Alpha, which apparently wants to copyright all of the output generated by its “computational knowledge engine”. All output is delivered as GIF image to try to prevent reuse. Article raises some good points about what can be copyrighted and who owns results that sit on SaaS servers.

“Eyeballs are a terrible thing to waste”. Like that line in article that suggests that publishers need to look beyond ads as way to monetize their audiences. In this case, People, will create a gaming site for its female demographic. (When it is presumed that “women” like People, I worry about possible gender-confusion!).

Paul Levy CEO of BIDMC in Boston questions the appropriateness of Obama’s photo opp with a DaVinci surgical robot, mfg’d by Intuitive Surgial. Some good comments on post that drive home the point that ever-more expensive health IT that majority of US consumers cannot afford is driving up the cost of overall healthcare in US. Wealthiest with great health plans may want to fund next-gen health innovation, but our healthcare system subsidizes the wealthy to a greater extent than other segments, which drives up costs.

Brief article in Lancet, an Elsevier pub, about why Elsevier should divest its pharma communications group, Excerpta Medica. It should be pointed out that other large medical publishers also provide marketing services to pharma, including WK and Informa.

MN-based non-profit collaborative that aims to deliver “patient-centered and value-driven” care. Best in country per Kent Bottles.

WK Health’s AdisOnline offers new pricing options. In addition to subscription pricing for access to the complete collections of journals, Adisonline offers pay per view and subscriptions to themed collections of journals/newsletters (such as Diabetes, Urology, Clinical Trial Methodology, Data Mining, Ethics, and Drug Evaluations). New pricing in response to resistance to high price of previous broader subscriptions.

Some analysis of performance of EHR vendors and other health IT companies in light of expected ARRA spending. Health IT stocks outperformed S&P 500, no surprise.

Medscape unseats epocrates as top app.

Op-ed on case managment in hospitals and how they are focused on speeding discharge. Also touches on need for improved patient discharge instructions.

Siemens overal operating profit drops 21% in Q3, more than most analysts expected.

RE’s profits slide due to downturn in ad markets and mostly b/c of debt from Choicpoint acquisition in 2008. RE planned to sell RBI to pay down debt, but only small pieces have been sold & new CEO wants to retain RBI. RE will issue new stock to raise capital needed to improve “credit metrics and ensure that we are appropriately resourced to invest in the business, capture market opportunities and increase competitive differentiation” (Ian Smith, CEO)

HealthLeaders’ article that reviews Premier, Inc’s analysis of which industry segments will likely benefit from changes in health policy and which will likely be hurt.

Article in NEJM that describes total cost of health care for average families. Analysis done on 2006 data; costs have risen since then.

PhRMA’s provides congressional testimony on why industry support ($$) of CME is beneficial.

JBat sums up Yahoo/Microsoft deal and provides links to other docs.

Nice post about growth in medical information and the effects of electronic publishing on ability to find, digest and put-to-work advances in medical knowledge. In short, there’s still too much info to assimilate!

Multi-year contract to implement Epic Systems EMR and financial/admin s/w is valued at >$60million. Kettering Health Network serves Dayton Ohio region and chose to standardize on Epic rather than retain it “best-of-breed” approach used in the past. Presumably to improve interoperability.

KLAS pres Adam Gale addresses issues of selecting appropriate health IT for EHRs.

Excellent comparative table of journal pricing policies by large number of scholarly publishers.

One analysts lists Cerner, Athenahealth, and HLTH/WebMD as good prospects to benefit from ARRA HEalth IT funding. Note, HLTH & WebMD are merging, and WebMD will be the surviving entity.

James, most recently with McKesson, to be named CEO of QuadraMed when Q2 10-Q filed. QuadraMed provides clinical and financial IT to hospitals.

Privacy and security of personal health data seems to be the theme today. In this case, the article provides a rundown of issues being debated in the UK related to EHRs and PHRs.