HealthContentAdvisors

David E. Williams blasts medical journal publishers for perpetuating the ghost-writing practice where Pharma pays academic physicians to put their name as lead author on research articles.

Silverlink, a Boston area company, provides s/w that helps providers send phone msgs to patients w/ alerts about health coverage & appt. reminders.

Big Pharma is increasingly outsourcing CRO and manufacturing to India.

As expected (at least by me), Twitter will introduce premium commercial accounts that include additional features (and probably better security).

AHA’s AHA Solutions arm has endorsed the EXTENSION HealthID system of smart cards for personal health info. System includes reading appliance and smart cards and integrates with PMS systems in hospitals & clinics. Smartcards are widely used in US, but have gained popularity in UK.

FDA has proposed mandatory digital reporting of postmarket adverse effects of drugs & devices. Pilot program has been in effect for years.

KevinMD asks how useful it is to share full lab reports with patients, since data are not presented in user-friendly format that could be easily understood by most patients. 2 points: 1) some patients will want the full reports–there will always be a distribution of preferences among the full patient population; 2) there is clearly an opportunity for a publisher to provide a tool that helps patients understand the lab test results and record them over time in a PHR or other data tracking tool.

Amazon, MSFT, & Yahoo plan to join the Internet Archive in the Open Book Alliance to oppose the Google Book Settlement. What took them so long?

Cool dashboard of Pharma companies’ tweets created by Ignite Labs.

David Weinberger explains why transparency is so important in today’s info economy.

RWJF’s research and links to the proposed Prometheus Payment Model, which attempts to pay for quality.

Interview w/ Dr. Bhan, founder of Ozmosis. Have to go back and read in full.

Excellent article that details total costs of implementing EHR systems at variety of provider institutions. Costs include training time, learning curve (including learning to type for some MDs), lost revenue through fewer patients seen during transition periods that can last >6 months, and worst cases where revenue is lost through malfunctions in s/w that cause billing problems. Not a pretty picture for very expensive systems. Bright side, effective implementation leads to improved patient outcomes (but not cost efficiencies for doctors).

Commentary about recent ASAE (Am Society Assoc Execs) meeting. Author emphasizes that associations do not exist to faciliate “associating”, rather to further the interests of the group they represent. Comments apply more heavily to industry trade associations than scholarly societies. However, some of the insights apply to both.

Good to see NIH funding research on intestinal microbes & the effect of antibiotics on upsetting the balance.

Shwen Gee’s slides from recent session on Pharma use of social media. Excellent overview & intro to Twitter.

Good article that describes why biologics are attractive to big pharma — and why that is leading to acq. of biotech companies by pharma.

Susannah Fox of Pew Research summarizes her notes from CDC’s Health Communications conference. Like her comment about using mobile devices (esp. phones) for exchanging health data & info.

Recent focus on some practices in medical scholarly publishing is likely to lead to new regulations. Using medical communications companies to write articles authored in name only by academics has been common, but recent attention on this practice is almost definitely going to lead to more transparency and changes in the practice.

Prof. Uwe Reinhardt clearly lays out a key element of the health care reform debate that has not received enough attention: rising health care costs come out of workers wages/salaries in the form of lower wages and higher layoffs.

WSJ puts spotlight on pharmacy benefit management (PBM) companies, which act as intermediaries to manage prescription sales for health insurance providers. Some of the health reform proposals call for PBMs to make available the prices they negotiate with pharma companies. In an “interesting” argument, the PBM association says that “transparency” will hurt competition. The more likely concern: transparency will expose the share of negotiated cost savings on drugs that the PBMs keep for themselves.

Siemens talks EHRs, partnerships, and interoperability.

Good list of people to follow to monitor Pharma social media.

Nice to see CenterWatch’s partnering with TrialX to make it easier for patients to find relevant clinical trials.

Focuses on role of employers–the key beneficiaries of maintaining healthy workers–in providing incentives for healthy behavior.

Boston area Caritas Christi Health Care to sell laboratory business to Quest Diagnostics, the leading medical testing company. Caritas will maintain its in-hospital testing facilites. Deal with Quest provides greater interoperability of test results with EMRs.

Michael Wolff offers his commentary on Mark Cuban’s suggestion that news publishers adopt the cable TV bundling model and have the ISP (or other utility) bill for content. In Wolff’s opinion, news content will always need advertising support. I agree with him for broad-based general news, although sponsorship by vendors of broad-based consumer goods/services is a valid model, too.

Good post on applications for Google Wave.

WSJ blog refers to piece in WaPo today about asking one’s doctor if he/she gets $$ from pharma companies. Checking online prior to visits is best method, IMO. Much of scientific publishing is still behind firewall, but tools like DeepDyve and Google Scholar help find citations, if not full articles.

Author of Caring for our Parents commentary on why it’s so hard for Americans to talk about end-of-life care and related issues.