HealthContentAdvisors

Does technology interrupt the communication between doctors & patients? That’s the question posed by this book. Sounds interesting.

New site that compiles info about neuroscience research.

Great example of the how new sources of data will transform medical research.

Jay Parkinson on specialized providers v. general hospitals.

Review of Adam Bosworth’s company, Keas, which uses custom “care plans” that collect personal data - directly or indirectly.

Consumer Watchdog wants change to HHS ruling that gives providers the authority to decide if/when a patient’s healthcare information security has been breached.

Karen Overstreet, named executive director of Lippincott CME unit. Interesting that she’ll report to the Medical Research division, not education. Has there been a re-org?

FDA will use data from Wolters Kluwer’s Pharma Solutions Source Lx Patient Studies Suite that captures patient-level Rx data and Pharmaceutical Audit Suite (PHAST) that captures Rx transactions to follow trends in flu medication prescribing activity by region and other patient demographics.

American Academy of Professional Coders offers free app to help convert ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes. See aapc.com.

New edition will include feeds from Factiva and use Factiva Smart Search. Need to check on pricing.

HealthPort Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based provider of healthcare IT solutions to hospitals and health systems, has set its IPO terms to six million common shares being offered at between $14 and $16 per share. It would have an initial market cap of approximately $360 million, were it to price at the high end of its range. HealthPort is owned by ABRY Partners. www.healthport.com

New study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that there are 67,000 fewer active physicians than calculations have suggested. The physician work force is also younger than previously estimated, with a greater proportion of doctors in their 20s and 30s and fewer who are 65 and older. By 2020, there will be 957,000 physicians, according to the new estimates, rather than the 1.05 million previously projected. Only 9 percent will be 65 or older, or half as many as had been predicted.

Team that developed InnovationRx at the Innovation Company bought the rights to the company and relaunched it as Aprexis Health Solutions. Aprexis focuses on patient adherence, with adherence to prescription drugs the focus.

WK Health announces new customer who will use Provation, now branded as Provation Order Sets, powered by UpToDate Decision Support.

UnitedHealth exceed analyst estimates despite declines in #insured, due to increases at drug unit.

Argentina the latest country to launch medical tourism program to encourage visitors to plan vacations centered around medical procedures (cosmetic and fertility are top treatments for medical tourists in Arg).

MVP Health, a regional health insurer in upstate NY, VT, and NH, will reimburse physicians for using RelayHealth’s WebVisit (TM) for patient consultations. MVP is partnering with Mohawk Valley Medical Associate (MVMA) to offer physician’s immediate reimbursement for implementing Relay’s webVisit.

presentation materials from Sept 24, 2009 webcasts on CAHPS Clinician and Group Survey

Concerns about patient privacy loom over electronic health records segment. George Hill of Leerink Swann estimates that by 2020, data mining could represent a $5 Billion industry.

Preview of next week’s Connected Health 09 conference in Boston. Focus: new devices and communications tools will help patients take more control of their health and leave hospital visits for severe events.

New device from Fitbit that tracks exercise & sleep & can be used to monitor calorie intake, too. Fitbit is joining a fast-growing segment of devices that help monitor healthy behavior & can be used by payer segment to evaluate lifestyle of insured populations.

Dr. Rob on medical costs and medical codes–and plug for his interview with Ira Glass for This American Life’s series on medical costs to be aired weekend of 10/17-18, 2009.

Quest Diagnostics’ MedPlus group, launches its Care360 ambulatory EHR on Oct.24. MedPlus will market the EHR to teh 150,000 physicians that already use its other Care360 apps and will offer hosted solutions for smaller practices. Quest’s MedPlus has the advantage of having existing relationships with these practices who use their other Care360 apps.

Developed in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Elsevier’s Brain Navigator tool, a “GPS system” that provides 3-D software to navigate the brain, adds new features for visualizing injection pathways and printing and exporting images. Interesting to note that this collaboration is with Elsevier’s Science and Technology Books division. Great example of how STM publishers can leverage their content through IT/R&D partnerships.

According to 2006 Kaiser Foundation study, nearly 1/3 of US companies that offer health insurance also offer some sort of wellness program. And, the focus on wellness has increased since then. This article describes some of the programs and $$ incentives for reaching wellness goals.

Very interesting. Healthy Advice Networks, which markets health info to physician practices with content sponsored by pharma and health and wellness brands, partners with HealthScape Consumer, a joint WK Health and Nielsen longitudinal panel to provide data on the effectiveness of sponsoring/promoting in Healthy Advice Network.

RightHealth is dba name of Kosmix, a Mt. View California search technology company that initially focused on the health space.

Digitas Health lists 140 possible uses of Twitter in healthcare. Nice.

Florida-based video sharing site that posts videos for docs to use for patient education.

CEO of OptumHealth’s Care Solutions group describes their programs to encourage healthy behavior before and after health care is needed.

Webmedx, which transcribes doctors’ voice recordings, implements new system powered by MarkLogic to create indexed data that can be fed into other apps.

Phase Forward signs Hungarian pharma company, Gedeon Richter, to multi-year deal for PF’s clinical trial management s/w.

Incentives for employees to participate in wellness programs are growing. Safeway is an example of a company that offers financial rewards to employees who achieve certain wellness goals. To encourage similar programs, health reform legislation will increase existing limits for rewards. This amendment is becoming known as the “Safeway Amendment”.

John Sharp’s presentation at Cleveland Clinic seminar on how IT is transforming medical practice and research. Good preso with good examples.

Article on MD who won HHS contest to prepare a PSA on H1N1. Dr. Clarke wrote a rap music PSA. Links to Youtube video of him performing the short video included.

Among issues mentioned in article, complexity of medical knowledge and explosion of # of journal articles.

Another review of Health 2.0 conference with good overview of startups (and some older companies) that presented.

Excellent review of last week’s Health 2.0 conference. John Moore from Chilmark Research understands the Health IT issues as well as anyone and articulates problems of interoperability better than anyone. Only comment from Health CONTENT Advisors: content producers/owners are left out of the discussion. IT companies don’t own the data, in fact at the current time they don’t bundle in much data with their services. But, we see lots of activity in deals between healthcare publishers and health IT vendors occurring and think that health content will receive more attention from the folks who are focused on IT aspect in the near future. Note, John’s comment abt Quicken Health & fact that one can hover over a test and see info about it is a great example of how content adds “meaning” to the use of IT tools.

Kevin Kruse of Kru Research details his reasons for launching e-Patient Connections 2009. I am speaking at the conference on the market for health content for e-patients. Important point: e-Patients both produce and consume health info.

Balanced review of the recent Health 2.0 conference in SF.

Safeway, which has stood out for its programs to encourage healthy behavior (mainly weight loss) of its employees, supports amendment that will allow larger incentives to employees who achieve health goals –as discounts to their health insurance premiums.

Atlantic writer describes Adam Bosworth’s new company, Keas. Keas helps individuals make healthy choices and uses an individual’s personal health data to customize alerts and plans for health. Writer is dubious that consumers will flock to this type of “big brother” service that tells them how to eat, exercise, etc. But, I think she misses the point. Individuals will be pressured to use services like this by the companies that pay for their health insurance and healthcare. Rewards, incentives, nudges–however you want to characterize them–will be need in the form of cash or other incentives to encourage individuals to participate. Eventually, concern for one’s health may be sufficient to encourage usage, but not yet…

List by topic of recommended external resources by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Review of the “tools” panel at Health 2.0, which highlighted integration of FirstDataBank’s drug codes for use by new consumer-focused health resources. Good move by Hearst’s FirstDataBank.

Verizon teams with Xora to provide app to track activity of home health workers and provide navigational tools.

Very good post on the benefits of having audience members using Twitter during a conference presentation. Worthwhile reading for conference producers and presenters.

Article reports on possibility that UK could overhaul CME and require docs to pay 1/2 of CME costs.

Ed Silverman, who used to write the Pharmalot blog, which was discontinued when the newspaper that hosted it gave him a buyout offer and he went to Elsevier to edit the Pink Sheet, will restart blogging.

Notes from Data Drives Decisions panel at Health2.0.

Everyday Health partners with DSHI Systems to offer video symptom checker tool for consumers.

Josh Seidman emphasizes the importance of sufficient customer research prior to developing health IT tools. Josh asked panelists from start-ups that have created health info tools for patients how they did their research and the lack of responses is telling. In-depth research of usage behavior and user-needs seems to be lacking in health IT for professionals as well as patients.

Story on Adam Bosworth’s new company, Keas. May have already bookmarked this story.

Royalty-based venture financing–where investors receive a % of monthly revenue– is gaining attention as new financing model.

IOM held 2-day workshop on Evidence-Driven Practice. More info here.

HealthCentral’s CEO, Chris Schroeder, will speak at Health 2.0 on 10/6 & will highlight growth in number of bloggers on their network, primarily from their acq. of Wellsphere.com.

Announcement of new partnerships with Harvard Pilgrim & the postal service union’s health plan. Also lists some recent features, including ability to graph test results over time.

OptumHealth and American Well are partnering to provide online medical services to Optum’s insured population.

CVS’s Medicare Drug plan(SilverScript and Accendo) will qualify to cover fewer subsidized members in 2010. They forecast losing about 1/3 of their subsidized customers in 2010.

XML version of Fed Reg now available. Big news for value-added publishers of gov’t data. I once produced a CD-ROM version of Fed Register: formatting to make a useful reference tool was not easy at that time.

Author published by S&S describes online storage companies RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile and how they play a role in illegal sharing of ebook files.

Schmidt says Google not a content company, but is in business to help content companies thrive. Disingenuous statement. They are a content producer and will be a content seller if/when Google Books Settlement is concluded.

Description of retail clinics, like CVS MinuteClinic.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn writes about the newly released study from PWC titled, “Transforming healthcare through secondary use of health data”. Jane focused on barriers to data liquidity (data flows between apps/stakeholders0. I’ll write up post that focuses on near-term opportunities for data publishers to offer data collections and analytic tools to mine newly available “secondary data” that is a byproduct of digitizing health records and health events.

Review of Health IT meeting 9/30/09 at Harvard Medical School to discuss “substitutability” aka interoperability/data exchange via APIs.

Fabulous case studies and overview of how the secondary data–or data that can be mined from digital repositories of health records and other recorded health event–from PWC.

CDC funds 4 new centers of excellence in public health informatics at Harvard Pilgrim, Indiana university, U. Pittsburgh and U. Utah. Centers will conduct research using informatics and real-time surveillance of data from hospitals and healthcare systems to discern potential health threats.

Study on the effects of online support groups fails to yield positive results, but more study is needed.

PhRMA, the drug industry trade assoc., revised guidelines for clinical trials and emphasizes transparency in research articles and in reporting results of all trials. Pharma companies have been criticized for not reporting results of drugs that they drop from their pipeline. And recently Pharma and journals publishers have been strongly criticized for ghostwriting practices, where well-known academics are asked to put their name as lead author, even when they have very little involvement with the study.

GenomeQuest partners with Thomson Reuters to include TR’s Geneseq database with GenomeQuest’s analytic tools.

As part of the Communities Putting Prevention to Work initiative, HHS makes $120 M available to US states & territories to use for prevention and wellness programs.

News of layoffs and restructuring debt at Advanstar. Comments offer very negative views.

Another example of partnerships with grocery chains to provide nutritional info to consumers. NuVal was in the news on Sunday for the nutritional labels they provide via several supermarket chains.

Phil Baumann provides more very helpful info on Google’s new Sidewiki.

Rundown of free and paid apps for medical formula calculations.

Spine-health.com wins Web Marketing Association award for third year in a row. Spine-health is a pioneer in providing an online community that provides authoritative health content for consumers and is evolving to become a central source of info for doctors, patient, and other stakeholders.

Good review of multiple ways that doctors are using social media in their work.

AMA on comparative effectiveness (CER)

Focus of partnership on developing monoclonal antibodies and vaccines for prevention of flu and other infectious & non-infectious diseases.

Nice to see videos that provide info to patients and advocates on how to navigate hospital stays.

NuVal, a Boston area start-up, provides rating based on nutritional value of foods. Scoring is done using ratio of good nutrients to harmful ingredients. Grocery stores are adding ratings to their shelf labels. Interesting–and based in my town of Braintree.

Ringful, an Austin, TX-based company, will demo its PreventiveCare.mobi app at DEMO.