HealthContentAdvisors

PatientFinder, which estimates # of insured patients in region that have specific diseases but are untreated, to be offered by HealthLeaders Interstudy. 

Denise Silber writes about provider ratings sites in Europe (France and UK) and how the survey-based rating sites differ from the “narrative” sites that allow patients to describe their experience in their own words. Combination would be better, wouldn’t it?

Xconomy on PatientsLikeMe, the Cambridge-based patient community site that leads in this space in collecting data. Also mentions Keas and its recent deal with Pfizer.

MSFT research at conference in Beijing talks about using XBox as part of a total health care system. Also refers to MSFT MyLife for Windows mobile phones, which uses mobile phones to capture and transmit data relevant to a EHR/PHR.

Interesting. Pfizer in alliance with Keas to enable health & wellness experts to produce and distribute online care plans directly to patients. My take: Pfizer and other pharma companies already subsidize the publication of a great deal of health care information. With this deal, they’re extending their reach into new channels.

Nice. CenterWatch now provides feeds by therapeutic area, disease category, FDA approved drugs and more that can be added to a website–for Free!

Patient Safety and workflow solutions company raises $30M led by TPG Biotechnology Partners.

Harvard Med School’s Laboratory for Quantitative Medicine has created personalized risk assessment tools based on “binary biology”. Interesting.

Really good analysis and commentary about ebook pricing and the recent controversy between Macmillan and Amazon about books on Kindle prices. I agree with author that the market should determine the value of the content. Market structure in book publishing industry inhibits market forces to apply. I like 4th paragraph that addresses fact that not all song tracks–or all books–have same value, so why are they priced nearly the same? In book publishing, the bizarre returns policy does provide mechanism to sell less popular books for very low prices, but authors receive no royalties. I also agree that far more ebooks would sell if prices were lower.

Very cool. FDA allows Bayesian analysis for studies of effectiveness in medical device clinical trials. Bayesian analysis allows use of results from previous studies to serve as prior distribution and may allow for results from smaller or shorter new studies to provide sufficient evidence of effectiveness.

Article describes how CMS is becoming more specific in requiring proof that treatments produce improved outcomes, not just evidence of their safety and short-term efficacy.

More on the Text4baby partnership btwn HHS, other fed agencies, industry (Pharma, telecom carriers) and insurance plans.

Important points about need for care providers to understand the effect of healthcare costs on patients who can’t afford expensive treatments. Cost factors must be considered when addressing compliance issues.

Hope Leman hits one out of the park with a fantastic interview with Danny Sands, MD at BIDMC and well-known in participatory medicine circle (also e-Patient Dave’s doctor).

WK Health updates Facts& Comparisons and rebrands it as (drumroll please…) Facts & Comparisons eAnswers. Drug info resource.

Astonishing. I finally read more details of the retraction and the original study. Only 12 children were studied and they were paid 5 pounds each to give blood at a child’s birthday party. Researcher had claimed that they were all referred to physicians, which was not true. Parents who suspected link helped raise funds for the researcher via their lawyers. So, Lancet finally retracts article, but what about the 10-years worth of fallout from the falsified research that has rippled across official and unofficial research sites and commentary on the Web?

Google Ventures has invested in Adimab, a New Hampshire biopharma company and is providing computing power to handle the heavy lifting of computer search work of matching candidate antibodies and targets to speed up the current process used by most biopharma labs.

DeepDyve, the specialty search service with features that simplify finding related information, adds 6 new publishing partners. ACM, AIP, MIT Press, and UC Press among them. All 6 will join the DeepDyve article rental system that was introduced last year, which allows users access to premium subscription content for $0.99 per article (with volume discounts). More details in press release.

Good article that describes how quickly move toward personalized medicine–based on an individual’s genetic data–is occurring.

Cute: a Jeopardy quiz for the rudiments of EBM for medical librarians.

ABRY provides funding to HealthTrans to support organic growth and acquisitions.

David Weinberger on flaws in the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy model. Hierarchy is too limited–one way progression, when gaining knowledge is more of a system that requires observation, hypothesis building, and testing.

Long article that provides some evidence that breakthrough research is not getting sufficient coverage in top journals. Theory is that peer reviewers are protecting their own group and making it too difficult for innovative researchers to break through. I think there’s some credibility to the theory that innovations are more likely to occur outside of the traditional circles of scholarly publishing, since researchers are increasingly making source data available. New metrics that incorporate real-time online measures are needed.

Addresses issue of why hospitals don’t track and use data to help them reduce risk in surgery. Mentions NSQUIP from ACS.

Social networking for weight loss site, iChange, gets funding from Momentum Venture Managment(MVM) and names MVM principal Stuart MacFarlane CEO. MacFarlane fmly of Insider Pages.

Good description of how the use of e-prescribing systems (in this case Kryptic) can alert doctors & pharmacists of “doctor shoppers” who go from doctor to doctor to get multiple prescriptions for pain medications and other drugs.

Reports on programs that provide behavioral counseling to MDs that have depression, substance abuse and stress problems.