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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.
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.
Today’s Health Content Headlines
- Posted November 17th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
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
Headlines for Nov 7-12
- Posted November 12th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
USDA providing load program to rural hospitals to implement EMRs,
David Rothman provides profile of Google Flu, which uses Google search term analysis to track trends in flu-related search activity.
NY Times on RNA research.
Warrior Care Web stie provides access to info on available medical programs and resources offered by Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, DoD and Veterans Affairs.
Gannett’s health group buys patient education site.
Steve Beller writes a long post on issues related to privacy and comments on the role of the patient in maintaining and sharing his/her own health info.
Express Scripts receives threat to reveal cusomter info from data that had been stolen from their system.
Lucrative elective procedure are being put off, which is affecting the profit margins of some hospitals.
Long report (>1000 pages) published by AHRQ, prepared by Oregon Health & Science University’s Evidence-Based Practice Center. Uses literature search to study usage behavior of digital tools to manage health among the elderly, chronically ill, and other underserved populations.
Health Central President, Jeremy Shane, Added to Health Content08 Program
- Posted November 7th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Just 5 days away! Limited Seats Remain
Health Content08 is just 5 days away and we’re busy making final preparations for the event. The response to our second annual conference has been extremely positive and we’re looking forward to spending a day and a half with an enthusiastic group of key decisionmakers in the health content sector who are shaping the future of information resources for physicians, consumers, providers, and other stakeholders in the healthcare industry.
We would like to announce the latest additions to our speaker roster and offer a brief recap of program highlights and schedule.
Recent additions to our speaker roster include:
- Thomas Johnsrud, EVP, Trigram America
- Scott Meyer, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Warburg Pincus
- Anne Seymour, Associate Director, Biomedical Library, University of Pennsylvania
- Jeremy Shane, President of Health Central Network
Health Content08 kicks off with the Innovators Showcase on Wednesday, November 12. This event will highlight 12 companies that our advisory board has chosen as noteworthy examples of early-stage companies that are poised to produce positive change for publishers and consumers of health care information. The presenting companies will be announced in a press release on Wednesday.
Thursday’s full-day program includes a blockbuster array of speakers representing the top medical and life science publishers, CEOs of the largest online consumer health companies, investment analysts who track the hottest sectors within health care, leading health content consultants, publishing experts who apply technology to content to create decision tools, medical librarians, and superstar MDs who succeed in business as well as medicine. This mix of speakers from the professional and consumer segments is designed to shine a light on cross-over opportunities for publishers that may not have considered serving non-traditional segments.
The full conference schedule has been posted online to facilitate networking at the event. If you are registered and haven’t yet received the preshow list, please contact me at: jmccallum@infocommercegroup.com.
Register now before it’s too late!
Headlines for Nov 4-6
- Posted November 7th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Big health insurance companies making acquisitions to prepare to shift some attention toward administering Medicaid plans for states. “Many insurers have been betting that Democrats will focus on expanding access to Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, by jumping deeper into the business of running those plans for states. Aetna Inc. expanded in that sector last year when it bought Schaller Anderson, a Medicaid plan operator in nine states, for $535 million. UnitedHealth Group Inc., already a big player in Medicaid, increased its foothold by acquiring Unison Health Plans, in June.”
The entire genome of woman who died from AML is sequenced, leading to new insight into genes that contribute to the disease.
More about Ian Smith, the newly appointed CEO of Reed Elsevier to replace Crispin Davis in March 2009.
Bayer and Onyx Pharmaceuticals sponsor educational resource program on liver cancer, in conjunction with American Liver Foundation and Vital Options Intl. “The centerpiece of the program is the Living with Liver Cancer Web site (http://www.LivingwithLiverCancer.com), which serves as a resource for people seeking more information about liver cancer and liver disease. To expand access and availability of the program to a wider audience, information on the Web site will be translated into several different languages, including Chinese and Spanish. More than 600,000 cases of liver cancer are diagnosed worldwide each year, including 15,000 cases in the United States.(1,2)”
Clayton Christensen’s advertorial for his upcoming book with (the late) Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription. I like that he invokes Say’s Law that supply creates its own demand and applies that to our healthcare system. Key point is that incumbent institutions are trying to keep out innovators.
More on rationale behind Rodale layoffs and re-org. “[A]dvertisers have been asking the company to offer them standardized sales packages across print, digital and events businesses, rather than building complicated custom programs for each campaign they run.” Online ad revenues projected to increase 14% in 2008; print 1%.
Advanstar expands its eye-care titles with launch of Optometry Times next March.
Rodale, which publishes Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Runner’s World and other health/lifestyle pubs, lays of 10%. Outsourcing IT and dismantling marketing solutions group.
Ian Smith, former head of homebuilder Taylor Woodrow PLC, to succeed Davis as CEO of Reed Elsevier in March 2009. Note, Smith also “worked as CEO of General Healthcare Group, Britain’s largest provider of acute private care, and was in change of Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Exel Group, a freight management company.”
Schedule for Health Content08
- Posted November 5th 2008
- Comments (2)
- by Janice
I have received several requests for the schedule of the sessions at Health Content08, which will be held next week (Wednesday, November 12 and Thursday, November 13) at the Park Hyatt in Philadelphia. We look forward to meeting many of you there!
The full schedule follows:
Conference Program
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 - Grand Ballroom
INNOVATORS SHOWCASE
2:00 - 5:00 Innovator Presentations
5:00 - 6:30 Cocktail Reception sponsored by Berkery Noyes
Thursday, November 13, 2008
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
8:00-9:00 Continental Breakfast
9:00-9:10 SETTING THE THEME
Russell Perkins, Founder and Managing Director, InfoCommerce Group
Janice McCallum, Managing Director, Health Content Advisors
9:10-10:00 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
West Shell III, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Healthline Networks
10:00-10:10 Health Content in Perspective: The Big Picture
Janice McCallum, Managing Director, Health Content Advisors
10:10-11:00 Session - Consumer-driven healthcare
Scott Meyer, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Warburg Pincus [Moderator]
Jack Barrette, CEO & Founder, WEGO Health
Jeremy Shane, President, Health Central Network
Benjamin Wolin, CEO & Co-founder, Waterfront Media Inc.
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-12:15 Session - Innovations in Evidence-based Medicine
Tom O’Connor, Managing Director, Berkery Noyes [moderator]
Nancy Greengold, MD, MBA, Vice President & Medical Director, Hearst Business Media
Dr. Sundeep Karnik, MD, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Development, Elsevier Health Sciences
Gary D. Kennedy, CEO & Chairman, RemedyMD
Linda Peitzman, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Wolters Kluwer Health
12:15-1:30 LUNCH - Conservatory
1:30- 2:15 Session - Lively Up Your Content
Megan St. John, Managing Director, InfoCommerce Group [moderator]
Deborah Breen, Director of Medical Market Development, EBSCO Publishing
Helen Hoart, President, StayWell Consumer Health Publishing
Nina Sossamon-Pogue, VP of Media, BenefitFocus
2:15 - 3:00 Session - Clinical News to Clinical Tools
Teri Mendelsohn, President, Mendelsohn Consulting, Inc [moderator]
Mike Alic, Vice President, Electronic Media Group, Advanstar Communications
Carolyn Simpkins, MD, Business Development Manager, BMJ Point of Care
3:15 - 3:35 Break
3:35 - 4:15 Session - Getting Clear on Price Transparency
Russell Perkins, Founder and Managing Director, InfoCommerce Group [moderator]
Danny Ezrol, Vice President, Strategy & Business Development
Thomas Johnsrud, Executive Vice President, Trigram America
Ronni Sandroff, Director/Editor, Health and Family, Consumer Reports
4:15- 5:00 Session - Let’s Get Personal
Janice McCallum, Managing Director, Health Content Advisors [moderator]
Anne Seymour, Associate Director, BioMedical Library, University of Pennsylvania
Rishi Sikka, MD, Chief Medial Officer, Praxeon
Conference concludes
Sponsored by: Berkery Noyes
Physicians Wellness Network Launches Widget
- Posted November 4th 2008
- Comment (1)
- by Marji
Physicians Wellness Network (PWN), a provider of compliance services for online wellness screening tests that is comprised of a national network of 250 credentialed physicians, has launched its webLAB widget. The widget is part of an affiliate program that enables consumer health sites to offer consumer-selected lab test services at no cost to the affiliate site. It also allows these sites to distribute the tests in compliance with state regulations and federal disclosure laws. The lab tests include screenings for general wellness, heart health, diabetes and prostate cancer.
webLAB features a fully documented application program interface (API) that allows affiliate sites to customize the widget with their own logo and colors. After a consumer places an order for a test, webLAB automatically submits it to a PWN physician for review and authorization. Then, webLAB directs the consumer to the nearest blood draw lab station to provide a sample. A PWN physician then reviews the results and consumers receive the results within days. The results can be stored via the affiliate site, such as Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health, so consumers can track those results over time.
This new widget will empower both consumers and health information websites. This is just another component that will enable consumers to manage their own health even better. For those who want to take a more active role, and not necessarily visit a physician for routine tests, this should prove to be a valuable service.
For health information sites, this will help them move closer to becoming one-stop shops for consumers who demand more than just health-related content from such sites these days. They want additional services from their online providers and this certainly fits the bill.
