HealthContentAdvisors

Good article on Endeca, a widely used search engine on shopping sites. Endeca’s “guided navigation” (also referred to as “faceted search”) works very well on structured information. Could it be adapted for less-formally structured info?

Article questions the role of employers in sponsoring wellness programs that tie participation to financial incentives such as reduced premiums.

Time covers e-Patient Dave’s story and writes about e-patient movement under the moniker “patient 2.0″. Provides a somewhat jaded view of non-medical specialist patients’ ability to understand medical info and make judgements. Suggests “rapid-learning” program for e-patients.

Els adds SNIP and SJR to Scopus to provide more complete citation metrics.

Prof. Robert Fogel, U. Chicago, contends that healthcare costs are high because consumers demand the high-cost extras and innovation.

John Halamka’s brief description of the breakout of grant funding plans by ONC.

good piece on why healthcare sector could be big market for Apple’s forthcoming tablet. The fact that iPhones are popular among MDs is one big reason.

Filing to Office of Science and Technology Policy from Elsevier regarding proposed regulations to offer more open access to scholarly publishing that is funded by US tax dollars.

Thomson Healthcare acquires ProfSoft-Health, a Needham, MA-based healthcare data analytics company. ““ProfSoft’s solutions will enhance the clinical performance measurement capabilities we provide to our healthcare payer customers,” said Jon Newpol, executive vice president of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters.”

David Williams interviews Bob Wachter of UCSF. Haven’t listened to it yet, but I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile use of time.

Good analysis of what the implications are of NY Times stated plans to allow inbound links to have access for free, but to charge metered access to direct users after an initial allotment of free pageviews.

Brigham and Women’s and Harvard Med School Professor Lawrence DeBuske decides to keep paid speaking role and gives up practicing & teaching. New limitations on accepting pay for for delivering canned presentations played role. Dr. DeBuske apparently gives several talks on behalf of multiple pharma companies each week.

John Sharp’s overview of Robt Wood Johnson Foundation’s new report on PHRs.

Commentary on why it is a positive sign that an MD is now leading Navigenics, a personalized genomics company.

Andrew Spong’s analysis of Twitter followers/followings of pharma companies.

Great news for data geeks and data content enthusiasts! Following up on their promise to add transparency to the federal government, Obama admin posts new data sources from all cabinet departments. I’m going to go download the Medicare data set now.

“Syed Tirmizi, MD, a longtime clinician and medical informatics leader at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, joined Quantros today as Vice President of International Business Development and Government Relations. Tirmizi helped lead the VA into its position as a pioneer in the use of electronic medical records (EMR) for point of care service delivery, enabling meaningful use of data to further patient safety and quality initiatives.”

TOC and abstract of just published study on significant benefits of reducing sodium intake for improving cardiovascular disease. See my notes in item below (third item) on same subject.

New Study in NEJM points to benefits of reducing salt intake in american diet. See my article on NY’s planned program to reduce salt and my criticism of AAFP for promoting salty foods in advertisements on their site. Note, a recheck of the AAFP FamilyDoctor.org site indicates that fewer packaged foods are advertised today. My blog appears to have been influential!

UMass Medical selects NDoc to automate home health services care. NDoc provides billing and operational s/w for use at pointofcare for home health services.

Trish (about.com) recounts story of pediatrician who molested patients and how comments on doctor rating sites prior to his conviction were positive. She suggests that the current array of ratings sites all share weaknesses. I tend to agree. Comments can be useful, but there need to be a large number and attributes of the people providing the ratings are needed. Plus, multiple criteria from formally reported and collected info need to form the basis. I’d want to know about outcomes, not just opinions.

Martin Fenner in Nature’s Nature Network on growing options for reading scholarly articles. Covers various devices as well as the concept of using connected information to provide context. No clear-cut perfect solution yet.

Excellent overview of trends in healthcare research being influenced by patient particpation via Internet channels. Specific focus on last October’s ePatient Connections conference. David Ellis and Julian Bond of HFD conclude that healthcare data analytics will become increasingly important in divining patterns from all the data being generated by epatients and even diagnosing for individual patients. They also point to the importance of mobile computing in healthcare.

Boston company that repurposes discarded specimens and matches basic EHR data to allow for additional medical research studies to be carried out on the specimens. iSpecimen then aggregates and uses datamining techniques to analyze patterns in the data.

Insititute for Safe Medication Practices reports results of recent survey about impact of recession on hospital staffing, capital expenses, patient acuity, and medication safety.

MedScape article that explores the value of online searching for patients. Shallow article with no conclusions, but it does offer some good criticism of existing options.

HubSpot marketing director explains why they have chosen to drop trade show exhibiting from their marketing mix. They still will attend events and seek speaking slots and will sponsor some events, but they don’t find the process of shipping booth & collateral and several sales people to be as worthwhile as other marketing options. Very good comments and responses.

MSNBC story that picks up on recent article in NEJM about pros and cons of sites that provide patient comments and ratings of doctors. Hook in this article is how some of the ratings sites, including Angie’s List, now flag doctors who are part of the Medical Justice Services group that require patients to sign contract that prohibits them from posting comments online. I agree that anonymous comments are a problem, and I’ve written before that a single numeric rating is insufficient, but it’s short-sighted of doctors to try to prohibit patients from expressing their opinions online.

Quidel, a San-Diego point-of-care diagnostic testing company, buys Diagnostic Hybrids, an Athens, Ohio company for $130 Million in cash. Acquisition expands the range of tests provided by the combined company, and should provide some economies in R&D.

Quest offers new test for early detection of colorectal cancer.

Cegedim Dendrite, the life sciences group of Cegedim, Paris-based CRM solutions provider, acquires SK&A, the leading US healthcare professionals directory. According to press release, revenues of SK&A are about $15 M.

Pfizer provides $3m in funding to Stanford to develop CME framework that incorporates a more participatory learning environment. Can it be donew/o industry influence given the source of the funding? Stanford says “yes”….

Another content + IT deal that will help hospitals/providers achieve meangingful use of EHRs. Zynx Health provides order sets; Meditech will integrate order sets from Zynx into EHR–press release doesn’t provide much detail on how they will integrate the info.

Quantros, a health IT company that helps hospitals with patient safety and risk assessment, names Gerard Livaudais, MD, MPH, as EVP Product Management.

athenahealth’s athenaClinicals was rated highly in recent KLAS ambulatory EMR report on confidence that athenaClinicals will meet meaningful use criteria.

SF-based Practice Fusion raises $5m of anticipated $7.1 round for it’s EHR software. Practice Fusion offers s/w for no charge and makes money with advertising–and has plans to sell data mined from customers.

Adidas introduce miCoach at CES. Similar to Nike’s popular Nike+.

David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts and chairman of Illumina, provides his top 5 trends to watch in biotech. Optimistic outlook for advances in curing cancer, but thinks that the data management and analysis issues will be a challenge due to the magnitude of data (”Moore’s Law just can’t keep up”).

Interesting example of how incentives from CMS can trickle down to specific programs within hospitals. In this case, residents can earn up to $1200 per year in incentive pay for reaching 3 goals related to patient satisfication–two from Press Ganey survey results and 1 from UCSF Medical Center compliance audits. Results are measured for a team and each teammember receives payment.

AHA endorses Surgical Info Systems for its scheduling, reporting and analytics modules.

Nice overview of Cell Press’s (Elsevier) new beta of their planned “article of the future”. Good features for zooming in on charts and link to more data and references. I need to do a more thorough review and hope to see it in action at Cell Press in Cambridge soon.

I’ve mentioned NuVal before. Intriguing company that provides single numeric rating of the nutritional value of foods and works with grocery stores to put labels on shelves. Concept is good, but like the writer, I think the single digit is insufficient. Good for shelf; but maybe more detail could be available via mobile device?

A physician reviews online doctor rating sites. Slams Vitals, in large part because only single numeric rating is available w/o paying. I’ve commented before that single number is ineffective for rating doctors–or most any other item. The reviewing physician likes the comments, however. Note, as list of comments gets larger, some kind of summary indicators become more necessary to annotate and summarize the long comments.

Nice article from Ingenix analytics on employer wellness programs.

Commonwealth Club program on medicine. Video.

AdvancedMD, which provides practice management and RCM solutions to medical practices, acquires PracticeOne, an EHR vendor. Interesting that the vertical integration is occurring in this direction–the vendors of admin/financial systems acquiring the EHR vendors. There’s lots of room for more consolidation in both markets.

“Krames has partnered with eClinicalWorks to provide consumer-friendly patient education to physicians using the electronic medical records system, eClinicalWorks 8.0.” Makes good sense.

Sramana Mitra interviews co-founders of NaviNet, a real-time health info exchange based in Boston area. 5-part interview with lots of good stats and info.

Gawande speaks about his new book, Checklist Manifesto, and the benefits of checklists in medical settings. Specifically mentions how checklists improve teamwork to the benefit of patients, and addresses the issue of physician resistance (20% of those surveyed after trying out checklists said they didn’t think they were useful; however >90% of that 20% group would want checklists to be used if they were the patient!).

Infotrends broad multi-client study on changing communications needs of small-to-medium sized businesses. TOC and list of tables only. Complete study >$10K

Caritas hospital group in Boston expands their relationship with athenahealth to include athenaClinicals. They already used athena’s revenue cycle management (RCM) s/w.

Lots of reaction to ONC’s release of MU requirements. This article highlights a few key concerns, including lack of focus on patient’s rights and support for outdated technology that will not provide advancements that are needed.

Article in NEJM questions equity of wellness program incentives in health reform package.

One of the questions posed by David Carr in this column about the reports of a new tablet device from Apple (rumored to be announced later this month (jan 2010)). If Apple can produce an e-reader/tablet that considerably improves the user experience over the Kindle, it could take off even at $800-$1000 per device. Publishers of all types–B2C and B2B–should be planning bus models (mostly advertising) around tablet devices.

Like this list, esp. the top 3.

Interesting comments from former insiders and analysts on what made Dow Jones vulnerable and changes under Murdoch. Note, I didn’t see any mention of the enterprise division of Dow Jones (there may be some comments, but most focus in on WSJ and the Telerate mess).

Mitch Wagner’s last article for InformationWeek w/ 2 examples of hospitals with successful implementation of business intelligence (document management, integration, analytics, dashboards) software.

“URAC, the nation’s leading health care accreditation and education organization, today announced its new Consumer Education Initiative, which teaches consumers about health insurance and identifies ways they can make more informed decisions about their health care.”

Nice video explanation of HL7 and how the standard facilitates sharing info between various IT systems in hospitals.

Quadrant HealthCom, publisher of The Female Patient, announced Tuesday that it has acquired Dowden Professional Publications from Lebhar-Friedman.With the deal, Quadrant takes control of four medical journals and an events group. The journals are: OBG Management, Current Psychiatry, The Journal of Family Practice and Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mentions Polka, an iPhone app, that allows remote monitoring.

From press release: “iGuard is a free, personal drug safety monitoring service that now provides 2 million consumers and caregivers with timely, personalized information about drug-drug interactions, drug-disease interactions, medication safety warnings, breaking safety news and medication recalls that may affect their health. In return, patients provide feedback on their medications to help researchers learn how to treat diseases better and minimize medication side effects. In 2009 alone, iGuard users have contributed toward 92 medical research studies – helping to develop new drugs for such diseases as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and diabetes.”

Healthy Humans (www.healthyhumans.com), an online wellness solutions company, received the 2009 Life Sciences Startup Company of the Year award from the Eastern Technology Council. The award, sponsored by the University of Sciences in Philadelphia, recognizes the company’s business and technology achievements. Healthy Humans provides online wellness programs that address the underlying causes of chronic disease and encourage prevention through personalized solutions and self-care methodologies. The company’s proprietary portal technology combines state-of-the-art medical protocols with evidence-based therapies. Note, Healthy Humans was highlighted as a Health Content08 Innovator at our HC08 conference.

Cerner acquires IMC Health Care, a provider of on-site health clinics for employers. Cerner established its own subsidiary to handle its self-insured and health & wellness needs. With acq. of IMC, Cerner is expanding to serve other self-insured employers.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn on PWC’s new report on 10 top trends in healthcare in 2010. Link to full report included.

More on HHS grant for designing db for comparative effective research.

Nice comparison table of existing e-book readers.

Good article that describes how electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) could become the foundation for effective data management in R&D enterprises.

Pfizer is equipping detailers with tablet computers that limit what samples can be provided to physicians based on their specialty and record the amount and type of samples. Doctors have to sign for receipt. It’s astonishing that sampels given to doctors in the past were not recorded!

A.D.A.M., long-known for its collection of anatomy images for medical education, launches an e-commerce enabled website that sells individual images. Prices seem to depend on the image and use. An graphic with multiple images related to carpal tunnel is priced at $39.95 for use in PPT; a simple image of the eye related to radial keratomy appears to be free, but site asked user to indicate how the image will be used.

Very interesting. “December 14, 2009 — Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), a leading international publisher for healthcare professionals and students, and part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has partnered with ProtoMED Medical Management Corporation (PMMC) to build a student version of its ProtoMED medical practice management software and its ProtoCHART electronic medical record (EMR) software.”

NY Times highlights the conundrum of Wm Styron’s estate where Random House and Styron’s family both claim ownership of e-book rights. I was involved in licensing books for an early e-book reader (SoftBook Press) in the late ’90s and met with all of the major NY & Boston publishing houses, including Random House. At that time, the majority of recent contracts with authors included incomplete clauses that essentially wrote that the publisher had rights to new electronic formats for the content licensed in the contract with terms to be negotiated. It was a terrible situation where rights were tied up but terms and conditions weren’t defined. It seems as though these same publishers have done very little in the past decade to update the terms of contracts that existed at that time, at least with terms that are fair to authors. As in the B2B publishing world,B2C publishers (and authors and agents) have to recognize that the digital version of the work is now the primary work.

Press Ganey acquires Patient Impact, announced 12/6/09. Patient Impact to become the unit specializing in physician practice & outpatient surveys. More details to come. Note, Patient Impact was a Health Content Innovator and presented at our Health Content08 conference: http://www.infocommercegroup.com/healthcontent/index.html

No doubt CME needs a redesign to change the current heavy subsidies by Pharma.

Article questions the affordability of new cancer drug, Folotyn, produced by Allos Therapeutics. Allos says price is in line with other specialty treatments and so far health insurers have agreed to cover it to treat aggressive tumors. Shines light on problem of high cost of developing drugs, but doesn’t offer any solutions.

Ad Age lists top magazines that have ceased publishing in 2009.

EBSCO’s DynaMed write-up on breast cancer screening. I don’t find their analysis and coverage very helpful.

Reports of small survey of device manufacturers; results show that social media isn’t yet part of the marketing mix for device companies.

Some commentary on benefits of move to ICD10 codes.

Good overview with links to other stories about Pharma’s slowness in developing mobile apps.

Note, this is the first I’ve heard of ebizMBA, who writes on their site that ebizMBA is “an eBusiness knowledgebase that helps you find the webs best ansers to your online business questions on topics ranging from online marketing and analytics to website development and venture capital”. To their credit, they offer some indication of the parameters they use to measure popularity.

Ovid to announce Universal Search, which allows clients to search across Ovid and client’s other internal databases in single search. Nice development.

Not surprising to hear that Informa has decided against going forward with bid for Springer. Debt levels of Springer make the deal hard to digest and current Springer owners PE firms Candover and Cinven want a sale to conclude quickly. If PE company acquires Springer, perhaps they would sell off pieces.

Dow Jones Venturesource reports Q2 2009 VC investments by industry. Healthcare the best performer and it outpaces IT for first time on record.

Good article with data and charts on changes in pharma sales & marketing over time and expected effects of health reform on pharma sales techniques.

Perspective on whether use of EMRs reduce liability for physicians. Focuses on discounts offered by insurance cos to doctors and practices that use EMRs.

Press releases doesn’t provide many details; I will look at Elsevier site soon. Embase is an index to biomedical research; relaunching as standalone product seems old-world.

Story about Full Yield, a wellness program for employers that provides its own food & nutrition programs. Story describes how Safeway, IBM, Pitney Bowes and others have saved money on health care costs via wellness programs. Major issue, however, is that these are companies that self-insure.

A one-sided critique of the shortcomings of EHR/EMR systems from Huffington Post. Whereas I agree that there are shortcomings, a more balanced report would have more credibility. Still, it offers some good basic info on what the feds are trying to do with ARRA funding.

Article mentions strong interest in healthcare sector by PE. Do PE professionals smell, taste and feel an opportunity in healthcare, too?

Excellent video presentation by Peter Norvig of Google. Data, semantics, search and much more.

Interesting article and site (which I just discovered) about opportunities in scientific/medical writing and journalism. Site focuses on female scientists.

Money-Driven Medicine site with free streaming version of the movie. Nice example of offering free streaming with promo for the paid DVD.

More on Informa bid for Springer from FT, which quotes analyts.

With over 2.1B Euros in debt (8X EBITA), Springer is a loaded target. Bids are expected to be under 400M Euros. But bigger question is: is there sustained value in publishers of scholarly research, an sector that is being disrupted by new models of scholarly communication and research?

Zynx Health’s order sets will be integrated with Keane’s Optimum EHR system thru this partership. Another example of embedding EBM info into EHRs.

“It” in this case, is the information in medical journal articles. Really good article about what could be done to help add context to each medical journal article that reports on new research so that journalists, patients, and even doctors can better understand the implications.

Study performed by Prof. Ashish Jha at HSPH and Catherine DesRoches at MGH indicates that using EHRs makes little difference in outcomes. This article goes on to point out that researchers also focus on the importance of changing processes & culture in hospitals to benefit from positive effects of using EMRs/EHRs. I’d add that hospitals and hospital systems that incorporate clinical information systems (order sets, point-of-care CDS) are more likely tho demonstrate improved outcomes. At this stage, not enough evidence-based content has been incorporated into EMR/EHRs.