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Archive for the ‘Companies’ Category

PHR Standards Big Step Forward

• Posted June 26th 2008
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• by Janice

While privacy concerns remain a deterrent to the adoption of personal healthcare records (PHRs), a lack of standards may be an even stronger one. Consumers don’t like to expend time and money on new technology that can’t easily synch up with other devices or content (certainly you remember “Betamax”?).

To help overcome both concerns, the Markle Foundation has just published a set of practices for handling PHR information in Connecting for Health Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information.  The framework was developed with a workgroup that included payers, providers, health IT vendors, healthcare publishers and advocates, physician organizations and policy analysts.  The group includes Google Health, Microsoft, Intuit, WebMD, Revolution Health, Aetna, AARP, Kaiser Permanente, BCBS, Consumers Union, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dossia, Ingenix, Cisco, and others.  (See the complete list in the press release: www.connectingforhealth.org/news/pressrealease_062508.html.)

The publishing industry has a dismal record of developing standards that facilitate data exchange. That’s why it is important to note that the complete report includes seven sections on technology standards and requirements along with nine sections on policy issues.  In consumer health care publishing, policymakers and technology companies play important roles, so perhaps they will push content providers to create and adopt standards. In the section of the report titled, An Architecture for Consumer Participation, the importance of portability and interoperability of the PHR is emphasized:

For PHRs to become more universally useful to consumers, they must provide a convenient and secure means of connecting to personal data and interactive services from multiple sources, and they must provide a convenient and secure means of moving the data out of the PHR as well, in whole or in part.[1]

At last year’s Health Content07 conference, there was a wide divergence of opinion about how long it will take before PHRs become mainstream. The Technology Overview section of the Markle report depicts how “health care entities and consumer technology innovators operate under different cultures that can clash without basic rules of the road“.  The technology standards and policy principles laid out in the Connecting for Health framework are a first step towards overcoming the hurdles on the road to adoption of PHRs.  However, according to recent research also reported by the Markle Foundation, only about 2.7 percent of the population they surveyed are using PHRs. The question of how quickly consumers will adopt PHRs is clearly still open for debate. 

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[1] Connecting for Health Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information, The Markle Foundation, www.connectingforhealth.org/license.html, section CT7, An Architecture for Consumer Participation, page 4, June 2008. 

 

Healthline’s Semantic Ad Network for Health Content

• Posted June 9th 2008
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• by Janice

Healthline, announced today its entry into the vertical ad network business with its healthcare-focused media network called HealthSTAT™ On-Demand.  HealthSTAT is a welcome addition for medical and healthcare publishers that need new options for revenue generation beyond AdSense and the other general search engine ad networks.  HealthSTAT joins other recent entries in the healthcare ad network space, including IAC/The Health Central Network and Glam Media. Healthline’s initial group of publishing partners includes some trusted traditional brand names and some new entrants (AARP, USNews.com, Time Inc.’s new Health.com, PracticeFusion, Elder.com, HealthPricer, and JustAnswer), as well as its own Healthline.com portal and a new consumer health portal to be launched by United Health later this year, MyOptumHealth. 

We’ve noted before that online health sites that rely primarily on pharma advertising revenue are showing slow and disappointing results. It’s time to think beyond the pharma companies as the only source of ad dollars for consumer health sites.  What impresses me about Healthline (an InfoCommerce 2006 winner), is its understanding of sponsorship opportunities. Its recent deal with Aetna and the signing of United Health in this new ad network show that Healthline recognizes insurers are good publishing partners.  It is important to note that these same insurers should be good prospects as advertisers on the HealthSTAT ad network, too. 

There will undoubtedly be more entrants in the healthcare vertical ad network market. Healthline, with its much-touted medical taxonomy, has built a good technical foundation on which to build its ad network.  But it’s Healthline’s demonstrated ability to form partnerships with important stakeholders that puts it ahead of competitors.

 

Google Health’s Unfinished Content Strategy

• Posted June 2nd 2008
• Comment (1)
• by Janice

 One thinks of search when one thinks of Google.  Since the early version of Google Health that was just released in Beta is focused not on search or content but on  interoperability and security for its personal health records (PHR) platform, it is difficult to quickly size up the opportunities. There are a few content companies among the early partnerships, including HealthGrades, Praxeon, and ADAM.  HealthGrades and ADAM are integrated into the main Google Health page, and Praxeon is a services partner that offers personalized content based on a user’s profile via its MyDailyApple service. 

The prime benefits for content partners appear to be the association with Google and visibility in the list of member services for Google Health.  As pointed out in our earlier entry, a user has to choose to sign up with your service and take added steps to register.  Unless the user takes these steps, the only benefit a member services partner receives is brand recognition for being listed among the other services that have been approved to be included in Google Health. Granted, being associated with Google is not a minor benefit (see Dr. Bob Wachter’s paeon to Google and Google Health, in which he states that companies like Walgreens “can’t put a monetary value on the “cool” value of teaming up with Google“). 

On the other hand, if users register for your service via Google Health, you receive  leads that can be upsold to your direct services, either advertising, paid subscriptions or some other revenue model.

Note that it takes work to become a Google Health partner.  Mount Tabor Online Services, a specialized IT services firm, has found a niche in helping potential partner companies navigate the technical hurdles and other issues related to becoming an approved member services partner.  In their own words, “Mount Tabor can help with secure hosting, technical support for functions involving data normalization and data exchange, and strategic guidance related to application development, integration, deployment and operation“.

It will also take patience to wait for a return on investment.  The adoption cycle for PHRs is likely to be slow and the value of a PHR is largely dependent on the adoption of electronic medical records by provider organizations.

Given these hurdles for participating and the limited returns, I find it puzzling that Google only allowed a limited number of member services partners to distribute press releases promoting their partnership.  Among them, none were content partners.  At this stage, it appears that Google may not have a content strategy for Google Health because they are so focused on developing their platform for exchanging information.  There are inklings of how users will be guided to more in-depth information (links on right-hand column display related results from Google News, Google Scholar, and Google Groups), but the existing content elements of Google Health look like a placeholder for a more developed content strategy to come.

 

Google’s Personal Health Record Platform

• Posted May 20th 2008
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• by Janice

 The long-awaited release of Google Health (in Beta of course) makes it clear that there is a race on between Google and Microsoft to gain traction and share in the emerging market for personal health records (PHRs). 

At Health Content Advisors, we have shifted our view of the relevancy of PHRs to publishers of health content.  Previously, we tended to think that electronic health records were an IT utility for record-keeping and that they would take time to be adopted by a significant portion of consumers.  Yes, publishers should be cognizant of the need to integrate their content with electronic medical records and PHRs, but more timely opportunities seemed to exist in the creation of standalone applications for researching healthcare information.   We now view PHRs as a logical structure and filtering tool for health-related research and information seeking.  Even if users don’t register and import or input data into secure (one hopes) online sites, the architecture of a personal health record is a sensible one for designing a healthcare information portal. 

Google Health requires that users set up a profile that includes age, sex, height, conditions, medications, test results and more before allowing access to the specialized online health services included in Google Health (health topics from ADAM are the exception).  I for one will not be entering this information exchange bargain with Google, but I know that I guard my privacy more highly than some others.  Google is offering added privacy protection measures and will not allow advertising on Google Health, but it has said that it will aggregate anonymized content from Google Health to create trend data and other statistics that can be monetized via online ads or other means.

When viewed as a content service, Google Health sets the registration bar extremely high: imagine other content sites asking for such personal information before they allowed users to view content.  Not many users would complete the registration process.  However, when viewed as a utility for storing personal health information-and a utility that is promoted by one’s medical provider/institution–the same content becomes a beneficial value-added service.  But, in either case, Google is dependent on a high level of trust from users.  

Google doesn’t think small.  As Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch says, Google Health is “a platform” and they are striving to be the most popular platform for personal electronic health records.  We applaud Google for establishing a sound foundational architecture for personal health content and for bringing order to the scattered world of online health content. However, we have some issues with the conditions that are set for accessing the content.

(This is the first in a series of posts on GH.  Our next post will focus on content, search and content partners.)

 

Buy versus Build at HealthGrades

• Posted May 20th 2008
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• by Russell

HealthGrades, a publicly-held healthcare information company, initially rose to prominence on its tremendous success with an improbable business model: selling background reports on physicians to the consumer market. What made the model improbable was the relatively sparse content in most of its physician reports (with the exception of occasional sanction data, it was pretty much name, address, board certification and med school bona fides) and the fact it could sell them at all in an online environment drowning in free health-related information. But sell reports it did, in vast quantities. And HealthGrades continued to innovate, now offering a limited number of physician reports for free where a hospital has agreed to cover the cost for its physicians. Another nice upside of this approach: it links its successful consumer offering to its hospital rating and marketing offerings. Smart.

Arguably, the key to HealthGrade’s success is its ability to get products to market fast, and adapt them rapidly to changing market demands. The key to this agility is that HealthGrades elects to buy rather than build its content, content that HealthGrades then integrates and markets. This preference for content licensing is true of its physician profile product, and it’s true of its newest offering, a prescription rating and comparison tool for consumers.

This offering, just launched a few weeks ago, draws on content licensed from IMS Health and Hearst’s FirstDataBank unit. Integrate the content, feed it into its remarkable online marketing machine, and a successful new product is the likely result.

And lest you think HealthGrades views licensing as a one-way street, consider its announcement yesterday that it is licensing its physician and hospital content to Google Health. It’s a wonderful move to build even more traffic to HealthGrades content, which makes HealthGrades more important to hospitals to which it sells both ratings and consulting services. At the same time, the HealthGrades cash register continues to ring with sales of physician profile reports to consumers. It’s a powerful virtuous circle that favors content marketing over content creation. That’s not a formula for everyone, but it certainly seems to be the right formula for HealthGrades.

 

Monetizing Online Health Communities

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Janice

 My colleague, Russell Perkins, writes this week about how a partnership between Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) and iGuard.org is selling access to the information collected in patient community sites to investors, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare industry stakeholders.   

Sermo, one of the participants in our Health Content07 conference last fall, is now providing paid access to market researchers in the medical field who want to poll Sermo’s communities of experts.    

The Wall St. Journal reported earlier this week about another company, EmergingMed, that is leveraging its online patient communities by playing matchmaker between existing patient community sites and the medical research teams that are seeking recruits to test cutting-edge treatments in clinical trials.  According to the WSJ article, one survey by Harris Interactive revealed that 75% of cancer patients would have been willing to enroll in a relevant clinical trial “had they known it was possible”. 

These are all great examples of market-driven information products and show how social networking sites can broaden their revenue base beyond online advertising.

 

SearchMedica.com Expands Content and Functionality

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Marji

SearchMedica, a search engine for medical professionals, announced this week that it has added electronic Medicines Compendium (eMC) to the GP section of Searchmedica.co.uk. Now, users can access drug information from a variety of sources in just one search.

This announcement by SearchMedica, a unit of CMPMedica, UK, comes just two months after an alliance was formed between SearchMedica.com and Advanstar’s ModernMedicine.com. This particular partnership called for SearchMedica to power ModernMedicine’s web searches to yield users more robust results.

SearchMedica ranks search results based on relevance but also sorts results to make them more actionable for users. It organizes results into categories such as practical articles and news, research reviews and editorials, evidence-based articles and meta-analyses, practice guidelines, clinical trials for patients, continuing medical education, and alternative and or complementary medicine.

Both announcements illustrate CMPMedica’s commitment to expanding the content and reach of SearchMedica. They will help SearchMedica achieve goals of providing relevant information to medical professionals and making it easier for them to locate that data in the process. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content in the world if users can’t access it. These two alliances are combining to enable SearchMedica to provide both extensive content and search capabilities to its users–two vital components of the online information industry. It will be interesting to see if CMPMedica forms additional alliances in the short term to further bolster its offerings to the marketplace.

 

WebMD: No Immunity to Ad Pullback

• Posted April 24th 2008
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• by Janice

WebMD, the bellwether of the online health information sites, is suffering from ad pullback.  It was widely reported this week that WebMD has lowered its guidance for 2008 and its stock has been punished as a result.   S&P has downgraded the stock to a sell and cut its target price to $23.

Concern about lower-than-expected pharma advertising was a major factor in the downgrade.  But, WebMD is not entirely dependent on online ads for its revenue, which mitigates the financial picture. WebMD is also a leading provider of online continuing medical educations (CME) programs, and also provides private portals and custom publishing.

Some seem to relish bad news about WebMD and are quick to ascribe the slowdown in pharma advertising for WebMD to competition from newer players that offer less-costly ad alternatives. See, for instance, the comments in Silicon Alley Insider.  We firmly believe that ad dollars will continue to shift online.  However, the advertising sector is notoriously cyclical, and considering the current economic climate, the ad pullback is likely to prove contagious in the short term.

 

Medical Reality Shows for the Pros

• Posted April 23rd 2008
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• by Janice

I just took a look at the recently enhanced Procedures Consult, one of the online clinical reference products in Elsevier’s Consult line.  Procedures Consult builds on some of Elsevier’s medical reference texts and is supplemented with custom—produced animations and video content that enhance the textual and still-image content.

The videos offer step by step demonstrations on real patients of how to perform certain procedures, such as defibrillation or shoulder arthroscopy (the number of procedures continues to grow). Procedures Consult includes online testing that reinforces the understanding of the anesthesia, emergency medicine, orthopaedic and internal medicine procedures that are included in the reference tool.

This is a case where the addition of video content adds obvious value to the reference content, compared to some products where the video element consists of nothing more than talking heads. Even an amateur can appreciate how useful the video content will be to physicians and medical students who need to study new procedures or refresh their knowledge of infrequently used procedures.

Procedures Consult may not capture the imagination of the consumer-focused investment firms eager to pounce on ad-supported consumer-centric online health products, but it represents an intelligent application of technology that greatly enhances the value of information to the audience it serves. Furthermore, by virtue of highlighting industry-standard patient safety guidelines within the product, Procedures Consult becomes an important tool in the performance improvement efforts of hospitals. Performance improvement may not sound leading edge and exciting, but it represents real dollars to health care provider institutions and better outcomes for patients.

 

Availity, Health Market Science Expand Licensing Agreement

• Posted April 22nd 2008
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• by Marji

Availity LLC, a health information exchange, and Health Market Science Inc., a manufacturer of health care provider reference data in the U.S. announced an expansion to their licensing agreement. The previous agreement called for licensed information for select states. This new agreement with provide Availity access to information about more than 4.5 million individual providers and one million provider organizations across the U.S.

Customers of the Availity Health Information Network (a secure web portal) can now easily search provider profiles in the HMS Provider Master File (which contains the listings of the providers and provider organizations). They can also segment the data by contact information, demographics, specialty, education and ethnicity. HMS data can be integrated with customers’ existing provider information.

It just makes sense for these companies to deepen their alliance. Availity will most definitely benefit by being able to provide customers a more robust database in which to find information they need–and find it quickly. Having such data integrated into their workflow will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of Availity customers–and this is functionality that has become a must-have for most information providers today.

This more robust offering may serve to attract more customers to Availity, especially those seeking a seamless solution. HMS may also be able to attract more customers as a result, as it gains more exposure in the marketplace with its position within Availity’s platform.