HealthContentAdvisors

McKesson & HP partner to provide EHR s/w and hardware for physician practices.

Interesting. Wolters Kluwer has set up a system whereby doctors will receive CME credit for clinical research done via their mobile phone.

Very thorough review of MSFT-Siemens deal to introduce MS HealthVault to German market and make it the system through which patients are provided medical info. HL7 is more widely used in Europe and Infobutton apps will likely catch on more quickly.

Julie Deardorff of Chicago Tribune writes about my recent blog on the AAFP’s FamilyDoctor.org site’s advertising high salt foods. Quotes me, AAFP VP Publishing, and Dr. John Spangler.

Good interview with David Blumenthal, Director, ONC, on meaningful use of EHRs and plans for national health data exchange.

Whole Foods to offer up to an additional 10% discount for employees who meet wellness measures that include nicotine use, cholesteral, and BMI targets.

Good short piece on why publishers are distributing content via Kindles even though there are business considerations.

Kent Bottles brings together topics from current books by Atul Gawande, Timothy Goetz, and an article by Jerome Groopman to consider the merits of checklists and use of decision trees in medicine. He also covers behavioral economics and choice and mentions the Thaler-Sunstein approach to offering nudges (libertarian paternalism) to guide healthful behavior. Conclusion: medicine and health are complicated. Seems to me that since computers are useful for dealing with complex calculations (even under stress) that it makes sense to use automated checklists and decision support systems to guide complex processes. Provided we can avoid GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) situations.

Interesting article on how Conde Nast is seeking to leverage brand value of Gourmet, Domino, and Cookie (defunct magazines) as well as current titles Wired and Lucky. Compares CN to Meredith, whose Better Homes & Gardens has used its brand to provide quality seals to products. CN-selected content (tested by Gourmet kitchens?) is one idea they should consider, IMO.

IUD manufacturer, Mirena (part of Bayer Pharmaceutical) has been using home parties, a la Tupperware, to spread word about benefits of Mirena IUD. FDC has sent warning letter to Bayer.

Everyday Health, the consumer health portal owned by Waterfront Media, files for $100M IPO. Positive sign for consumer health publishers. Everyday is one of the largest consumer health portals that relies on online advertising for most of its revenue.

Home page of Jan 2010 report from RWJF on PHRs.

ZocDoc, a online directory of doctors that has focused on NY and DC, is expanding to cover SF. Note, a key differentiator of ZocDoc (from the slew of other doctor ratings sites) is its integration with practice management systems for scheduling appointments so that users can find doctors with available appts. ZocDoc says they have integrated with close to 1400 PMS companies. Note, ZocDoc also encourages patient reviews of doctors, but only from ZocDoc users. Reviews of doctors remains a sticky wicket for all of the doc review sites.

Susannah Fox from Pew Internet started the conversation with her post about Google Health OneBox that lists results from Mayo Clinic, WebMD, ADAM, and MedlinePlus in a special position at top of search results. Great discussion in the comments ensued, including a couple from me.

Brief article describing MedeAnalytics revenue cycle management solution being adopted by St. Joseph’s Hospital in Maryland.

Info on work Tim Berners-Lee is doing for UK govenment to make sources of gov’t data more available and meaningful.

“Pfizer increased its spending on online professional promotion by more than 90% last year, according to a study, a sign the drugmaker is emphasizing alternatives to live sales reps for detailing certain products.” Study by SDI.

NYTimes on how InterMountain Healthcare is adapting EBM practices to improve outcomes.

Initiate Systems (healthcare data mgmt) acquire Accenx, a provider of health info exchange solutions.

Shwen Gwee’s presentation on Social Media usage in pharma. Excellent presentation.

Jeff Arnold, fmly of WebMD and more recently HowStuffWorks, to lauchn Sharecare, a consumer health info site supported by medical device from a group of physicians.

Data Advantage names to 75 hospitals in their value index.

Interesting review of recent report from Quintiles with thesis that pharma should take lead in establishing valuation system for their products in line with the comparative effectiveness (CER) concept.

HealthCentral partners with 5min, an aggregator of health & wellness videos.

Mara Aspinall joins On-Q-ity as CEO. On-Q-ity (could they have created a more difficult company name to type?) was created by combining two investments of Mohr Davidow (Cellective Diagnostics and the DNA Repair company). On-Q-ity will focus on “developing new, cheaper and more effective treatments for cancer by tracking suspicious cells in a patient’s blood stream that indicate resistance to treatment, Aspinall said. On-Q-ity will focus on breast and thoracic cancers first, then prostate and other solid tumor cancers. developing new, cheaper and more effective treatments for cancer by tracking suspicious cells in a patient’s blood stream that indicate resistance to treatment, Aspinall said. On-Q-ity will focus on breast and thoracic cancers first, then prostate and other solid tumor cancers” (from PE Hub).

For medical coding geeks only; an MD applies ICD-9 codes to daily living….

Dr. Jerome Groopman (author of How Doctor’s Think) writes on limitations of current diagnostic methods and EBM.

eHealth will focus on improving methods for sharing health info between patients and clinicians. Includes security features (patient ID, data privacy).

Live (and archived) coverage of BilPil healthcare “unconference” in San Diego from MedPage Today.

Some details on Nov 12-13 FDA public hearing on use of social media by pharma. list of speakers included

Summary of SixUntilMe’s preso at epatient connections.

MaryDee Ojala on DeepDyve’s new rental model for scholarly articles.

Report on some small steps taken by select providers to post prices of their services.

Demand for patient advocates is on the rise. Clear indication that our healthcare system is not consumer-focused, since it takes a specialist to sort through the choices.

JBat coos over DigitalGlobe, which takes satellite pictures of the entire earth and sells commercially (and esp. to govt.).

Harvard drops its earlier policy to require med school students to filter media communications through Harvard’s communications office. Students are working with admin. to establish guidelines to protect patient confidentiality.

Since parting ways with Sermo earlier this year, AMA is forging ahead on its own in social media.

Study compares official gov’t data on hospital quality against US News & World Report hospital rankings and finds that hospitals w/ best outcomes don’t correspond to US New’s rankings.

Joint Commission (JCAHO) is changing procedures for surveying hospitals that comprise a hospital system. In short, hospitals systems will be surveyed concurrently.

Logical Images renames its consumer website for skin health and wellness to Skinsight.com (fmly visualdxhealth.com)

Health Matrix, a health info company that provides drug info, licenses the GetFugu mobile platform to enhance access to its health info for professionals and consumers.

Burst Media, an ad network located in Burlington, MA, announces new Health & Wellness vertical that includes Healthguru.com. Burst previously had Wellness vertical; not sure if this replaces it.

Details on Brill’s Journalism Online’s business model for paid access to online news.

Interesting repositioning of the Economist & new ad campaign in UK.

Nice thorough review of reference content currently available via Google Health. Google’s strategy toward content in GHealth still remains murky.

Dr. Susan Love is building “an army of women” one million strong to serve as universe to be tapped for medical research/clinical trials. To date, site has 300,000. Dr. Love’s model also represents the new model for publishing: bringing parties together to faciliate transactions as well as exchange information.

Ohio State School of Medicine has developed iPod Touch & iPhone apps for medical students.

Excellent brief article with link to slide presentation on ebooks. Note the comment about mobile being the fastest growing platform for non-US sales. Good comments on pricing and revenue models, too.

Psychiatrist Daniel Carlat skewers Schering-Plough for its marketing practices for its new Saphris antipsychotic drug. Dr. Carlat lists the compensation offered to him for promoting Saphris.

Some good examples of value pricing (or at least new types of pricing) for healthcare.

HITECH Act waters down the requirements for CPOE in its meaningful use (MU) definition.

Describes Epothecary system that uses bar codes & cell phones to authenticate Rx medications. Proposed usage in developing countries.

Insufficient labeling and regulation of vitamins and supplements contribute to serious side-effects of OTC supplements. Article incluees excellent list of resources for researching supplements.

Three HIEs in Ohio and Indiana collaborate to increase interconnectivity.

Growing brouhaha in medical journal policies with JAMA arguing that writers have no right to comment on articles in any forum except through JAMA letters to the editor. Demonstrates how isolated medical journal publishers are from realities of social media and the influence of online communication.

Requirement that clinical trials be registered upon inception to ensure that all results are reported (not just positive results) has been largely ingnored according to this article.

Or, why publishers (content companies) should subsidize the costs of the reader! Razor/razor blades analogy anyone? Problem is that publishers are still resistant to e-books.

Google does analytics. Need to check it out in more detail, but this furthers Google’s expansion into publishing.

John Halamka’s recommended cool community hospital info sites: good examples of aggregating and displaying information.

Article dissects US News & World Report’s hospital rankings to performance reported in govt statistics and finds that US News’ rankings are based on handling of complex or unusual care. Comment: current state of ratings and rankings for hospitals and doctors are not very helpful in guiding consumer decisions in choosing providers.

Perhaps the UK will promote & accelerate adoption of Google & MSFT’s PHR platforms before they gain traction in US.

Interesting new aggregator of top journal content (based on impact factor & google scholar rankings) in clear, attractive interface. Access to premium fulltext journals is limited to existing subscribers via Athens. [edited 7/15] Note, Clinical Reader has been called out by medical librarians because of sloppy copyright practices and use of false implied endorsements by NLM & others. To gain credibility as source of authoritative content, CR team needs to tread carefully!]

I wouldn’t call it WebMD, but it includes health and wellness information and lots of information on the institution.

Beta version released; official release sched. for Q4 2009. Breakthrough sounds like an exaggeration, but it is a step forward for a traditional directory publisher who sells to libraries.

SpringerImages, which includes over 1.5 million scientific images, tables, charts & graphs, to be officially launches at ALA in Chicago this week. Was originally planned for Q1 release.

Serials Solutions, a ProQuest company, expands the content indexed by its Summon Service. Summon aims to offer “Google-like” search interface across library’s holdings. For now, content from ProQuest, Gale, Springer, IEEE, Taylor& Francis and some other scholarly publishers and university presses participate. Summon is in beta at Dartmouth, Claremont Colleges, and 5 other universities in US, Canada, UK, and Australia.

Kent Anderson of NEJM writes about Amazon’s growing role in book publishing, not just redistribution of books. How should publishers react? Comments as of 7/9 suggest scholarly publishers stick to their knitting of creating content and build their own open repositories– and be more aggressive with digital distributors. Granted, scholarly publishers should take more control of digital distribution, but in order to do that, they have to invest in digital infrastructure & know-how.

Good dialogue about social media’s relevance to clinical practice.

Good write-up of interview with Berners-Lee by ReadWriteWeb’s founder, Richard MacManus. W3C’s focus on data content is exciting development for us at InfoCommerce Group, where the role data in publishing businesses has been a central focus on ours from day 1. s

Good article on the under-tapped value of customer lists held by publishers. As author points out, many print publishers seem to miss the connection between their ability to build communities of interest for publications and adapting that ability to web-based communities. Instead, too many publishers are letting upstarts replace them online.

The concepts of EBM and Comparative Effectiveness Research are reaching consumer-focused publications. IMO, considerable education via general press and other venues will be necessary to help consumers/patients understand EBM and CER.

SDI, which acquired Verispan last year, releases results of most respected pharma companies by pediatricians.

Thomson Reuters, already one of the biggest webcast providers, acquires Toronto-based webcasting s/w firm Streamlogics.

A medical librarian’s comparison of DynaMed and UptoDate

More on the “Free” as business model debate. See my comments on the post.

Using tag cloud to help understand key terms and contents of a book, Google Books now makes it easy to glean substance of books in seconds. Pretty cool.

Connectyx’ MedFlash portable PHR enters sales agreement with Healthy Directions, a vendor of “science-based vitamin & nutritional supplement formulas” and other wellness products. By end of August 2009, Health Directions will offer the flash-drive MedFlash EPHR through its distibution channels. Comment: press release alludes to fact that the Healthy Directions’ audience, on average, is more interested in health & health-related products, than the general population and therefore is more likely to be interested in tracking their health-related behavior. Given the behavior of Healthy Directions’ audience, it makes sense for vendors of PHR technology to focus sales efforts on this group.

Massachusetts and Vermont ban on pharma and medical device companies’ giving gifts to doctors (anything from coffee mugs to trips) goes into effect today.

Concerro, a vendor of SaaS workforce management s/w to hospitals acquires CommandAware, which provides hospitals a turn-key solution for emergency response.

Very good article (although long) that lays out reasons why incumbents have difficulty adopting new technologies. I’d add that many large incumbent scientifc publishers have to innovate through acquistions because of the problems described in Nielsen’s article and because of constraints put on them by the financial markets (if they are public). Accounting for acquisitions allows them more freedom to “buy” vs. “make”. I totally agree about the need for scientific publishers (in fact, all publishers) to become proficient in IT. Technology is a key input to all content products & services; without constant innovation, publishers will get disrupted by new entrants. This relates to last week’s article, “Health Content is Rapidly Losing Its Value”.

Using IVR technology, Doctors on Demand allows patients to call in and leave info, then get contacted by MD. Physical visits are required at least 1/year.

UBM’s CMPMedica discontinues 2 print pubs and cuts unspecified # positions; some digital presence of pubs: Infections in Medicine and AIDS Reader will continue.

WK Health announces new research reports that incorporate data and analysis gleaned from their Adis R&D Insight, WK Healthcare Analytics (NDA), and other resources to suppy focused analysis on specific markets. inThought is targeted to financial analysts, health care suppliers and drug manufacturers. Seems like a logical extension to their data services.

Interview with new CEO of Elsevier Health Sciences, Michael Hansen. Describes EHS businesses and where they are focusing for growth (clinical decision support systems; outcomes analysis)

“Drugstore.com Inc. is working with Medco Health Solutions Inc., a pharmacy benefits manager, to launch a Medco-branded online store by mid-year. Drugstore.com will provide Medco with technical development and operations services, consumer health products and over-the-counter medicines, fulfillment, and customer care for non-prescription drug products.”

Review of financial condition of hospitals, many that have expanded or planned expansion financed with debt.

Overview of personalized medicine with viewpoints from former pres. of Affymetrix who is now partner at Mohr Davidow, and Elissa Levin of Navigenics.

From Toronto Public Library Consumer Health Information Service, a list of top 10 health-related websites from 1999 and update on where they stand today, as well as some notable new sources.

From Toronto Public Library Consumer Health Information Service, a list of top 10 health-related websites from 1999 and update on where they stand today, as well as some notable new sources.

Informa plans to cut its debt, which will likely require selling off some assets. In Healthcare (with heavy emphasis on Pharma BI), Informa owns Taylor & Francis publishing,PJB (Pharmaprojects, Scrip, and other pharma bi databases, publications and events),Citeline TrialTrove, and recently acquired Datamonitor (see: www.informa.com/divisions/academic_and_amp_scientific/informa_healthcare for full list. In other divisions, Informa is known as the owner of Lloyd’s list, finance and insurance publications, and global events producer IIR.

David Harlow takes the new Massachusetts’ online hospital database MyHealthCareOptions, for a spin. Reveals that cost data are only given in broad ranges and ratings in the form of star, which don’t provide sufficient data to make informed decisions.

Thomson Reuters to issue up to $3B in debt to use for general corporate purposes. Thomson Healthcare is a division of Thomson Reuters.

Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation medical coding product “has been designated Number One in the Clinical Procedure Documentation category of the 2008 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Professional Services report”.

CMPMedica to provide drug info content to iSOFT, one of the world’s largest providers of healthcare IT solutions. (iSOFT press release was distributed on 11/25/08)

“The Center for Improving Medication Management ( The Center ) today launched http://www.LearnAboutRxSafety.org, a new Web site where consumers can learn how to use medications safely. Developed in conjunction with the National Council on Patient Information and Education ( NCPIE ), the Web site is primarily intended as a resource for families and all individuals seeking information on medication safety. The Center will collaborate with consumer organizations, provider and payer organizations and other groups interested in promoting medication safety and adherence for consumers.”

Xconomy reports on how foundations are more carefully considering the investments they make in pharma and biotech companies due to the economy. Cites a CenterWatch study.

2009 edition of Scrip 100 - Informa Healthcare’s annual analysis of pharma industry is now available online: http://www.scripnews.com/supplements/download_today/Scrip-100

Good run-down of presentations of consumer health tools at Health 2.0 conference.

Good post by Bill Crounse, MD, Sr. Dir, Worldwide Health, MSFT about translating Health IT developments into useful tools that add value to the patient’s healthcare experience. Good contrast between Health2.0 and Health Content08, where we stress the importance of intermediaries (whether they be publishers, navigation tools/advocates, or producers of decision tools) to guide consumers and medical professionals in finding and using new tools that are ready for the market.

“(Reuters Health) - If you’re searching the Internet for surgery information, you may want to stick with sites run by professional medical groups and other sources free of commercial sponsors, a new study suggests. In a study that examined the quality of various surgery-related websites, researchers found that unsponsored sites generally gave more reliable information than sponsored sites did. When it came to the specific sources, sites run by professional medical groups got the highest marks, followed by government-run sites. The findings, published in the Journal of the American College of Surgery, underscore the need for consumers to consider the source when looking for online medical information.”

Librarian Hope Leman gives positive review of Infovell, a new search service that “culls content from thousands of journals, millions of documents and billions of untapped pages of Life Sciences, Medicines, Patents, Industry news, and other reference content from trusted and expert sources.” Note, Infovell is one of 12 companies to present at Health Content08’s Innovators Showcase Nov. 12. (www.healthcontent08.com)

“Yahoo! Health will incorporate HealthGrades data into a new search-driven directory that will leverage numerous Yahoo! technologies and applications. The new physician directory will offer detailed physician and care provider pages, insurance coverage information, ratings and reviews from other users, comparable physician charts and health-focused Yahoo! Answer and Yahoo! Group modules.”