HealthContentAdvisors

GE’s press release for HIMSS. Includes debut of clinical knowledge platform that helps providers with quality improvement initiatives, expanded HIE services, a clinical portal and a patient health management system.

BU School of Medicine creates RED (Re-Engineered Discharge), a checklist that helps reduce readmissions. Other examples of application of health IT in this article.

Earnings in health and pharma division down sharply–from 29M Euros in 2008 to a loss of 79M Euros in 2009. WK says pharma communications, advertising and book sales biggest factors. McKinstry says they are changing portfolio of WKHealth to focus on “clinical decision support areas”.

MIT Technology Review feature series on personalized medicine. Haven’t taken good look at the articles yet, but will return to explore.

Sponsorship and payments from device and pharma companies to fund research and for board representation introduce conflicts of interest for academic health centers. No news there, but some good insight into recent developments in this article.

John Moore at Chilmark provides insightful analysis of today’s announced alliance between Microsoft Amalga and Eclipsys.

Google and Microsoft Health execs address benefits of health IT on healthcare in short article published in The Hill. Two key points: 1) focus on the patient and 2) focus on the performance improvement (”improved outcomes we want to achieve”) with health IT, not just IT for IT’s sake.

Primarily via financing initiatives from Treasury, HHS, and Dept. of Agriculture will fund programs that improve the availability of fresh foods and more healthy alternative foods in communities that currently lack access to large grocery stores. These initiatives are closely tied to first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative that aims to decrease childhood obesity.

CalTech is partnering with DeepDyve to provide discounted access to DeepDyve’s article rental service to alumni. DeepDyve’s Gold plan, which allows rental access to an unlimited number of articles included in DeepDyve’s collection of scholarly journals and other literature that sits behind paywalls. I continue to be impressed with DeepDyve’s initiatives to increase access to scholarly research that has been walled off to non-academics or those who don’t have a corporate subscription to commercial collections.

Transcript of Q4 2009 earnings call with Kerry Hicks and CFO Allen Dodge. Few tidbits: efforts to build risk management business line (Health Credit Solutions) have failed and Health Grades is winding down that business and focusing instead on ratings products. Advertising sales have grown nicely, esp. from AdSense and other networks. However, I still question how well the WrongDiagnosis.com product fits with HealthGrades.

Some good points about quality of patient-reported data and implications for using data from patient community sites in research. I like the points about how some users enter dummy data just to test out a site and the importance of recognizing what data are missing. Both issues related to good data management.

Summary of project funded by RWJF and carried out by IHI to study performance improvement initiatives in hospitals in the period 2001-2008. Link to report included.

E-patients consult Web to find ratings on doctors and providers, but fewer post ratings themselves. Link to full report from Pew.

John Mack on the role Pharma can plan in providing information directly to consumers via social media.

Pathway Genomics, which provides genetic tests to consumers, licenses Staywell’s Harvard Health Content so that customers can access additional information about the conditions reported in the test results.

Story of how Louisiana has seen improvements in rural health care through implementation of health info exchange.

Recent survey commissioned by Cleveland Clinic, GE Healthcare & Ochsner Health System indicates that 50% of Americans believe other people’s health “was going in the wrong direction” but only 17% said their own health was “going in the wrong direction”. 2000 people surveyed. Results are in line with my observations. Many people are in denial that their habits are unhealthy. Even when they get sick, they don’t believe their own health management was a factor.

TOC and links to full report from CDC on trends in health statistics.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius releases report that includes info on requested premium increases by health insurers across the country. Link to full report included.

Shared Health Clinical Xchange, the largest HIE in Tennessee, has partnered with Elsevier’s MEDai to provide clinically-relevant HIE.

Veteran’s Admin to monitor how doctors respond to e-alerts sent via the agency’s computerized patient record system (CPRS). Currently, they only tract if doc acknowledges receipt of an alert, not whether the doc takes follow-up action.

NaviNet chosen as communications network in pilot intended to document benefits of provider-payer health info exchange in NJ.

GE producing TV ads for Healthymagination campaign during Olympics. Also sponsoring content online. Good to see someone beside Pharma sponsoring content!

Hope Leman’s long, but very entertaining, comments about DeepDyve’s specialty search and article rental model for scholarly journals articles. Access to much of the scholarly journal content isn’t available to non-subscribers and even discovering the existence of this body of content is difficult, which means the publishers are not reaching growth markets. DeepDyve offers a solution with minimal risk to publishers, yet the buzz for DD hasn’t grown as much as Hope (or I) would have expected. Worth reading — and it’s worth checking out DeepDyve.

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.

Usage of free PHR services hasn’t yet taken off. Peter Neupert of MSFT hints that wider adoption of IT by physicians and better connectedness between the stakeholders are needed before the value of using PHRs is obvious enough to incent consumers to adopt them.

Short article on health IT with focus on MSFT. Quotes Peter Neupert, MSFT Health head.

Nice brief overview of EHR solutions for smaller practices with a description of some of the vendors.

AMedNews writes up the recent PWC report on secondary data from EMRs. This is a major focus of ours at Health Content Advisors.

Keas expands through partnership programs with CVS Caremark (MinuteClinics), Quest, and now Partners Healthcare.

Bob Stern, founder of MedPage Today, delivers his perspective on how medical societies that publish research and organize medical conferences inhibit distribution of research information, much of which is funded by tax dollars via NIH, HHS, NSF, etc. The current model is undergoing a slow but steady transformation, which I think is accelerating.

CVS Caremark offers mobile site that includes access to medication history, drug info, special offers, and driving directions/phone numbers of CVS pharmacies or MinuteClinics.

Hope Leman writes an enthusiastic review of American Well, the online healthcare service that provides access to medical professionals from home and handles billing, too.

Good overview of status of standards for ensuring that secondary data produced by EHRs will be useful for research purposes.

long article on why “lifestyle” medicine is needed to reduce costs and improve outcomes. Note, focus on healthy behavior is gaining traction in large part because of the research that can be conducted on electronic health records of patients.

HealthGuru Media raises additional $3.2 M from Castile Ventures and Village Ventures. VV’s Po Beabody is co-founder/Chairman

Due to “operating” costs (and debt loads from med school) MDs less likely to go into solo practices.

Birmingham, AL based MEDSEEK listed 455 in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. MEDSEEK provides patient portals for hospitals and claims >650 hospital clients.

PEHub reports that IMS Health is in talks with PE firms to sell the company. IMS shares surged almost 22% yesterday (10/19)

Prof Teisberg on why gov’ts shouldn’t legislate comparative effectiveness requirements. Essentially because of variation in outcomes. Focus should be on value for each patient.

With goal of trimming 100 positions in newsroom, NY Times editor Bill Keller offers buyout to entire newsroom staff. If fewer than 100 respond, they’ll have layoffs.

CDW Healthcare, Vernon Hills, IL, partners with Cerner to market EHR solutions to physician practices.

Wow! AstraZeneca seeks 5,000+ sales people to “self identify” their interest in taking buyout.

Epic and Apple working together on Mobile EHR project.

Great review of new iPhone version of Merck Manual Home Health Handbook.

Akaza Research, provider of OpenClinica 3.0 open source s/w for clinical trials, adds electronic data capture features.

More proof that medical apps are far ahead of any other professional (b2b) mobile apps.

Although there’s resistance, trend toward incentives for following healthy behavior is on the increase.

Halamka reports on latest HIT standards Committee meeting.

Quantified Self, group that advocates and facilitates patients to track health and wellness data about themselves, names impressive advisory board.

iTriage, an iPhone app from Healthagen, offers info on wait times at ERs and info about providers (hospitals). Providers pay to be listed with marketing info.

MedSeek announces recent deals for installations of their consumer information portals in hospitals.

Review of recent conference on Personalized Health at Ohio State.

Deloitte offers database and analytic tools on pharma/biosciences alliances.

Paul Sheils, who has led many top quality healthinfo-related companies in the past, named CEO of DocSite. DocSite provides “modular, upgradeable, affordable, Web-based tools tied to evidence-based guidelines”. Interesting.

HealthGrades latest annual study of patient outcomes by hospital.

Intuit’s Quicken Health Bill Pay partners with Allscripts to improve efficiency of patient billing. With better information provider to patients about what they owe, bills are being paid faster and can be paid online.

RWJF funds Kaiser’s biobank, the largest and most diverse repository of data genetic data that includes info on lifestyle and environmental factors.

Great article on imporantance of teaching students how to mine through and analyze data–an increasingly important skill especially in medical research.

Lawrence Lessig warns that complete transparency of govt data will lead to misuse of data by those who draw incorrectclusions. Sunlight foundation begs to differe. My point: access to govt data provides opportunity for data publishers to build quality info products and market them.

How access to info–and especially DTC ads–help drive up costs by increasing demand for tests, procedures and drugs.

Harvard launches new mobile apps on public health, starting with H1N1 info.

Brief review of Health IT Stimulus Summit sponsored by Health Data Management.

Review of Dr. Margaret Hamburg’s remarks from a recent speech where she emphasized need for more resources for regulating drugs to keep up with growth in research activity.

Good profile of Innocentive, a Boston area company headed by former Hoover’s CEO Dwayne Spradlin. Innocentive provides marketplace to bring together inventors and companies that seek solutions (largely life science companies). Companies post challenges they want solved; inventors post their fees for executing. Company’s goal is to improve the research process.

This is a very interesting move. Scientific news feed direct from major universities. See: www.futurity.org.

MDVIP respresents one of the new breed of physician practices that charge fixed fees for primary care, wellness & preventive care and offer more access to patients. Fees are far lower than typical high-deductible insurance premiums, but patients still need catastrophic coverage and have to pay for lab fees, etc. This new model of primary care, along with retail clinics, will be the major disrupters in healthcare delivery in US. Note, key reason cited for creating the new model: admin o/h expense of insurance claims processing.

Darin Steward of Oregon Health & Sciences Univ. writes very good overview of PHRs and coves the concept of “infodemiology” without using the term!

Librarian Loren MccRory questions the longevity of current for-fee subscription databases sold to public and academic libraries. With more good info available for free, why should libraries continue to buy “big deal” subscriptions of unknown value to their audience?

Atty General Jerry Brown unveils site that tracks prescription drug use to help physicians with durg interractions and to spot possible illegal drug abuse.

Dirk Stanley, MD, writes of his hospital’s experience with “Jedi Informaticists”, a special breed of clinical specialist who has crossover skills in health IT, healthcare analytics, and a workflow process mindset. Sounds like a systems analysts with subject specialty to me. He’s right that individuals with these crossovers skills are critical to successful EMR/EHR implementation and adoption. The right “Jedis” will see the big picture and focus on key success factors.

Published by Wiley with support from Aetna, Navigating Your Health Benefits is available for free.

Very helpful presentation by John Moore of Chilmark Research on state of personal health records (PHRs).

Malamud’s preso was a big hit; here’s the video.

MD describes why current system with 3rd party payers doesn’t lend itself to price transparency. Dr. Jindal suggests patients examine their EOB statements and note how much goes to doc v. insurance co. IMO, EOB statements are purposely designed to confuse, not explain and they impede transparency in pricing.

HealthLeaders writes about Data Advantage’s Hospital Value Index and suggests that hospitals have to adapt to increased scrutiny and pay-for-performance measures.

Just learned about Harvard’s suspension of funding for its Div. of Primary Care. Wow!

JAMA now requires independent review of data analysis in industry-sponsored research and has seen a dramatic drop in commercially-funded submissions.

Good comments on security as process not product.

Modern Healthcare’s analysis of recent IOM and Federal Coordinating Council reports on comparative effectiveness research (CER). Key finding: data infrastructure is need and investment in creasting databases is critical (and probably > total funds allocated for CER –$400 M–in ARRA).

Pretty good list of useful purposes of Twitter–mostly business related.

Decent article in Telegraph about Reed Elsevier’s need to focus on IT infrastructure to enhance value of content assets. Title a bit misleading, but it does mention specific title/markets where Reed might reconsider selling RBI assets: Construction, chemical, energy, XpertHR & Totaljobs.com.

PhRMA site offers limited access to Adis’s R&D Insight drug pipeline db for no charge. Limited info on each drug is output, but list of drugs by phase is available. US only.

Tim Berners-Lee talks about data that do stuff (an ICG mantra): “And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we’ve used for data. When I’ve pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.

Can’t resist tagging this article, since it intersects the key topics I follow & my interests (tennis). Serena Williams launches skincare line developed by chairman for American Academy of Dermatology Chair, Dr. Bryan Adams. Skincare line is targeted for those with “demanding and active lifestyles” like Serena.

Some good analysis of Amazon’s Kindle pricing strategy and why share to publishers may shrink. Quotes couple of analysts.

Monster cuts 160 jobs; will add 80 in new technology innovation center. New focus on long-term strategic planning and customer engagement. Evidence of need to add layers of analytic and other value to core content.

Healthcare reform may include tax credits for employer-sponsored wellness programs.

Survey conducted by Rodale on behalf of FDA DTC division provides data that show that almost 50% of consumers rate online health videos information websites as top resource when searching for medical conditions and prescription drug info online. Next in line were pharma websites, video sharing sites, and social networking sites.

Candover & Cinven (current PE owners) ask bidders to resubmit bids for up to 49% of Springer. Initial bids from TPG, EQT and consortium of Carlyle & Providence did not meet current owners’ expectation. Owners asked for 500M Euros for up to 49% of Springer; 2 sources said 350-380 Euros was a more reasonable valuation.

Interesting partnership between Mayo Clinic and Winn-Dixie grocery chain, whereby Mayo provides info related to nutrition and conditions including cold & flu, heart disease, digestion, asthma and allergy (most of which have OTC products sold in grocery stores to help manage these conditions).

CDC launched a web-based public health tracking interface that includes state-by-state data through 2006 on air & water quality, lead paint, and other public health measures. My first attempt to extract data for air quality in MA led to an error message. It’s likely that no data were available for the query I entered through the menu-based system, but a better-designed faceted search would have alerted me to this fact. In sum, it’s great that CDC is providing more data in easy-to-use formats, but there’s lots of room for improvement by commercial information services that can add value by aggregating data and improving the search experience.

Emdeon, a RCM vendor, buys eRX Network, a vendor of epharmacy solutions. eRx has established base in government, providing claims-processing services for CMS.

UK “Power of Information” taskforce invited Tim Berners-Lee to advise on opening access to UK govt data.

David E. Williams comments on the need to focus on the “content” or “information” side of the IT equation, not just the technology. In particular, he points to how clinical decision support systems (CDS) benefit from application of technology to info. This is the mantra of Health Content Advisors. We’re glad to see more industry analysts poiont out the need to put attention on the “I” in “IT” .

John Halamka’s post on first meeting of HIT Standards Committee on quality measures.

Here’s an example of a publishing company’s looking at data it can extract from patterns of use of its content. Analysis doesn’t appear to have been done for purpose of creating a by-product, but online news sites should consider more offshoots from mining usage patterns on its sites.

Elsevier selects NextBio’s platform to enhance ScienceDirect, by allowing it to integrate search results from other online scientific data along with ScienceDirect results. NextBio is used by many top Pharma companies & research institutions.

Dr. Chen writes about uses of social media (including Twitter) to motivate patients to comply with treatment and wellness plans.

Varian says ’statisticians are sexy’ and ability to interpret and communicate trends from databases is critical skill in today’s business world.

Lots of tips & references on using Twitter for HC journalists.

Single payer system = longer life expectancy?

2nd in 3-part series on eprescribing.

Good summary of new Pew reports with follow-up by Susanna Fox, Gilles Frydman, and more. I’ll dig into the report tomorrow.

Medseek, a provider of healthcare enterprise portals for hospitals, listed #72 in HCI 100 rankings.