HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for the ‘Databases’ Category

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.

 

New NCPDP Database Boasts Increased Functionality

• Posted May 14th 2008
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• by Marji

The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs launched a new database for pharmacies, pharmacy benefit management companies and health insurers. The application, dataQ, is a new version of the NCPDP’s standard pharmacy database that includes information on nearly 75,000 pharmacies. According to news reports, the goal of the database is to provide information to make pharmacy claims more accurate.

The new web-based database offers users a variety of new features. In addition to instant look-ups and custom reporting functions, the database can also help users with pharmacy network development and credentialing; data validation; drug utilization and product recall monitoring, as well as the ability to pull all of it together through market research and analysis.

Anything that will improve the accuracy of pharmacy claims is a good thing. This database seems to contain all of the content and functionality required of databases today. While a vast number of listings is vital, today’s databases are not nearly as valuable without abilities that make their data actionable. The NCPDP has all of the necessary components here – components that will help users perform their job duties more efficiently and effectively.

 

Physician Transparency: Why the Angst?

• Posted April 24th 2008
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• by Russell

Last summer, a non-profit consumer advocacy group called Consumer’s Checkbook won a landmark victory in court: a U.S. federal court ordered the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide detailed Medicare claims data to the group. While containing no information that could identify individual patients, the data would allow a look at what types of procedures were being performed by individual physicians, and how often. In short, the data would provide an objective indicator of physician expertise. The reason Consumer’s Checkbook had to go to court for the information was that HHS had taken the stance that it couldn’t release this information because it would constitute an invasion of physicians’ privacy because it would indirectly allow anyone to calculate how much money a physician received from the government. The court shot down this argument and ordered release of the data.

One would expect that with HHS advocating at the highest levels for transparency in healthcare, and with a number of its own quality assessment and measurement initiatives, HHS might embrace this court ruling and get moving on this release of data. Instead, in a quiet court filing last week, HHS appealed this court decision. While HHS has publicly stated it is only seeking help from the court to reconcile several conflicting court decisions, published reports indicate its appeal filing with the court seeks to reverse the previous court decision, leaving restriction on disclosure of this information in place. Robert Krughoff, president of Consumer’s Checkbook, attributes this odd move by the government to pressure from the American Medical Association, stating “We regret that the AMA has pushed HHS so hard to hide this information.

Less than a month ago, the consumer ratings service Angie’s List announced that it would allow its consumer members to start rating physicians on everything from the cleanliness of waiting rooms to a physician’s bedside manner. The announcement immediately drew response from the physician community, including a fairly representative comment from Dr. Jon Marhenke, president of the Indiana State Medical Association, who said “doctors’ services to patients can’t be compared to the work of a skilled tradesman.”

All this points up an essential conundrum: physicians to a large extent seem to be resisting rating, evaluation and review at the exact same time that the move to consumer-driven healthcare is making this kind of information important if not essential. And this is not a new problem. For too long, patients have been selecting their physicians based on an awkward combination of word of mouth referrals, health plan participation and geographic proximity. That’s not good for patients, but what physicians apparently don’t see is that it’s not good for them either. By rejecting third party evaluation and review, physicians aren’t elevating themselves above the fray. Indeed, they are commoditizing themselves. By refusing to provide useful differentiation about their training, expertise, and yes, even their beside manner and office tidiness, physicians are telling patients “we’re pretty much interchangeable,” and leaving patient to select physicians based on criteria and information that can be highly subjective, biased, irrelevant and even inaccurate. There is a huge need for information to help differentiate physicians and this vacuum will be filled. And as every good marketer knows, if you don’t write your own story, others will write it for you, and you probably won’t like the results.

Physicians: market thyselves!

 

dCard: An Open Standard; A Needed Standard

• Posted March 7th 2008
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• by Russell

A consortium of nine healthcare technology companies and healthcare providers has unveiled a new standard for collecting, presenting and exchanging healthcare provider data. The new standard is called “dCard,” short for Doctor Card. It’s an important and needed initiative to be sure given the many tortured attempts over the years to organize basic provider information and keep it current.

We’ve spent many years in the area of claims data, thinking that the actual information used to cut checks to providers would be the key to building dependable provider databases. Not even close. It’s the same issue that has bedeviled the people behind the various physician identifiers that have been created: physicians tend to have multiple affiliations and even more addresses and phone numbers. They often have third parties involved in receiving payments. At any given time, many are not actively practicing medicine for various reasons. In short, it’s a case of volatility meets complexity.

This ongoing problem of getting control of even information this basic smacks right into two huge trends in healthcare: consumerism and improving care, while reducing the cost of care, through improved use of information technology.

How do you, for example, confidently rate the quality of a physician when you can’t even confidently supply that physician’s address and phone number?  How do you as an IT company develop an electronic health record when nobody can even organize and account for the people who will be entering data into your systems?

We wish dCard the best – we would all benefit from it success. And perhaps the standards that ultimately get traction will be based on open standards driven by voluntary consortiums – it almost has to, because other approaches haven’t advanced the ball very far.