HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for the ‘DrugInfo’ Category

Google Health’s Unfinished Content Strategy

• Posted June 2nd 2008
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• 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Epocrates Files for IPO

• Posted April 18th 2008
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• by Janice

Epocrates, best known for its mobile clinical information decision support tools for medical professionals, filed a registration statement with the SEC yesterday.  The filing didn’t disclose terms, but it estimates that the company will raise at least $75 million in the offering.  Revenues for 2007 were $65.6 million, which represents a 33% increase over 2006.  However, elsewhere in the filing the company reports that growth in  subscriptions to US physicians was flat in the period.

Subscription sales to physicians and other healthcare professionals do not represent the only revenue stream for Epocrates.  They also provide “interactive information services” to pharmaceutical and managed care companies and offer physician panels to market research companies.  These additional sources of revenue allow Epocrates to provide free access to core drug reference and decision support databases, which helps them build loyalty among their user base. 

Epocrates has been in the news recently for creating iPhone-compatible versions of  its drug and clinical information products.  This development should help Epocrates maintain its cool factor among medical students and younger healthcare professionals. 

In a related development, news that UpToDate, a competitor to Epocrates, is on the market has been circulating.  We’ll fill in more details in an upcoming post.

 

Speeding Drug Safety Alerts

• Posted March 27th 2008
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• by Russell

Medem, a for-profit company formed by the American Medical Association and several national medical societies, has just announced the launch of the Health Care Notification Network (HCNN). HCNN is a timely new initiative to send drug safety alerts to physicians via email as opposed to slower postal mail. Medem is operating this new service on behalf of a broad-based non-profit initiative called the iHealth Alliance.

Everything about this new undertaking seems smart and laudable. The only potential fly in the ointment is that because you can’t send email to physicians unless you know their email addresses, physicians need to enroll in the HCNN program. Enrollment is free, it’s been made clear the email messages will be free of advertising or promotional copy, and email addresses will not sold to third parties. Again, it’s all simple, smart and much-needed.

It’s good to see Medem getting itself involved in a project that’s high profile, non-controversial and practical. Medem’s charter was to create useful ecommerce services that would connect physicians and patients. Nobody could doubt the long-term need, but Medem’s launch at the height of the dot com bubble was inauspicious. Further, the novelty and sophistication of its ideas and offerings have tended to leave the company far out in front of its market. Selling cutting edge ecommerce platforms to a market that is hidebound, paper-based and notoriously cheap is tough work. However, with the market finally starting to catch up to Medem’s vision, its strategy may well be vindicated in the not too distant future. In the interim, Medem can burnish its image in the marketplace