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Archive for the ‘Health2.0’ Category
Today’s Health Content Headlines
- Posted March 11th 2010
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Please scroll down if the story you are looking for is not the first headline. New stories are added throughout the day and I may have provided a link to the most current story that is now lower down on the page. Follow me on Twitter @janicemccallum.
Needed: Guided Navigation for Health Information Search
- Posted February 3rd 2010
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
There has been a lively dialogue occurring on the e-patients.net site this past week about how Google and Microsoft Bing display search results for health care queries. Google recently introduced a special result listing that provides links to Mayo Clinic, ADAM, WebMD and MedlinePlus when users type in a common health condition as their search term. For example, type in “hypertension” in the Google search box and the first listing in the search results will look like this:
| Hypertension | |
| Google Health Mayo Clinic Medline Plus WebMD | |
| Hypertension is the term used to describe high blood pressure. Blood pressure readings are measured in millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and usually given as two numbers. For example, 120 over 80 (written as … www.google.com/health |
|
The thread on e-patients.net was initiated by Susannah Fox, Associate Director, Digital Strategy at Pew Internet Research and so far has elicited 73 comments about Google’s policy of providing special placement for these four specialty health sites. Further comments on the post focused on the inability of existing consumer health portals, aggregators, and search engines in guiding patients to information sources that may be more relevant to them. I highly recommend a thorough reading of Susannah’s post and the subsequent comments.
I contributed the following comments: “At this point, the big search engines focus on the broadest topics and Mayo, ADAM, WebMD and MedlinePlus are good sources for basic info on diseases and conditions. But, the common complaint I hear about these resources is that they are too broad, not deep enough, too removed from the current needs of the patient, and certainly not geographically specific.” Susannah wisely brought up the topic of how useful it would be to offer more guidance to people who are seeking more specific reliable information in their health-related query. She asks “I wonder if curated search results are the answer to the ongoing debate over information quality?”
It may be difficult to offer “pre-curated” health information that suits everyone’s needs because of the vast array of queries and the disparate number of sources that exists. The ‘big 3′ consumer health portals, WebMD, EveryDay Health[ii], and HealthCentral already serve as curators to the content they make available under their umbrellas. But, these sites share many of the same mile-wide, inch-deep characteristics of the previously mentioned sites. Even though there are some patient communities represented on these consumer health portals, it is often difficult to find the relevant community and relevant information buried in a post.
The discoverability problems in consumer health search relates to the early-stage of the health content product life cycle. Some online patient communities may have existed for a long time, but most are relatively new. Because many are small and specialized, it is unlikely they will ever achieve sufficient PageRank in Google’s relevancy algorithm to be listed on the first couple of search results pages on Google.
As social networking and other factors that drive the demand for healthcare information matures, there will be more demand for services that guide users through the process of researching, communicating, and recording health information. Who will be the likely winners in the race to provide guided navigation to health information? There are roles for EHR/PHR vendors, content companies (i.e., publishers), patient community sites, pharma and other vendors, providers, and payer organizations to create, distribute and sponsor health content. I expect to see a growing number of licensing and other content sharing deals between these health industry stakeholders in the coming years. And there will always be a role for aggregators and search engines that can improve the customer experience.
[i]Note, Google has changed the display to read “Google Health” instead of ADAM. Google licenses the content from ADAM.
[ii] Everday Health (the new parent company name for what was formerly Waterfront Media) filed to go public last week.
Headline Commentary Oct 12-18
- Posted October 18th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
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.
CEO of OptumHealth’s Care Solutions group describes their programs to encourage healthy behavior before and after health care is needed.
HealthGrades latest annual study of patient outcomes by hospital.
Webmedx, which transcribes doctors’ voice recordings, implements new system powered by MarkLogic to create indexed data that can be fed into other apps.
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.
Phase Forward signs Hungarian pharma company, Gedeon Richter, to multi-year deal for PF’s clinical trial management s/w.
RWJF funds Kaiser’s biobank, the largest and most diverse repository of data genetic data that includes info on lifestyle and environmental factors.
Incentives for employees to participate in wellness programs are growing. Safeway is an example of a company that offers financial rewards to employees who achieve certain wellness goals. To encourage similar programs, health reform legislation will increase existing limits for rewards. This amendment is becoming known as the “Safeway Amendment”.
Great article on imporantance of teaching students how to mine through and analyze data–an increasingly important skill especially in medical research.
John Sharp’s presentation at Cleveland Clinic seminar on how IT is transforming medical practice and research. Good preso with good examples.
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.
Article on MD who won HHS contest to prepare a PSA on H1N1. Dr. Clarke wrote a rap music PSA. Links to Youtube video of him performing the short video included.
How access to info–and especially DTC ads–help drive up costs by increasing demand for tests, procedures and drugs.
Among issues mentioned in article, complexity of medical knowledge and explosion of # of journal articles.
Harvard launches new mobile apps on public health, starting with H1N1 info.
Headline Commentary Oct 5-Oct11
- Posted October 11th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Another review of Health 2.0 conference with good overview of startups (and some older companies) that presented.
Reports on iGuard whitepaper and CDC stats on prevalence of Rx drug usage in US.
Excellent review of last week’s Health 2.0 conference. John Moore from Chilmark Research understands the Health IT issues as well as anyone and articulates problems of interoperability better than anyone. Only comment from Health CONTENT Advisors: content producers/owners are left out of the discussion. IT companies don’t own the data, in fact at the current time they don’t bundle in much data with their services. But, we see lots of activity in deals between healthcare publishers and health IT vendors occurring and think that health content will receive more attention from the folks who are focused on IT aspect in the near future. Note, John’s comment abt Quicken Health & fact that one can hover over a test and see info about it is a great example of how content adds “meaning” to the use of IT tools.
Example of using wellness programs to lower health insurance costs.
Kevin Kruse of Kru Research details his reasons for launching e-Patient Connections 2009. I am speaking at the conference on the market for health content for e-patients. Important point: e-Patients both produce and consume health info.
Cleveland Clinic list top 10 medical innovations that they view as having significant potential for s-t clinical impact.
Balanced review of the recent Health 2.0 conference in SF.
Brief article on Epic, one of the big players in the market for Elec. Medical Records. Big success for Epic came when Kaiser chose them.
Safeway, which has stood out for its programs to encourage healthy behavior (mainly weight loss) of its employees, supports amendment that will allow larger incentives to employees who achieve health goals –as discounts to their health insurance premiums.
Brian Mossop names MyPACS.net as most impressive new clinical decision-making tool from recent Health 2.0 conference. MyPACS.net allow docs to post MRI, CT Scan or other DICOM images to get feedback from other radiologists/docs. He likes the fact that publication delay is eliminated.
Atlantic writer describes Adam Bosworth’s new company, Keas. Keas helps individuals make healthy choices and uses an individual’s personal health data to customize alerts and plans for health. Writer is dubious that consumers will flock to this type of “big brother” service that tells them how to eat, exercise, etc. But, I think she misses the point. Individuals will be pressured to use services like this by the companies that pay for their health insurance and healthcare. Rewards, incentives, nudges–however you want to characterize them–will be need in the form of cash or other incentives to encourage individuals to participate. Eventually, concern for one’s health may be sufficient to encourage usage, but not yet…
Slide presentation given by Lee Rainie of Pew Research to Medical Library Association.
List by topic of recommended external resources by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Wow! Bershire Partners (MA) funds DC (Bethesda, MD) area life sciences services company with $125 M equity investment “for continued expansion through acquisitions”. “United BioSource helps biotechnology companies manage their clinical studies and assists in the regulatory approval process. The six-year-old company has grown exponentially through a series of acquisitions since its founding and now has 1,300 employees in more than 20 locations.
Review of the “tools” panel at Health 2.0, which highlighted integration of FirstDataBank’s drug codes for use by new consumer-focused health resources. Good move by Hearst’s FirstDataBank.
Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, at 2009 Medical Innovation Summit at Cleveland Clinic, Oct. 6, 2009
Verizon teams with Xora to provide app to track activity of home health workers and provide navigational tools.
Caring.com acquires Gilbert Guide. Both provide directory and infor resources on elder care. Caring has raised $6M and has far more users.
Very good post on the benefits of having audience members using Twitter during a conference presentation. Worthwhile reading for conference producers and presenters.
New Merck Manual Home Health Handbook launched with iPhone/iPod app available. Professional Edition of The Merck Manual also available on iPhone/iPod.
Article reports on possibility that UK could overhaul CME and require docs to pay 1/2 of CME costs.
David Cutler, econ prof at Harvard, writes that healthcare costs as % GDP may decline. Counter to CBO and other estimates, but he gives good reasons why the rate of increase may moderate.
Ed Silverman, who used to write the Pharmalot blog, which was discontinued when the newspaper that hosted it gave him a buyout offer and he went to Elsevier to edit the Pink Sheet, will restart blogging.
I like the idea. Safeway, which has been written up before, is mentioned as a company that saved $$ by providing incentives for employees to lose weight.
Notes from Data Drives Decisions panel at Health2.0.
Making the transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 may require hospitals to upgrade their info systems.
Everyday Health partners with DSHI Systems to offer video symptom checker tool for consumers.
Healthline, keynoter from our Health Content08 conference, wins WebAward from Web Marketing Association for best healthcare website for 2009.
Josh Seidman emphasizes the importance of sufficient customer research prior to developing health IT tools. Josh asked panelists from start-ups that have created health info tools for patients how they did their research and the lack of responses is telling. In-depth research of usage behavior and user-needs seems to be lacking in health IT for professionals as well as patients.
Interesting. Gomez represents a good example of a company that evolved from a research firm to a provider of analytic tools. Gomez was prepping for an IPO, but premium from Compuware was high enough to make offer attractive.
Story on Adam Bosworth’s new company, Keas. May have already bookmarked this story.
Nice brief summary of early stage companies presenting at Health 2.0.
Royalty-based venture financing–where investors receive a % of monthly revenue– is gaining attention as new financing model.
Susannah Fox’s remarks at Health 2.0 conference about importance of engaging patients into healthcare. “if you’re not engaging patients, you’re doing it wrong.”
IOM held 2-day workshop on Evidence-Driven Practice. More info here.
Good post by Dr. Joseph Kvedar about steps small physician practices can take to move toward the benefits of EHRs. Kvedar also slams the attention that big EHR systems are receiving–and the $billions of federal incentives–since most doctors practice in small practice groups and cannot afford most of the EHR/EMR systems currently available.
HealthCentral’s CEO, Chris Schroeder, will speak at Health 2.0 on 10/6 & will highlight growth in number of bloggers on their network, primarily from their acq. of Wellsphere.com.
Acquired by PE company Patriach Partners in late 2007, Rand McNally has hired Dave Muscatel (UChicago Booth School ‘96) to revamp the company to position it well against Google Maps and Mapquest.
Announcement of new partnerships with Harvard Pilgrim & the postal service union’s health plan. Also lists some recent features, including ability to graph test results over time.
Profile of Keas, a healthcare decision tool set from Adam Bosworth, fmly of Google & Microsoft. I like the focus on helping use data for decisions.
OptumHealth and American Well are partnering to provide online medical services to Optum’s insured population.
Nature’s new open access Nature Communications, likened to PLoS One in this post.
CVS’s Medicare Drug plan(SilverScript and Accendo) will qualify to cover fewer subsidized members in 2010. They forecast losing about 1/3 of their subsidized customers in 2010.
DeepDyve, which offers search of premium medical publications along with other Web content, is raising $5M to help expand marketing and content development.
XML version of Fed Reg now available. Big news for value-added publishers of gov’t data. I once produced a CD-ROM version of Fed Register: formatting to make a useful reference tool was not easy at that time.
Be careful of semantics. Eric Schmidt repeadedly says that Google is not a content company, but he really means a “content development” company (editorial?). But, Google is very much a media company and by my definition a content company, too. They own some newspaper archives and are trying to own copyright to orphan books. What else do they have to do for everyone to realize that they are a content company? See this post by Erick Schonfeld with some early quotes from Ken Auletta’s forthcoming book on Google.
Author published by S&S describes online storage companies RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile and how they play a role in illegal sharing of ebook files.
SpaFinder lists top trends in spas, including cross-polinations of “medicine” and “spa’. mentions rise in “wellness diagnostics” within the medical spa environment, from services like imaging, genomics, stress tests, lab tests, to stem cell banks as examples of services provided by medical spas.
Schmidt says Google not a content company, but is in business to help content companies thrive. Disingenuous statement. They are a content producer and will be a content seller if/when Google Books Settlement is concluded.
Great tips on how hospitals can track CMS updates and make sure their insitituiton remains current.
Description of retail clinics, like CVS MinuteClinic.
Some competing pharma cos cooperate in participating in coronary stent study. New trend in collaboration in medical research? Probably.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn writes about the newly released study from PWC titled, “Transforming healthcare through secondary use of health data”. Jane focused on barriers to data liquidity (data flows between apps/stakeholders0. I’ll write up post that focuses on near-term opportunities for data publishers to offer data collections and analytic tools to mine newly available “secondary data” that is a byproduct of digitizing health records and health events.
Good overview of medical research and the importance of testing observational hypotheses with clinical trials. My 2 cents: new pools of data are becoming available via digital health record data and will allow larger-scale studies that can allow for more factors than current clinical trials.
Review of Health IT meeting 9/30/09 at Harvard Medical School to discuss “substitutability” aka interoperability/data exchange via APIs.
Proponent of use of safety checklists proposes that doctors who don’t follow rules be penalized.
Headline Commentary Sept 14-20
- Posted September 20th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Good article about lack of transparency in pricing for medical services–and how health reform could help change the current system. Also mentions a company called NewChoiceHealth.com that estimates cost of procedures from Medicare data.
Brief review of Health IT Stimulus Summit sponsored by Health Data Management.
Sweden’s EQT now frontrunner; TPQ is out; Carlyle & Providence Equity still in but have taken a back seat.
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 notes on Medicine 2.0 meeting in Toronto on PHRs.
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.
Alliance Health, which builds platforms for health-related social networks, raises and additional $3.3 M for a total of $6.6M in VC from EPIC Ventures,Highway 12 Ventures and angels. DiabeticConnect.com was its 1st site, which has >50,000 registered memebers.
This is a very interesting move. Scientific news feed direct from major universities. See: www.futurity.org.
Good commentary about disconnect between focusing on improving HCAHPS scores and patient safety. When too tightly focused on score improvement, real chances to improve quality often get overlooked.
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.
Slides, recordings and transcripts from August 27, 2009 Web conference sponsored by AHRQ.
Darin Steward of Oregon Health & Sciences Univ. writes very good overview of PHRs and coves the concept of “infodemiology” without using the term!
Check out this cool app for reading, searching & Tweeting the just-released Baucus hc bill — from Tizra a search tech company.
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?
Good balanced piece on FDA’s cancer drug director, Dr. Richard Pazdur.
Atty General Jerry Brown unveils site that tracks prescription drug use to help physicians with durg interractions and to spot possible illegal drug abuse.
MedAssurant, based in Bowie, MD, acquired Atlanta-based Catalyst Info Technologies, which provides s/w to manage collecting & reporting quality data (HEDIS). MedAssurant focuses on analytics for disease management, clinical & quality outcomes, and financial performance and is gaining market share in healthcare data analytics through acquisitions as well as organic growth. Article also points out other recent acq: Verisk Health (based in Waltham, MA) acquired TierMed Systems LLC (Chanhassen, MN) earlier in the week.
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.
Ted Eytan, MD’s (Kaiser Foundation) presentation on PHRs as used at Kaiser & plans for the future. Outstanding slides (see esp. slide 16).
Published by Wiley with support from Aetna, Navigating Your Health Benefits is available for free.
Apple invites vendors to meeting to discuss healthcare apps. As author says, they’d be idiots to ignore the billions in ARRA funds!
Very helpful presentation by John Moore of Chilmark Research on state of personal health records (PHRs).
Weems named SVP Health Strategy at Vangent. Govt & Health are key markets for Vangent.
Malamud’s preso was a big hit; here’s the video.
OurParents, a central source of information on eldercare services and related information, introduces user forums.
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.
Nice marketing move to encourage sales of its EHR systems for physician practices.
HealthLeaders writes about Data Advantage’s Hospital Value Index and suggests that hospitals have to adapt to increased scrutiny and pay-for-performance measures.
Recent national survey of almost 1,000 physicians by Mayo Clinic reveals that 78% agree that physicians have moral obligation to address societal health policy issues and 73% agreed that physicians are obligated to care or uninsured or underinsured. Other questions reveal attitudes toward using cost as a consideration in determining treatment. Data tables available.
Just learned about Harvard’s suspension of funding for its Div. of Primary Care. Wow!
Bedside patient portals help patients keep in touch with doctors. good idea.
JAMA now requires independent review of data analysis in industry-sponsored research and has seen a dramatic drop in commercially-funded submissions.
Video Screencapture.
Good comments on security as process not product.
Profile of John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Children’s Hosp in Boston. Browstein developed HealthMap.org, which culls online reports of infectious diseases and maps them in real time. A great example of infodemiology.
Headline Commentary Aug 18-Aug23
- Posted August 23rd 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
David E. Williams blasts medical journal publishers for perpetuating the ghost-writing practice where Pharma pays academic physicians to put their name as lead author on research articles.
Morningstar on health reform’s impact on public companies in pharma & managed care industries.
Silverlink, a Boston area company, provides s/w that helps providers send phone msgs to patients w/ alerts about health coverage & appt. reminders.
Nice comparative analysis of drug info on Wikipedia v. Medscape Drug Reference. I think the conclusion applies to almost anything on Wikipedia relative to authoritative sources that have been carefully produced with editorial guidelines: “Wikipedia has a more narrow scope, is less complete, and has more errors of omission than the comparator database. Wikipedia may be a useful point of engagement for consumers, but is not authoritative and should only be a supplemental source of drug info.”
NPR now offers archival transcripts for no charge. Makes good sense, esp. if they can gain addt’l advertising/sponsorship rev. as result.
Big Pharma is increasingly outsourcing CRO and manufacturing to India.
Actually, the article is about the initial ARRA spending on health IT, which will go toward regional training and HIEs.
As expected (at least by me), Twitter will introduce premium commercial accounts that include additional features (and probably better security).
HealthLeaders writes on new regs that require patient notification of security breaches.
AHA’s AHA Solutions arm has endorsed the EXTENSION HealthID system of smart cards for personal health info. System includes reading appliance and smart cards and integrates with PMS systems in hospitals & clinics. Smartcards are widely used in US, but have gained popularity in UK.
AHRQ will hold a free webcast on Sept 24 on the clinical & group CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems), with two case studies presented by clinics who implemented the clinical CAHPS.
FDA has proposed mandatory digital reporting of postmarket adverse effects of drugs & devices. Pilot program has been in effect for years.
Dan Roam provides an entertaining slideshow to explain healthcare policy reform options under debate. Interesting for 2 reasons: 1) does a good of explaining the issues clearly; 2) demonstrates how good simple storytelling using basic graphics and data can provide entertaining content. Publishers take note!
KevinMD asks how useful it is to share full lab reports with patients, since data are not presented in user-friendly format that could be easily understood by most patients. 2 points: 1) some patients will want the full reports–there will always be a distribution of preferences among the full patient population; 2) there is clearly an opportunity for a publisher to provide a tool that helps patients understand the lab test results and record them over time in a PHR or other data tracking tool.
Nice entry by CMIO (chief medical info officer) at Phoenix Childrens detailing the key success factors of their implementation of EHRs. InfoWeek is providing some very useful coverage of health IT.
Amazon, MSFT, & Yahoo plan to join the Internet Archive in the Open Book Alliance to oppose the Google Book Settlement. What took them so long?
Interesting event planned by Mayo Clinic in Sept to discuss innovation in health care.
Cool dashboard of Pharma companies’ tweets created by Ignite Labs.
Some good arguments, but overall Felstein’s points make a case for a public option to sit alongside private insurance. The rich can afford the costly innovative treatments, which if proven successful, will become more widely available at lower prices.
David Weinberger explains why transparency is so important in today’s info economy.
Kru Research has prepared a brief video that defines the participatory class of epatients. Their conference in October “Epatient Connections2009″ will focus on what this emerging segments means to healthcare vendors and information providers. Health Content Advisors is on the program speaking about publishing information for ePatients.
RWJF’s research and links to the proposed Prometheus Payment Model, which attempts to pay for quality.
Short article by Steven Spear reinforces my recent blog “Health Content is Rapidly Becoming a Commodity”.
Interview w/ Dr. Bhan, founder of Ozmosis. Have to go back and read in full.
To be released next year: attachment for Wii that measures pulse.
Excellent article that details total costs of implementing EHR systems at variety of provider institutions. Costs include training time, learning curve (including learning to type for some MDs), lost revenue through fewer patients seen during transition periods that can last >6 months, and worst cases where revenue is lost through malfunctions in s/w that cause billing problems. Not a pretty picture for very expensive systems. Bright side, effective implementation leads to improved patient outcomes (but not cost efficiencies for doctors).
Overview of eprescribing role in Health IT & reform.
Commentary about recent ASAE (Am Society Assoc Execs) meeting. Author emphasizes that associations do not exist to faciliate “associating”, rather to further the interests of the group they represent. Comments apply more heavily to industry trade associations than scholarly societies. However, some of the insights apply to both.
More detail on “medical ghostwriting”, which is in fact quite common. I don’t think the whole category of medical communications agencies that write on behalf of research organizations needs to be overturned, but more transparency is definitely needed. And, more guidelines on under what conditions doctors in academia can lend their name to research articles.
Good to see NIH funding research on intestinal microbes & the effect of antibiotics on upsetting the balance.
Ascend Media sells Allied Healthcare to Anthem Media Group and Practice Builders to undisclosed buyer. Allied provides traditional trade pubs in 10 healthcare specialities; Practice Builders provides consulting to help medical practices with business issues, including selecting and managing IT services for practice mgmt.
Shwen Gee’s slides from recent session on Pharma use of social media. Excellent overview & intro to Twitter.
Gina Kolata reveals the lack of transparency in health care costs. Explains why shifting the burden to consumers via HSAs won’t help keep costs down.
Good article that describes why biologics are attractive to big pharma — and why that is leading to acq. of biotech companies by pharma.
Managing expenses helps hospitals improve their financial results in Q1 2009, according to Thomson Reuters study. Link to study included.
Susannah Fox of Pew Research summarizes her notes from CDC’s Health Communications conference. Like her comment about using mobile devices (esp. phones) for exchanging health data & info.
I got to say that I find Gartner’s Hype Cycle out of touch with reality. The basic curve and phases along the curve make sense, but their taxonomy and placement of technologies along the curve seem less helpful than throwing darts. I’m sure there’s some sensible analysis in the whitepaper, but I don’t find their visual models useful.
Recent focus on some practices in medical scholarly publishing is likely to lead to new regulations. Using medical communications companies to write articles authored in name only by academics has been common, but recent attention on this practice is almost definitely going to lead to more transparency and changes in the practice.
NPR doing a series on the role of Free in digital content. Increasingly, Chris Anderson’s thesis resembles the traditional B2B trade publishing model. “Plus ca change…”
Prof. Uwe Reinhardt clearly lays out a key element of the health care reform debate that has not received enough attention: rising health care costs come out of workers wages/salaries in the form of lower wages and higher layoffs.
Datatrak, an electronic data capture (EDC) company, improves its performance. Was delisted from Nasdaq. Compare to Medidata that went public recently.
WSJ puts spotlight on pharmacy benefit management (PBM) companies, which act as intermediaries to manage prescription sales for health insurance providers. Some of the health reform proposals call for PBMs to make available the prices they negotiate with pharma companies. In an “interesting” argument, the PBM association says that “transparency” will hurt competition. The more likely concern: transparency will expose the share of negotiated cost savings on drugs that the PBMs keep for themselves.
another story about changes in medical school curricula & teaching methods.
Siemens talks EHRs, partnerships, and interoperability.
As part of greater revenue cycle management (RCM) efforts, hospitals now rate patients on ability to pay and use risk calculations in estimating their revenue.
Good list of people to follow to monitor Pharma social media.
Large percentage (82%) of drug ads on Yahoo! lead to illegitimate pharma sites. (Bold thought: there is clearly a demand for a different way to buy pharmaceuticals; our existing system in the US isn’t serving needs of consumers. We need a change.)
Nice to see CenterWatch’s partnering with TrialX to make it easier for patients to find relevant clinical trials.
Good point about lack of CMS director.
Focuses on role of employers–the key beneficiaries of maintaining healthy workers–in providing incentives for healthy behavior.
John Moore of Chilmark will moderate panel on PHRs at upcoming AHRQ event.
Boston area Caritas Christi Health Care to sell laboratory business to Quest Diagnostics, the leading medical testing company. Caritas will maintain its in-hospital testing facilites. Deal with Quest provides greater interoperability of test results with EMRs.
Advice for redesigning Rx drug labels to make them less likely to be confused by patients; and for label inserts to have greater relevance & usability for patients.
Michael Wolff offers his commentary on Mark Cuban’s suggestion that news publishers adopt the cable TV bundling model and have the ISP (or other utility) bill for content. In Wolff’s opinion, news content will always need advertising support. I agree with him for broad-based general news, although sponsorship by vendors of broad-based consumer goods/services is a valid model, too.
Paul Levy, CEO BIDMC, writes of Consumer health Quality Council, founded by Health Care for All, which is seeking stories from patients or caregivers about their experiences with hospitals-esp. experiences that involve avoidable errors.
Good post on applications for Google Wave.
NPR does story on Patient Central, a site from Consumers’ Checkbook. At first glance, yet another site that offers patients a chance to rate doctors. Most aren’t very good. What I like about this one: they get lists of doctors & patients from insurance companies and sent surveys to patients, which gives them a good base and higher # ratings per doctor.
WSJ blog refers to piece in WaPo today about asking one’s doctor if he/she gets $$ from pharma companies. Checking online prior to visits is best method, IMO. Much of scientific publishing is still behind firewall, but tools like DeepDyve and Google Scholar help find citations, if not full articles.
InfoWeek reports on Vanguard Health’s joining the Dossia consortium and writes on the role of employers in providing PHR info to employees. Seems to me that role of employers has been underreported by other media in the helath reform debate.
Author of Caring for our Parents commentary on why it’s so hard for Americans to talk about end-of-life care and related issues.
Headlines for Apr 26-May 2
- Posted May 3rd 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Good post by Missy Krasner, product marketing manager Google Health, and engineering VP, Alfred Spector of Google that endorses Markle Foundation’s framework on “meaningful use” related to ARRA.
Dr. Val speaks with CEO of AllOne Health, which provides a mobile phone app for practitioners and patients.
Scranton Gillette, a PE firm, acquires Imaging Technology News and Diagnostic & Invasive Cardiology from Reilly Communictions.
Warburg has invested more than $65M in Archimedes Pharma, which is seeking approval for its nasal spray pain reliever for cancer sufferers.
Phreesia, which provides patient check-in via wireless touchscreen devices, includes new content from National Osteoporosis Foundation to screen patients for risk of osteoporosis.
ClearHealth creates a iPhone app that allows doctors to view patient records on their iPhones.
Abstract & link to full article by Deloitte on how Pharma can exploit the increasing amounts of digital outcomes data to improve R&D and clinical trial procedures.
Rodale & Reveille, who brought us “The Biggest Loser” are teaming up for new reality TV program based on Rodale’s “Eat This, Not That”.
Good preso from Digital Pharma Europe on social media in pharma. Part 2 of 4.
J&J achieves top ranking in Harris survey on company reputation. Pharma industry was only sector to “register a significan tpositive change from 2007″. Financial services now at bottom with Tobacco industry.
Interesting post about tools for personal datamining: Daytum and YourFlowingData (YFD). Gives example of entering code words “gnight” and “gmorning” on Twitter before going to bed and upon waking to track hours slept each night. There’s some question about user motivation to enter data, but in health care arena, the combo of ease-of-use and fee incentives might be sufficient.
Statement by PhRMA on IOM’s report with recommendations to curb detailing/gift/etc to physicians & medical institutions. Includes some data on R&D spend v. marketing spend by Pharma.
Steve Woodruff’s top stories in Pharma for 4/29/09. Includes link to IOM’s recommendations on detailing/gifts/etc. to physicians & medical institutions, and updates on Sanofi & Novartis’ pipelines.
DeepDyve (formerly Infovell) unveils a suite of tools for publishers that want to offer DeepDyve search and discovery tools for content via their own site. Tools include enhanced landing pages, customer search API, a “more like this” feature, and content highlight search capability. DeepDyve, a Health Content08 innovator, will provide these tools to publishers whose content is incorporated in the DeepDyve search index for a rev. share of advertising deal, or a fee that depends on volume. Note, DeepDyve’s current index is very strong in health content and other scholarly research information. PLoS is one of the first to implement the API.
Missed this last week. Zynx Health, a Hearst Business company, and EBSCO Publishing announce new partnership to embed EBSCO’s Dynamed EBM content into ZynxOrder for mutual customers. DynaMed produces evidence-based medicine (EBM) reference content that is used in thousands of hospitals. Zynx produces clinical decision support order sets. Note, senior executives from EBSCO Publishing and Hearst/Zynx have presented at our Health Content conferences.
Judge Chin issues a 4 month extension to the May 5 deadline for opting out of Google Book Search Settlement.
Excellent PPT by John Moore at Chilmark on current state of PHRs.
BW highlights concerns about suitability of largest entrenched health IT vendors to revitalize healthcare information systems and add efficiency to current manual processes, given their track record. Reaction to article is divided: some say BW is promoting the viewpoint that doctors dismiss the benefits of technology b/c they aren’t tech savvy *; others say the big vendors truly are not providing systems that add efficiency due to poor design. See our 4/16 blog on Google Health PHRs for a more balanced view: health IT vendors need to develop greater expertise about the data that will flow through their systems and the workflow of the clinicians who will be using the systems. With a dearth of standards for clinical data across health IT systems, interoperability and ease-of-use will continue to be curtailed. Information architects are desperately needed in healthcare.*NB, we don’t believe all doctors are luddites!
Scrubs Magazine, which debuted in beta in Jan. 2009, positions itself as the only site focused on broad interests of nurses: including”career advice and inspiring stories, beauty and fashion tips as well as lots of ideas on making your downtime as relaxing as your work life is demanding”.
IOM proposes that pharma companies disclose payments to doctors, med schools, & professional groups in a centralized db, along with some other recommendations to curtail current practices.
Describes how some employers and healthplans are using incentives to “nudge” employees to practice healthy behaviors. Also mentions how MED300, a billing & EMR company, uses multi-level incentives (incl. chance to win a bigger prize) to get workers to fill out health-risk assessments.
Ken Doctor on continued decrease in print circulation for newspapers and Google’s plans to offer personalized online news. Ken lists reasons for print downturns and points out that the aggregator/distributor (Google) seems to be winning (or has already won) in the online news category. As he says, unless a “new, fairer, stable ecosystem emerge[s]”, “Who will pay journalists to create the news?”
Study by Harvard School of Public Health reports that 90% of cases of diabetes in study of 4,883 men & women aged 65 & older could be attributed to lifestyle factors.
NY Times writes about Johns Hopkins Drug Library, which maintains samples of largest collection of approved drug compounds. Researchers can order full set for about $5,000 and then carry out testing to find new applications. Article describes High Throughput Screening (HTS), which automates processes for testing and allows large-scale screening that wouldn’t have been economically feasible in past.
TicTOCs aggregates tables of contents from group of scholarly publishers, including Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Informa, WK, BMC, Nature & others, in an RSS feed. Developed by U. Liverpool library, Heriot-Watt Univ., CrossRef, Proquest, Emerald, RefWorks, Mimas, Cranfield U., IoP, Sage Pub., inderscience, DOAJ, Open J-Gate and Intute.
Roni Zeiger, MD, Google Health product manager, responds to flak over use of billing codes to exchange & interpret data from patient’s hospital medical records.
John Moore from Chilmark Research provides a sanguine review of last week’s Health 2.0 conference in Boston. He’d appreciate less hype, more data.
J&J’s McNeil Pediatrics launches new Facebook Page that provides online resources for adults with ADHD. Site aggregates info from group of ADHD experts and community leaders. This site follows other ADHD Facebook Pages from J&J, which is leading other pharma companies in experimenting with social media and web publishing.
Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) releases a report, “Core Measures: All About the Data”, which recommends that hospitals change priorities to focus on automating documentation of physicians’ notes early in the process to create “core measures” for payers.
New site from HHS that covers federal health IT programs and provides links to state-level initiatives and additional info.
Monica Healthcare, a developer of miniature wireless technology for monitoring pregnant women, has raised 1.2 M pounds in VC funding, led by PUK Ventures. Monica is based in UK and is a spinout of U. Nottingham. Will be marketed in UK, Europe, Gulf States & Australia.
NY-based Applied Informatics launches TrialX, a patient recruitment tool that facilitates recruitment for clinical trials via social networking sites. TrialX also allows subjects to upload data from PHR apps from Google Health and MSFT HealthVault for pre-screening. Recruitment for research studies is fast becoming the leading revenue model for social networking sites.
J&J’s Simponi, a monoclonal antibody that is injected once a month, is approved by FDA for 3 rheumatic indications. Analysts have est.sales of $3B in next 3 years and this biologic is thought to be a key reason that Merck is acq. Schering Plough for $44.5 M.
Good description of Mayo’s adaptation of MSFT’s HealthVault for their PHR application that is open to anyone.
Healthcare IT News provides a concise summary of the key differences in viewpoints represented at last week’s Health 2.0 conference in Boston. Further comment from HCA: both expert and user-generated content can be useful. But, it’s important to have transparency in health content, so that user understands who produced the content and their motivation/bias.
Phase Forward, a leading provider of clinical trial management s/w acq. Waban Software,which provides platform solutions to automate clinical data analyis & reporting, for $14M in cash.
Challenge to Vermont’s law that bars healthcare datamining companies from using prescriber-identifiable data rejected by US District Judge Murtha. VT’s law was challenged by IMS Health, Wolters kluwer, and Verispan/ SDI. PhRMA has a separate challenge which was included in the ruling.
NY Times reports on spread of swine flu & public health emergency. Tracking usage of social media & Google Flu during this emergency will be interesting.
John Battelle posts a couple of graphs showing Twitter’s “hockey stick” growth in March 2009. I think that’s the month I started tweeting. @janicemccallum
Headlines for April 19-25
- Posted April 25th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
HealthBirds, tool provider and aggregator of health-related tweets.
Good post about experience on an “e-patient” who sought out additional options after being told she needed surgery. Point to keep in mind: it takes some work and luck to find an MD or advocate who can help. Patients need more guidance. “a wealth of information is available on the web, but patients often need encouragement to seek it, and help interpreting it and applying it to their own situations. Peer support groups on line are one way to accomplish this and finding an interested, available physician to serve as an “e-patient advisor” is another way.”
Harvard School of Public Health newsletter article that reviews some examples of employer-sponsored wellness programs. Compares carrot & stick approach.
Post by Partners clinical informatics R&D group on meeting in DC of new Clinical Interoperability Council. “CIC may help establish essential clinical governance mechanisms for defining & optimizing the implementation of HL7 standards, … and the clinical content that is used in healthcare information technology for clinical decision support.
FDA held meeting on Wed 4/22 to discuss strategic direction of the device center, which has been criticized for approving devices despite objections from scientific reviewers.
Q1 2009 earnings results for Healthgrades. net income $1.64 B met consensus estimates. Rev. grew 35.6%. Internet Business Group rev. grew 124%, mostly ad & sponsorship rev.
Medical Present Value Inc. has integrated its patient cost estimator with insurance eligibility/benefits calculation s/w. Based in Austin, TX. mpv.com
AHRQ contracted with Rand Corp to develop ‘how-to’ toolset for implementing e-prescribing systems. Notice in today’s Fed Register.
Not sure if I already tagged this story yet.
Example of new payment models in pharma sales. In this case, Merck provides discount to Cigna if Cigna helps promote compliance.
Great example of a Twitter Poll: Are Cochrane reviews too long, short, or just right.
ABC news writes about open access movement in scholarly pubishing and the importance of broader access to medical research. Also, article points to provisions in stimulus bill for continuing to require posting to PubMed, and describes the Conyers bill that takes the opposing view of diminishing open access.
Thomson Reuters’ NexCura Cancer Profiler Tools to be incorporated into National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR)’s website for cancer patients. Good example of medical society’s sponsoring commercial content for patients.
John Moore from Chilmark provides a quick comparison of growth in unique visitors to WebMD, Healthline & Healia.
Lowers forecast made in October by 2 %. Emerging markets capture higher % growth; US market to decline in 2009.
Revenue declines 8% to $526.0M (3% constant currency); Operating income also down, but net income up.
John Glaser, VP & CIO Partners Healthcare in Boston has accepted a 6 month stint as adviser to David Blumenthal, the recently appointed national coordinator for healthcare IT. Glaser will spend 4 days/week for 6 months working with ONC.
Agents from Defense Criminal Investigations Service raided offices of Siemens Medical Solutions in Malvern seeking documents related to company’s military contracts.
O’Reilly Radar reports that medical apps for iPhones are the 3rd fastest growing category. Medical still only 1.1% of all apps, but growing. Note, healthcare & fitness is separate category with 2.5% share.
American Medical Assoc. plans to launch health info exchange platform for physicians. AMA has contracted with Covisint (sub. of Compuware) to build the platform. Will likely include practice mgmt tools, CME and other content, clinical mgmt tools and networking. DrFirst has already announced its plans to offer its e-prescribing s/w via the platform.
Microsoft’s Tim Smokoff, genl manager MSFT’s worldwide public sector health division, on state of health IT and MSFT’s role.
Good post on “ebb and flow” but steady progress being made in determining clinical quality guidelines.
Good article on well-publicized deal between Microsoft & Mayo Clinic to offer PHR free service.
ADAM releases a consumer health app for iPhone with content from ADAM, Healthcare Blue Book, video from HealthiNation, and some blogs/social networking sites.
From Healthline, post that provides the “pro” point of view on patients doing online research prior to office visits–despite some possible drawbacks.
Story in FT that suggests that new CEO of Reed Elsevier, Ian Smith, may be interested in talking with WoltersKluwer about a merger. Also reports on new chairman, Anthony Habgood.
Searchable transcript of UnitedHealth, parent of Ingenix and OptumHealth, latest earnings call.
UK’s NHS on DNA tests.
New site includes ability to upload and share personal protocols.
Cignamakes Quicken Health Expense Tracker available to those enrolled in most of its health plans, via myCigna.com.
SureScripts releases report and PR that announces growth in e-prescribers in US from 19K to 103K in past 2 years. Q1 2009 growth especially high due to new incentives from CMS.
The result of consumers’ bearing more of the costs of healthcare: fewer doctor visits & reduction in other care. Especially acute in recessionary times with loss of employer-paid care.
Developing countries adopting telemedicine & use of mobile phones for medical records transfer more rapidly than in US.
Healthline adds suite of tools & enhancements to help patients research treatments & costs.
Zynx Health (a Hearst Bus. Info company) contracts with Scope e-Knowledge for medical terminology mapping project.
More on FDA warnings to 14 pharma companies about lack of compliance of short online paid search ads. Prior to recent warning, pharma companies thought a “one-click” rule existed, which allowed for brief ad as long as a click on the ad led directly to more info.
Good piece on PaidContent about FDA warnings to Pharma about use paid search ads, which the FDA says are misleading because they don’t include risk info. In early April, FDA asked pharma companies to remove ads that contain violations and respond to the agency by mid-April. Health in one of largest verticals for Google, and pharma ads make up the largest component of ads in the category, so Google has big incentive to find a solution, even though SVP Rosenberg says it may not be easy.
American Psychiatric Assoc votes to phase out pharma-sponsored symposia at APA annual meetings.
Good article in NY Times on state of personal health record (PHR) systems. Key point, for most patients, their provider(s) are not using effective EHR systems that can interact with PHR s/w. PHRs can still be a useful tool for record-keeping for individuals, although the patient will have to input all data manually. My comment: with more patients on high-deductible plans with HSAs, there is more incentive to track medical expenses. Intuit’s tools may be good solution.
Follow-up to Google Health story about e-Patient Dave. BIDMC’s CIO Halamka has decided to halt transmission of medical billing codes to PHR vendors. Instead, they’ll send info from clinical records, which include a mix of textual descriptions and some codes.
Dr. Roni Zeiger, product mgr for Google Health, writes that patients should ask about risk/benefit profile of all treatments their doctors suggest. Good goal in an ideal world, but we have a way to go before we have sufficient data to provide the statistical evidence. The greater issue is improving health literacy, ie., educating patients about medical research and basic statistics.
FTC files propsed privacy requirements for PHR vendors and organizations that send data to PHR vendors. ARRA requires FTC to work with HHS to prepare a report to Congress by Feb. 2010; for now, FTC is proposing “interim final regulations” covering breach notifications for PHR vendors.
Follow-on from John Halamka, CIO of BIDMC, re: the Google Health brouhaha this week. They’ve learned from experience that medical billing codes shouldn’t be tranferred to Google Health. Overall, post supports my point that health literacy & patient education experts not involved in plans for Google Health PHR.
Thomson Reuters Healthcare’s Medstat Advantage Suite and APS Healthcare are chosen by NY State’s Medicaid office to provide analytic/predictive modeling services to study usage patterns in provision of Medicaid services. “APS, which operates 41 Medicaid programs in 26 states and Puerto Rico, focuses on improving overall health and wellness through education and interventions that promote behavior change, improve health outcomes and reduce long-term healthcare costs. Thomson Reuters’ Advantage Suite® is currently used for data analytics and decision support by Medicaid and other government agencies in 28 states. Thomson Reuters will deploy its Medstat Advantage Suite® solution, which combines a customized repository of healthcare data with a comprehensive set of analytic tools. The system generates intelligence and benchmarks that governmental agencies use to analyze and manage the cost and quality of healthcare delivered to their beneficiaries.”
Debate about usefulness/value of genomewide studies for predicting likelihood of disease in individuals, based on currently available genomic testing services. Full genomic profile of individual appears to be more useful.
Headlines for Feb 5-16
- Posted February 15th 2009
- Comment (1)
- by Janice
IMS reports 3% growth in rev in constant currency for 2008. See press release for more details & links to full financials.
U. Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health published study that offers conservative view of the short-term benefits of genetic screening tests.
HealthGrades introduces Five-Star Doctors, rated on a mix of objective criteria (affiliated with hospitals with 5-star rating in specialty; board certified; and free from malpractice judgements & sanctions).
Thank you to David Rothman for writing the post that I started to write a couple of days ago to point out some Web 2.0 tools being used by HHS/CDC, including widgets to help spread info on the peanut recall. CDC even has a Twitter feed for health professionals.
Research from Change Sciences Group shows that individuals have greater trust in sharing info with their health insurer than with banks, gov’t agencies, or Google or MSFT. Other results indicate that existing health portals aren’t effective, but that insurers are in the best position to provide info that will be used.
Not health related, but a topic I monitor: business models for online news. I’m afraid NY Times is taking the wrong approach again. The archive is so suitable for monetizing by contextual advertising: a broad collection of content with a broad audience. But, API access should incur a fee or rev share.
Google & IBM announce a partnership to facilitate transfering data from mobile monitoring devices to Google Health record. Article includes some estimates of how many users have created records on GHealth or Microsoft’s HealthVault–one est. is “a few hundred thousand”.
Article tosses around the possibility that DTC ads will be prohibited by Obama admin. More likely scenario is that there will be restrictions and that more info will need to be made available along with ads.
Story about betting pools at offices to encourage weight loss, along with some websites that facilitate the process. Points to success of cash rewards for weight loss and importance of peer pressure/cooperation–especially among men.
Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, which focuses on the discovery & development of antibiotics for antibiotic-resistant infections, receives $25M in additional funding after strong phase 2 results.
P&G has retained Goldman Sachs to look for buyers of its >$2b pharmaceutical businesses.
Presentations, transcripts and podcast of recent ARHQ webinar on evaluating Clinical Decision Support methods.
David Rothman points to Behind the Medical Headlines, a site produced by Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh & Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons in Glasgow. Site provides pointers to help readers discern the validity or trustworthiness of health-related articles in the press.
PharmaNet, a large provider of outsourced drug development services, is acquired by JLL Partners for $250M.
Montreal-based IT company, CGI Group Inc., receives a contract worth up to $24M to conitnue to develop computerized system for Medicare appeals.
A patient education program developed at BU Medical Center in Boston called RED (for Re-Engineered Hospital Discharge Program) uses specially trained nurses to educate patients about post-hospital care plans. RED led to 30% fewer readmissions and subsequent emergency visits.
FT interviews Peter Rigby, CEO Informa, with focus on debt and need to divest some assets. Informa has divisions in financial & commercial publishing, as well as academic & scientific, which includes substantial pharma business intelligence databases, publications and events.
More info on ENURGI acquisition by Univita. Techcrunch provides concise descriptions of Univita and ENURGI (a service that helps patients and their advocates find caregivers). Also reports that Univita is backed by Genstar Capital, a SF-based PE company.
ENURGI, which presented at Health Content08’s Innovators Showcase, has been acquired by Univita. Matt Holt provides more details in this post.
Research firm, User Centric, posts results of recent study of consumers’ ease of use and utility of GoogleHealth and Microsoft’s HealthVault personal health records platforms.
Headlines for Nov 25-30
- Posted November 30th 2008
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Post by Elsevier software architect on how they are experimenting with using 2ndLife.
Merck manuals Web and mobile versions made available in “digitally born” formats through Unbound Medicine, a healthcare knowledge management company.
Cmed Group, a CRO based in Horsham, PA, receives 5M GBP from Scottish Equity Partners to fund global expansion of Timaeus, an intelligent data acquisition & mgmt solution for gathering clinical data.
Med Ad News spotlights 4 innovative pharma marketing companies: 3FX, Aptilon, HealthTalker and Phreesia.
Article about follow-on studies of drugs using larger more diverse populations than in clinical trials.
Now in its 2nd year, Xconomy, on web-based technology publication and events producer, raises 1st tranche of 2nd round. Xconomy covers the “exponential economy” with focus on high tech, healthcare/biotech/devices, and energy in Boston, Seattle & San Diego. Founded by ex-Tech Review execs.
Boston-based Yankee Equity Solution has launced a $50M fund (YES Medical Technology Fund) to invest in medtech companies in Boston area.
Recent study by MSFT researchers (info retrieval expert and MD/computer scientist) suggests “suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.”
Global Lib. of Women’s Medicine launches in beta (11-19-2008). Open access. “The objective of this site is to support clinicians in their care of women. It is hoped that the information provided – which is designed to be up-to-date, expert and practical – will be a useful resource for all physicians and, in addition, that it may be of particular benefit where access to the latest textbooks and references is difficult.”
A survey article of online health resources for patients. Article lists lots of sites, with little or no evaluation.
Good interview with Steve Aylward, GM, Health & Life Sciences, Microsoft.
“A new tool for health plans, providers, portals, and disease management organizations, Ix Conversations help health care consumers self-manage major health issues like heart disease, diabetes, asthma, healthy weight, and smoking cessation.”
Drugs.com launches new tool, MedNotes, that helps consumers monitor and manage their medications. MedNotes is free and “can also be used to create printable personal health and medication records. Accessible directly at www.drugs.com/mednotes, MedNotes is linked into Google Health’s online health records system as a personalized drug safety management tool.”
Latest in Elsevier’s “Consult” product line of EBM resources, “Imaging Consult provides thousands of high-quality images and anatomic drawings that help radiologists identify typical, variant, and differential-diagnosis findings. The extensive reference material included with each topic contains detailed explanation of how the image findings correlate with anatomic and pathological changes.”
WSJ Health Blog on shortcomings in health care journalism.
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