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Archive for the ‘Health2.0’ Category

PHR Standards Big Step Forward

• Posted June 26th 2008
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• by Janice

While privacy concerns remain a deterrent to the adoption of personal healthcare records (PHRs), a lack of standards may be an even stronger one. Consumers don’t like to expend time and money on new technology that can’t easily synch up with other devices or content (certainly you remember “Betamax”?).

To help overcome both concerns, the Markle Foundation has just published a set of practices for handling PHR information in Connecting for Health Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information.  The framework was developed with a workgroup that included payers, providers, health IT vendors, healthcare publishers and advocates, physician organizations and policy analysts.  The group includes Google Health, Microsoft, Intuit, WebMD, Revolution Health, Aetna, AARP, Kaiser Permanente, BCBS, Consumers Union, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dossia, Ingenix, Cisco, and others.  (See the complete list in the press release: www.connectingforhealth.org/news/pressrealease_062508.html.)

The publishing industry has a dismal record of developing standards that facilitate data exchange. That’s why it is important to note that the complete report includes seven sections on technology standards and requirements along with nine sections on policy issues.  In consumer health care publishing, policymakers and technology companies play important roles, so perhaps they will push content providers to create and adopt standards. In the section of the report titled, An Architecture for Consumer Participation, the importance of portability and interoperability of the PHR is emphasized:

For PHRs to become more universally useful to consumers, they must provide a convenient and secure means of connecting to personal data and interactive services from multiple sources, and they must provide a convenient and secure means of moving the data out of the PHR as well, in whole or in part.[1]

At last year’s Health Content07 conference, there was a wide divergence of opinion about how long it will take before PHRs become mainstream. The Technology Overview section of the Markle report depicts how “health care entities and consumer technology innovators operate under different cultures that can clash without basic rules of the road“.  The technology standards and policy principles laid out in the Connecting for Health framework are a first step towards overcoming the hurdles on the road to adoption of PHRs.  However, according to recent research also reported by the Markle Foundation, only about 2.7 percent of the population they surveyed are using PHRs. The question of how quickly consumers will adopt PHRs is clearly still open for debate. 

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[1] Connecting for Health Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information, The Markle Foundation, www.connectingforhealth.org/license.html, section CT7, An Architecture for Consumer Participation, page 4, June 2008. 

 

Google’s Personal Health Record Platform

• Posted May 20th 2008
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• by Janice

 The long-awaited release of Google Health (in Beta of course) makes it clear that there is a race on between Google and Microsoft to gain traction and share in the emerging market for personal health records (PHRs). 

At Health Content Advisors, we have shifted our view of the relevancy of PHRs to publishers of health content.  Previously, we tended to think that electronic health records were an IT utility for record-keeping and that they would take time to be adopted by a significant portion of consumers.  Yes, publishers should be cognizant of the need to integrate their content with electronic medical records and PHRs, but more timely opportunities seemed to exist in the creation of standalone applications for researching healthcare information.   We now view PHRs as a logical structure and filtering tool for health-related research and information seeking.  Even if users don’t register and import or input data into secure (one hopes) online sites, the architecture of a personal health record is a sensible one for designing a healthcare information portal. 

Google Health requires that users set up a profile that includes age, sex, height, conditions, medications, test results and more before allowing access to the specialized online health services included in Google Health (health topics from ADAM are the exception).  I for one will not be entering this information exchange bargain with Google, but I know that I guard my privacy more highly than some others.  Google is offering added privacy protection measures and will not allow advertising on Google Health, but it has said that it will aggregate anonymized content from Google Health to create trend data and other statistics that can be monetized via online ads or other means.

When viewed as a content service, Google Health sets the registration bar extremely high: imagine other content sites asking for such personal information before they allowed users to view content.  Not many users would complete the registration process.  However, when viewed as a utility for storing personal health information-and a utility that is promoted by one’s medical provider/institution–the same content becomes a beneficial value-added service.  But, in either case, Google is dependent on a high level of trust from users.  

Google doesn’t think small.  As Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch says, Google Health is “a platform” and they are striving to be the most popular platform for personal electronic health records.  We applaud Google for establishing a sound foundational architecture for personal health content and for bringing order to the scattered world of online health content. However, we have some issues with the conditions that are set for accessing the content.

(This is the first in a series of posts on GH.  Our next post will focus on content, search and content partners.)

 

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.

 

Doctors, Rate Yourselves

• Posted April 2nd 2008
• Comment (1)
• by Janice

Last week, Angie’s List, the online subscription site that is known for user ratings of painters, carpenters, roofers and other home contractors, announced a new service that allows its 600,000 members to rate their experiences with physicians, dentists, pharmacists and health insurers.  Angie’s List joins Zagat’s, which launched physician ratings last fall. 

Most of the press coverage about the new service has highlighted doctors’ concerns that reviews will be biased toward comments that are not central to the quality of the clinical care provided and that negative comments will be difficult to counteract. However, it is important to keep in mind that the objective of services like Angie’s List is to help users find good doctors and contractors. If the site doesn’t meet that objective, it won’t succeed.

How should doctors be responding to the increasing demand from patients for information about the quality of care and overall user experience with certain practitioners? They can take the tack emphasized in the articles referenced above, or they can create their own services that offer information about their qualifications, range of services, and other differentiating factors to help prospective patients evaluate whether they want to make an appointment with them or not.

If doctors want to ensure that the full picture of the care they provide is presented, including the quality of the clinical outcomes, they are going to have to get in the game and help create information services that complete the picture. They and other healthcare providers should keep in mind that the visitors to these healthcare directory sites are prospective new patients who are seeking a new practitioner—what marketers would call prospects! And just like in other markets, one size does not fill all in healthcare. Preferences for doctors vary just like preferences for cars vary. It is incumbent on the healthcare providers to learn some of the tools of the marketing profession to position themselves effectively. We don’t expect all doctors to become expert marketers, but we do expect them to be aligned with institutions that do understand marketing.

As we move down the road to a value-based system of healthcare services in the US, we predict that there will be an increasing number of marketing services companies that will help physicians and other healthcare providers understand how to market themselves. Xoova and Alijor represent a couple of new companies that offer a platform where doctors can market themselves on the Web. Expect to see many more entrants leverage the advantages of infocommerce to help buyers and sellers of healthcare services make better informed purchasing decisions.

 

Consumer Health Sites Not for the Faint of Heart

• Posted March 21st 2008
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• by Janice

Steve Case, the keynote speaker at yesterday’s EconHealth seminar, and CEO of Revolution Health, used the phrase “not for the faint of heart” to describe the current environment for producing healthcare content for the consumer market. Chris Schroeder, CEO of the HealthCentral Network, repeated the phrase in the introduction to his opening panel. It’s an apt way of summing up the themes of the seminar that focused on the money flow in early-stage digital consumer health companies.

Case used the analogy of his experience getting consumers engaged in online communication at AOL and predicted that the time horizon spans 10 to 20 years before the full “sea change” occurs in the healthcare sector. Significant additional hurdles exist in the health market, which has a complex institutional structure with layers of agents that constrain consumer choice and behavior. The agents include employers who remain the primary payers of health insurance, the health insurance companies as payer-intermediaries between consumers and providers, and government agencies that create policy and regulations—and are also a major payer of healthcare services. Layers of constraints also exist for the physicians and other healthcare professionals who offer health services.

Still, Steve and other speakers did not present a gloomy future for health content start-ups and established healthcare publishers. There is overwhelming agreement that the US is moving toward a consumer-centric healthcare system and there are ample opportunities for companies that create innovative applications to improve the efficiency of healthcare consumption. But the timing of adoption by consumers is very difficult to predict, especially in an environment of constrained choice. Deep pockets help. And, it helps to have alternative sources of revenue to keep afloat while the “tectonic shifts” in healthcare settle. Without significant resources, the most likely future for most of today’s consumer health start-ups will be acquisition by a large more diversified health content or health IT company.

 

EconHealth Seminar, March 20

• Posted March 6th 2008
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• by Janice

Our friends at PaidContent.org have extended a special offer to Health Content in Perspective readers and Health Content07 attendees for their upcoming EconHealth seminar in NY.  We’ll be attending and look forward to seeing many of you there.

PaidContent.org invites you to join our team and excellent panelists for a half-day seminar on March 20 from 1pm to 5pm in New York at the TimesCenter.  As a courtesy to the HealthContent audience, we extend a $50 discount on tickets for the event. Register here using the discount code “HC” to receive $50 off the $250 admission price. Since we’re keeping the discussion group more intimate, the seats are limited and will fly fast, so jump in now.

EconHealth’s specific focus will be the evolving business models for consumer health media companies, VC and M&A deals being done in the industry, the players in the industry, both big and small, and innovative services and disruptors in the space.

The format is simple: one keynote Q&A and three panels. We’re excited to announce that the keynote interview is with Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution LLC, a co-founder of America Online.

Panel topics:

– Competition for Attention: Health portals vs Portals with Health vs Oldline Publishers vs Service Providers

– Emerging models: Search engines, merging medical info with personal medical data, ad networks, and social media 

– Deals: Health and wellness media M&A and venture capital investments 

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution LLC, a co-founder of America Online
• Esther Dyson, EDventure
• Stephanie Dolgins, VP-Women’s & Lifestyle, AOL
• David Kramer, CEO, Digitas Health
• John Lambros, Managing Director, Savvian
• Morris R. Levitt, Managing Director-Life Science, DeSilva+Phillips
• Marjorie Martin, GM-Health, About.com
• Daniel Palestrant, CEO, Sermo
• Chris Schroeder, CEO and president, The HealthCentral Network
• Dean Stephens, president & COO, Healthline
• Benjamin Wolin, CEO, Waterfront Media/EverydayHealth

 

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

 

Journals Need to Join the Online Social Mix

• Posted February 19th 2008
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• by Janice

A recent post by Dr. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, on Matthew Holt’s Health Care Blog chided the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for publicizing an article that “has important public policy ramifications but does not make available the full text of the article” [unless one pays a $15 fee or is a subscriber].  In the comments to Dr. Levy’s post, a reader questions why JAMA can’t emulate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which not very long ago began allowing free access to articles for readers who follow links from blogs that reference specific articles, as well as opening general access to a limited number of articles that have broad interest.

We think that medical publishers should indeed follow the example of the WSJ (which, under new ownership of Rupert Murdoch, is expected to greatly increase free access to the news on the site, but retain certain high-value subscription content). Why? Because there is a large and growing audience of both medical professionals and consumers who are interested in the content from major medical journals and these readers are motivated to read and possibly pass along information about the articles to others.

Whether through participating in services like Sermo, which is targeted to medical professionals, or via Web-wide social networking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace, or Facebook—and of course blogs—the payoffs to journal publishers are many. They include: increasing exposure, connecting more directly with engaged readers who are not currently part of their core subscription base, and remaining relevant to medical professionals as the conversation moves online. Look for a discussion on whether or not subscription revenue will decline as a result of increasing free access in a future post.