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Archive for the ‘Infocommerce’ Category

Healthcare 3R’s Bring Pain and Gain

• Posted May 23rd 2008
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• by Janice

 Arguably the most powerful and actionable of all consumer health information, ratings, rankings ad recommendations (the 3R’s), present both opportunities and minefields, as the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) found out this week when a lawsuit was filed against them by the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS).   

GIC ranks physicians using cost and quality measures, and its rankings are used for  cost containment; patients have to pay higher copayments for doctors who rank in the lower tiers.  MMS, which has more than 20,000 physicians and student members, alleges that GIC’s system, called Clinical Performance Improvement Initiative (CPI), uses “inaccurate, unreliable and invalid tools and data”.  In particular, the complaint cites miscoding of procedures and inaccurate assignment of patients to physicians who were not responsible for their care. 

A different ratings approach is practiced by the department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS). Its CAHPS program  centers its rankings on patient satisfaction measures.   HHS was also in the news this week with a near-full-page ad in local papers in all 50 states promoting the use of the Hospital Compare site (http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/). As reported by AP, “the ads reflect an emphasis by the Bush administration to increase transparency in the health care system. Officials say greater public disclosure of costs and quality will drive providers to improve on both fronts.”

Currently, hospitals are penalized with a reduction in their reimbursement rates from CMS if they do not participate in the CAHPS program.  It is expected that HHS will continue down the path of pay-for-performance (P4P) as the CAHPS program develops.  

The 3R’s are shaping up to be a lively and controversial business, and Health Content Advisors and our parent company, InfoCommerce Group, will continue to monitor closely those information products that offer ratings, rankings, and recommendations, and you can look for them to continue to play a prominent role in this year’s Health Content08 conference.

 

Medical Tourism Site Launches

• Posted May 14th 2008
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• by Marji

CPR Communications, a healthcare marketing and communications company, has launched YourMedicalTravel.com, a web site that provides information about medical tourism to consumers.

Specific information accessible on the site includes travel tips, cost comparisons for various procedures, legal data and insurance facts. Site visitors can also find information about treatments as well as particular regions (from India to Singapore and Thailand).

The new site complements another CPR Communications offering, MedicalTravelToday.com, a site for businesses that participate in the medical tourism industry.

CPR has launched this latest site to capitalize on a trend of individuals traveling abroad to find more affordable medical treatment. However, recent media reports suggest that the market for such content is not as large as previously thought. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal cites a McKinsey & Co. study that revealed that not as many people are interested in traveling abroad for medical treatment as was assumed. Yet, the study does note that the industry is still poised for strong growth.

In addition, the article notes that the Medical Tourism Association doesn’t size the medical tourism market because there is no firm definition of the market.

Still, for CPR Communications, the launch makes sense. It really does fit nicely with the company’s MedicalTravelToday.com offering, and the organization is certainly on its way to creating a solid portfolio for the medical tourism market. Although the McKinsey study found the market to be smaller than originally thought, it is still predicting growth; and CPR Communications is extremely well-positioned to capitalize on that growth.

 

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.

 

Medical Research, Bloomberg-Style

• Posted May 2nd 2008
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• by Janice

Many of you are probably familiar with the Bloomberg terminals that transformed the workflow for financial traders and analysts in the 1980’s.  The Bloomberg system integrates financial information feeds in a manner that allows analysts and traders to monitor real-time events in the context of historical trends-and to place trades.  Because of its value as a productivity and decision-support tool, Bloomberg has become an essential part of the daily routine for a large percentage of traders. 

At the Bio-IT World conference in Boston this week, Gary Kennedy, CEO of RemedyMD, said that his goal is become the Bloomberg for medical researchers, and the analogy is certainly apt for the relational database system that RemedyMD has developed with the Cleveland Clinic.  Their product, Investigate, is attempting the very difficult task of tying together many sources of data in a way that allows the researchers to clearly see interactions between drug data, medical literature, evidence-based decision tools and internal clinical data.

RemedyMD takes care of the laborious task of data management and provides a dashboard interface that facilitates analysis and collaboration. The goal: helping researchers spend more time on analysis and less time on data collection, conversion, and reporting.  This young company, started by ex-Oracle developers, clearly has larger ambitions, with its growing suite of applications for physicians, surgeons, and dieticians, as well as general office electronic health record (EHR) productivity tools. This is classic Infocommerce in action, and we’re putting RemedyMD on our Model of Excellence watch list. This is a company that bears watching…

 

Physician Transparency: Why the Angst?

• Posted April 24th 2008
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• by Russell

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

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

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

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

Physicians: market thyselves!

 

Availity, Health Market Science Expand Licensing Agreement

• Posted April 22nd 2008
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• by Marji

Availity LLC, a health information exchange, and Health Market Science Inc., a manufacturer of health care provider reference data in the U.S. announced an expansion to their licensing agreement. The previous agreement called for licensed information for select states. This new agreement with provide Availity access to information about more than 4.5 million individual providers and one million provider organizations across the U.S.

Customers of the Availity Health Information Network (a secure web portal) can now easily search provider profiles in the HMS Provider Master File (which contains the listings of the providers and provider organizations). They can also segment the data by contact information, demographics, specialty, education and ethnicity. HMS data can be integrated with customers’ existing provider information.

It just makes sense for these companies to deepen their alliance. Availity will most definitely benefit by being able to provide customers a more robust database in which to find information they need–and find it quickly. Having such data integrated into their workflow will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of Availity customers–and this is functionality that has become a must-have for most information providers today.

This more robust offering may serve to attract more customers to Availity, especially those seeking a seamless solution. HMS may also be able to attract more customers as a result, as it gains more exposure in the marketplace with its position within Availity’s platform.

 

dCard: An Open Standard; A Needed Standard

• Posted March 7th 2008
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• by Russell

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

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

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

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

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