HealthContentAdvisors

Richard Boulderstone chairs global committee (with members from 50 countries) to provide access to scientific information through WorldWideScience.org.

RWJF rebuts comments about high health care costs being a direct function of poverty. Issue is far more complex and poverty only explains a small portion.

Alphabet soup of health IT standards described in this article. Although technical, it includes some very important points about data standards that allow interoperability.

New study indicates ghostwriting prevalent even in top journals. Systems for requiring transparency in reporting relationships between industry and the research it funds are required if trust in scholarly medical publishing is to remain. Industry funding is needed, but researchers and other readers need to know who funded the research.

Dr. Kent Bottles, who heads the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (CSI), writes on how fear motivates and why fear tactics have become so prevalent in our current political environment. All in relation to health care reform.

EBSCO opens up a sliver of its health info to the world for H1N1 info.

Harold Miller outlines critical payment reforms needed to put US healthcare system on track.

More evidence of trend toward increased mergers among hospitals and physician groups.

Retail clinics like CVS MinuteClinics expand their services to include treating chronic diseases such as asthma. Driver of expansion=need for more consistent revenue.

Indepth article on “infodemiology”, a term to describe analyzing online data to extract intelligence on public health trends. I like the term & used it at last year’s Health Content event.

Great list of data content built on open government data. I’ll check out Govpulse, which article says turns Federal Register into something more useful (sorted and searchable by dept and geography).

Nice opinion piece that focuses on issue of improved evidence base for medical care. To those that oppose evidence-based medicine, my comment is: “do you prefer the opposite?” As this article points out, patients don’t know that half of treatment is not based on objective scientific research.

New site from FDA/USDA provides a central place to find info on food safety, recalls, etc.

List of lists for twitter feeds that cover women’s health. 10 lists in total. mostly good.

This brings back old memories. Superior Capital, a MI PE company, buys National Archive Publishing, which was spun off from UMI/ProQuest (x years ago). National Archive includes XanEdu, the coursepack group, and microfilm, the original UMI product line.

pMDsoft, “an elegant EMR front-end” announces interfaces with additional EMR, EHR and other health IT systems.

Information Week brief article on premilinary certification for health IT by CCHIT, in advance of full requirements for meaningful use (MU) from ONC by year-end.

Written by a designer, but article homes in on the business models for ebooks.

CMS’ guidance pertains to states and HIEs.

FDA launches real-time reporting of food safety issues by manufacturers & other industry players.

Pharmavite, mfr of Nature Made vitamins & supplements, to offer vitaminID program to consumers. VitaminID provides individualized vitamin/supplement programs for consumers via a website enabled for ecommerce (of course). Newsletters & online chat with a dietician are included.

Guardian lists top 100 tech media companies in UK.

A nice post that provides list of online anatomy resources. Good to find another medical librarian on Twitter.

David Rothman reviews new Gilbane Group report on ebooks.

AHRQ is in process of releasing version 1.0 (from beta) of Common Formats for submitting patient safety information.

LEO Pharma, a privately-held pharma company specializing in dermatology & critical care will acquire Peplin, a public Australian company fo US$287.5 million in cash.

Response to Ignagni’s editorial in NEJM, which expresses why health insurers are against a public plan.

Robert Fogel, prof. of economics at University Chicago Booth School of Business, writes that demand for healthcare is driven by increases in income. In short, people with high incomes have more disposable income and are willing to pay both a higher absolute and higher relative amount of their income on health care. So, as income increases, a household wants to spend a greater % of income on healthcare. Conclusions written in the AEI piece center on the positives of this phenemenon: demand drives innovation in healthcare and other related industries benefit, too. Problem is that with the current level of income disparity in the US, only the wealthy can afford the healthcare innovations and the steadily increases in overall healthcare costs that accompany them.

Security specialist in UK writes about NHS plans to manage their Healthspace program(me), which offers summary medical record info to patients. Google Health & Msft HealthVault are under consideration to replace HS.

Excellent presentation that provides into to Twitter and overview of how hospitals and other healthcare providers are using Twitter.

Nice example of how one MD uses a white board to explain his diagnoses to patients (and their parents) and then suggests they capture via camera-phone.

Rodale includes articles & some covers on Obamas in all of their health magazines: Prevention, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and use cover w/ Michelle Obama & children to launch Children’s Health.

Short (3:32min) video that describes Mark Twain St. Joseph’s Hospital’s award from Avatar International for exceeding patient satisfaction. Avatar Int’l is a research firm that carries out satisfaction surveys for healthcare providers, including HCAHPS.

Google custom search that searches over 2,800 US hospital websites. Tools are there, but it still takes effort to aggregate good content. Thanks Ed!

Pfizer to pay $1.3B in criminal penalty related to marketing practices for Bextra and another $1B in civil fines related to other drugs. HHS held a news conference with Secy Sebelius to reinforce the seriousness of their intent to enforce penalties against pharma companies that violate regulations.

Great title that drew me in! Good post, too. Big issue with hashtags on Twitter is that there is no standardization and no easy tools for deciding what tag to use. Plus, longer hashtags take up too many of the precious 140 characters. I hardly ever use them. Best use at this point: conferences.

WaPo writes about how social media use will change public health communications. Describes “infodemiology”, where analysis of online messages can provide data about such things as spread of flu.

Practice Fusion EHR can now integrate lab results data from Quest Diagnostics. Another small step in integration & interoperability.

Dr. Abraham Verghese offers his thoughts on importance of listening to patients and the power of framing information about our current health system in stories that people can relate to.

Article questions why CVS’ stock price hasn’t benefited more from its position as PBM, pharmacy and MinuteClinic provider.

Suit filed on Aug 21 says merger of Pfizer & Wyeth should be stopped because it will drive up drug prices and b/c it depends on gov’t bailout funds to finance the deal.

NYTimes offers some background on how Forest Labs used paid consultants to push Lexapro to extend life of Celexa whose patent had expired.

Report on recent seminar at UC Berkeley on Google Books Settlement. To read.

Article cites some evidence that taxes on sugary drinks & junk food would help reduce obesity. Bottom line: incentives work.

According to latest Pew study, 47% of internet users seek info abt doctors, and 1/3 of that 47% looked for rating or ranking info. However, very few posted ratings or reviews.

CDC plans to dismantle the National Center for Health Marketing, which promoting health information via social media. Role will continue but not as centralized group.

Article reviews methodology used to project costs of chronic disease/conditions.

Wow! Raytheon to acq. BBN, which is best known for having developed ARPAnet.

Good article that posits that solution to slowdown in productivity in pharma industry will require an open-access approach to chemical research that focuses on biological processes and the biological role of the drug target (usually a protein) under investigation. In essence open access chemical biology will allow cross-discipline research.

Don’t know if I tagged this yet. Bweek offers case study of 6 sigma implementation at Moffitt Cancer Center to improve efficiency.

CareFusion, a spinoff of Cardinal Health launches on S&P 500.

Very thoughtful post on what model is optimal for doctor/patient interaction. Dr. Bottles raises the concern that focus on EBM and patient choice de-personalizes care. Post also reminds me of my frequent comment that buying healthcare is not like buying a car (as some like to say); however, healthcare consumption is somewhat similar to maintaining a car–finding a good mechanic, doing reg. maintenance, etc. Choices are more complex for lifetime care than for single transaction. Bottles comments about target marketing are important, too. It’s difficult to pre-identify and serve groups of similar healthcare consumers as consumer product companies try to do in their marketing. Biggest issue in the US healthcare system IMO: providers typically don’t work as a team which hampers collaboration and makes it difficult to promote styles of care to consumers/patients.

Greenway, a EHR vendor, partners with McKesson’s RelayHealth to provide access to RelayHealth’s Virtual Information Exchange platform. This is an extension of partnership between the companies to further access to lab results, radiology reports & transcribed documents to Greenway customers via VIE platform.

Good case study of how one provider org. analyzed workflow and broke down the implementation of EHRs into manageable pieces.

Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks partners with Correctional Medical Services (CMS) to provide its EMR solution to correctional facilities affiliated with CMS.

More initiatives to improve hospital quality performance, which I see as the major focus of health care industry change in 2010-2011.

Link to CBO report that analyzes effects of health reform plans on Medicare Part D.

Good list of online health info sources for patients/consumers to consult.

New paper describes better methods for disclosing potential conflicts of interest to participants in clinical trials.

UK “Power of Information” taskforce invited Tim Berners-Lee to advise on opening access to UK govt data.

David E. Williams comments on the need to focus on the “content” or “information” side of the IT equation, not just the technology. In particular, he points to how clinical decision support systems (CDS) benefit from application of technology to info. This is the mantra of Health Content Advisors. We’re glad to see more industry analysts poiont out the need to put attention on the “I” in “IT” .

John Halamka’s post on first meeting of HIT Standards Committee on quality measures.

Here’s an example of a publishing company’s looking at data it can extract from patterns of use of its content. Analysis doesn’t appear to have been done for purpose of creating a by-product, but online news sites should consider more offshoots from mining usage patterns on its sites.

Elsevier selects NextBio’s platform to enhance ScienceDirect, by allowing it to integrate search results from other online scientific data along with ScienceDirect results. NextBio is used by many top Pharma companies & research institutions.

Dr. Chen writes about uses of social media (including Twitter) to motivate patients to comply with treatment and wellness plans.

Varian says ’statisticians are sexy’ and ability to interpret and communicate trends from databases is critical skill in today’s business world.

Lots of tips & references on using Twitter for HC journalists.

Single payer system = longer life expectancy?

2nd in 3-part series on eprescribing.

Good summary of new Pew reports with follow-up by Susanna Fox, Gilles Frydman, and more. I’ll dig into the report tomorrow.

Medseek, a provider of healthcare enterprise portals for hospitals, listed #72 in HCI 100 rankings.

MediaPost reports on FDA views on usage of social media advertising by Pharma. “The FDA hasn’t squarely addressed the role of social media in drug advertising to date. But an agency official offered some insight on the subject in a recent interview with Mark Senak, a Fleishman Hillard executive in Washington, D.C. who separately runs the EyeonFDA blog.” Article also quotes Waterfront Media and HealthCentral execs about slow pickup in advertising by pharma on social media sites.

Add Wellpoint to the list of insurers being sued by AMA &/or NY atty general Cuomo. Similar class actions suits have been filed against Aetna & Cigna for using the Ingenix db that led to overcharges to patients for out-of-network care.

Press release on study published in NEJM online 3/25/09 that reports that only 1.5% of US hospitals use comprehensive electronic medical records systems that connect various depts, lab reports, prescription info. Link to int. with primary author/researcher included in release. Study conducted by Harvard Sch. Public Health, Mass General, and George Washington Univ; Ashish Jha of HSPH was lead author.

Elsevier launches Innovation Explorers, an online community of research scientists & librarians, to help involve customers in the design of products.

David Rothman describes his experience trying to get a price quote for an information product that was promoting a 30-day free trial. Illuminates pricing practices by medical publishers that vary customer-by-customer.

TechCrunch reports that Trusera, a recent entry on “health 2.0″ patient social-networking scene, will run out of money by end-of-April if it can’t raise more funds. Started by ex-Amazon exec in Seattle. Comments on post point out key problems: crowded field and lack of revenue model.

AP article on importance of “getting it right” when spending $19B on electronic medical records investment. Emphasizes the importance of ability to transfer data between systems.

Greenhill SAVP partners with Valhalla Partners and High Peaks Venture Partners on an $8M investment in Flat World Knowledge. Flat World, based in Nyack, NY, publishes open source textbooks and charges only for print-on-demand, audio textbooks and ind. chapter sales.

DeepDyve (formerly Infovell), a Health Content08 Innovator, adds Steve Wozniak to its advisory board. DeepDyve released a new interface recently that is clear and simple, yet offers access to body of information not available through standard web search engines.

Wolters Kluwer’s medical coding s/w, ProVation, is profiled by AARP with a focus on WK Health’s Clinical Solutions group in Minneapolis (which now employs 130).

John Halamka,MD, offers definitions and descriptions of terms used in healthIT, along with some commentary on adoption rates and potential for healthIT. Worth a read.

Article highlights rapid adoption of the iPhone as a medical device to communicate info to patients. Further evidence to support my commentary last week that interfaces,design & convenience of electronic medical devices needs to be improved.

Discusses business-rule management systems (BRMS) usage for clinicians. BRMS is really just another acronym for clinical decision support tools that rely healthcare data analytics. Article points out that such systems are only as good as the quality of the rules that are applied in the s/w–and I would add only as good as the quality (and quantity) of the data in the system that is mined to determine the recommendations. Article also refers to what has been called “alert fatigue”; that is, if too many warnings are flashed each time, and most are very rudimentary, clinicians will start ignoring the warnings about potential adverse effects, etc.

Press release from HHS describing $268M in ARRA (Stimulus bill) funds available to hospitals to treat most vulnerable patients.

Not health content specific, but a short, concise interview with co-founder and managing director of InfoCommerce Group, parent of Health Content Advisors. Focus on business models for publishers, esp. ad-supported vs. subscription/for fee.

Not health content specific, but relevant to online publishing: Two popular content management technology firms to merge. Interwoven includes LexisNexis and other B2B publishing companies as clients; UK-based Autonomy is also strong in legal market for e-discovery applications. Autonomy, which just reported strong Q4 20008 results to pay $775 for Interwoven. See www.autonomy.com for more details.

Carefx, which offers s/w that help integrate and organize data from multiple systems to improve workflow. The press release touts the addition of 200 more hospitals to its client roster and 200% revenue growth 2008/2007.

CMS’ e-prescribing financial incentives go into effect this month. Some details on the program in this post.

David Rothman, one of the most highly regarded medical librarians, writes about the importance of promoting health literarcy, and his concern (to put it lightly) about social media enthusiasts who call for “crowdsourcing” of average citizens’ opinions to replace recommendations from medical professionals when seeking relevant health information.

DeepDyve, formerly Infovell, receives $3.9 million in early stage funding to expand its medical research service and introduce similar research services in other verticals. DeepDyve was a presenter at Health Content08’s Innovators Showcase.

Bob Wachter on how insurers are getting into the act and promoting medical tourism for their insured patients.

Post isn’t health-focused, but anything Google does is relevant to publishing. Mentions Knol, which was seeded with paid medical contributors, and the fact that it hasn’t caught on.

Related to story earlier this week about settlement between UnitedHealth and NY atty general to fund development of independently produced database for calculating out-of-network reimbursement rates. UnitedHealth’s Ingenix group will pay $50M to help new db; Aetna will pay $20M to help fund the db.

David Williams on the Ingenix/UnitedHealth database settlement. Good points about wide variations in costs among providers.

Chilmark reports on merger of two vendors in RHIO/HIE market that combined serve approx. 10% of US hospitals.

More on the new Family Health History tool from Surgeon General.

5-8% of Pfizer’s 10,000 research employees to be laid off by end of year.

Neil Versel provides a list of the members of the leadership board for the National eHealth Collaborate, the successor to AHIC 2.0. Versel points out limited representation of nurses, and lack of medical librarians on the board.

Abry buys minority stake in Gateway EDI, a healthcare billing service compnay.

Kolltan, a spinoff from Yale Medical School, closes Series A fo over $35 M and names CEO. Kolltan is developing cancer treatments.

ZocDoc, an online doctor directory and appt. scheduling service, adds to series A with inv. from Bezos and Benioff.

Healthination receives 2nd round and expands parterships to include PARADE magazine, Guideposts Mag, Lee Enterprises, UCompare Healthcare and LifeSript.

Lists providers of EHRs in ambulatory care practices that are certified to meet CCHIT standards.

Josh Seidman of Center for IX Therapy on CCHIT’s standards for PHRs, which focus intitally on privacy, security & interoperability.

Pfizer, with largest pharma R&D budget of >$8B, reallocates R&D resources to cancer and away from heart disease research. (subscription site)

Site on EHR info and news

Good post on using checklists in hospitals to prevent errors; also points out that hospitals won’t adopt error reporting practices unless requirements are in force.

Press Ganey, leading vendor for HCAHPS surveys, describes gains in patient satisfaction measures since initiation of HCAHPS. Note, program is new and base year reporting low, so large increases are not surprising.

Times reports that Zerhouni will retire end of October. Also reports on flattening or declining budgets since 2005: “Dr. Zerhouni’s greatest challenge has been a difficult budgetary environment. When he was appointed in 2002, the agency’s budget was in the midst of being doubled under a bipartisan plan intended to restore its luster as the world’s pre-eminent sponsor of scientific work. But from 2005 through 2007, the agency’s budget remained stuck at $28.5 billion, although this year it grew to $29.5 billion. Since about 80 percent of the agency’s budget is used to finance initiatives at universities across the country, the flat budget led to a growing sense of alarm among academics. As budgetary realities have gone from bad to worse in recent months, the mood among many biomedical researchers has gone from alarmed to depressed.”

AllOne Health Group will integrate its s/w with MSFT’s HealthVault to allow consumers to transmit health info via cell phones. Uses Health Level Seven messaging standards. see: www.allonehealthgroup.com