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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.
Headline Commentary Feb 14 - Feb 28
- Posted February 28th 2010
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
GE’s press release for HIMSS. Includes debut of clinical knowledge platform that helps providers with quality improvement initiatives, expanded HIE services, a clinical portal and a patient health management system.
FDA charges Guidant (a Boston Scientific company) with failure to report safety problems with some of its implantable defibrillators.
BU School of Medicine creates RED (Re-Engineered Discharge), a checklist that helps reduce readmissions. Other examples of application of health IT in this article.
Eclipsys Sunrise Enterprise suite of health IT software applications to integrate with Microsoft’s Amalga UIS platform.
Earnings in health and pharma division down sharply–from 29M Euros in 2008 to a loss of 79M Euros in 2009. WK says pharma communications, advertising and book sales biggest factors. McKinstry says they are changing portfolio of WKHealth to focus on “clinical decision support areas”.
Athenahealth to delay its Q4 SEC filing so that it can audit its revenue recognition practices. Has to do with how Athenahealth amortizes implementation fees that are deferred until implementation is completed; they are considering extending the period of amortization beyond the current 1 year.
MIT Technology Review feature series on personalized medicine. Haven’t taken good look at the articles yet, but will return to explore.
Important story about how Harvard Vanguard/Atrius physician group is making Beth Israel/Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) a priority hospital because of coordination of care between the two institutions.
Sponsorship and payments from device and pharma companies to fund research and for board representation introduce conflicts of interest for academic health centers. No news there, but some good insight into recent developments in this article.
Mayo, GE Healthcare & Intel partner on year-long study of effects of monitoring seniors & people w/ chronic illnesses with home monitoring devices.
John Moore at Chilmark provides insightful analysis of today’s announced alliance between Microsoft Amalga and Eclipsys.
“”Blending Eclipsys’ leadership in physician adoption and sophisticated clinical and decision-support workflows with Microsoft’s leadership in interoperability, data extraction, authentication and context management will open up new choices and opportunities for healthcare organizations needing to make the most from their existing IT infrastructure.”- Peter Neupert, Corporate VP, HSG, Microsoft.
Google and Microsoft Health execs address benefits of health IT on healthcare in short article published in The Hill. Two key points: 1) focus on the patient and 2) focus on the performance improvement (”improved outcomes we want to achieve”) with health IT, not just IT for IT’s sake.
Interesting. DyanamicBooks allow professors to customize textbooks with their own modifications. Prices will be lower for e-books, but print on demand versions will cost about the same as traditional print version. What about copyright for new version? It probably remains with Macmillan, which means professors don’t get to copyright their contributions?
Primarily via financing initiatives from Treasury, HHS, and Dept. of Agriculture will fund programs that improve the availability of fresh foods and more healthy alternative foods in communities that currently lack access to large grocery stores. These initiatives are closely tied to first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative that aims to decrease childhood obesity.
Obama’s healthcare proposal 2/22/10
CalTech is partnering with DeepDyve to provide discounted access to DeepDyve’s article rental service to alumni. DeepDyve’s Gold plan, which allows rental access to an unlimited number of articles included in DeepDyve’s collection of scholarly journals and other literature that sits behind paywalls. I continue to be impressed with DeepDyve’s initiatives to increase access to scholarly research that has been walled off to non-academics or those who don’t have a corporate subscription to commercial collections.
Missed this last week. PatientsLikeMe acquires ReliefInSite, based in Hungary. ReliefInSite helps patients track their pain levels; bus model relies on pharma and clinical researchers.
Transcript of Q4 2009 earnings call with Kerry Hicks and CFO Allen Dodge. Few tidbits: efforts to build risk management business line (Health Credit Solutions) have failed and Health Grades is winding down that business and focusing instead on ratings products. Advertising sales have grown nicely, esp. from AdSense and other networks. However, I still question how well the WrongDiagnosis.com product fits with HealthGrades.
IMS offers decision support service for regulatory compliance for Pharma and med device companies.
Some good points about quality of patient-reported data and implications for using data from patient community sites in research. I like the points about how some users enter dummy data just to test out a site and the importance of recognizing what data are missing. Both issues related to good data management.
National Center for Quality Assurance (NCQA) paper on evolving standards for Patient-Centered Medical Home metrics.
Summary of project funded by RWJF and carried out by IHI to study performance improvement initiatives in hospitals in the period 2001-2008. Link to report included.
Grassley questions Pharma sponsorship of content on WenMD
E-patients consult Web to find ratings on doctors and providers, but fewer post ratings themselves. Link to full report from Pew.
Eclipsys beat expectations in Q4 2009, with earnings of $3.8 Million, up 15% YoY. Rev. up 5% YoY.
John Mack on the role Pharma can plan in providing information directly to consumers via social media.
Good overview of ResearchGATE, a social networking site for scientists that allows users to set degree of privacy and facilitates collaboration. Bus model: jobs board for scientists.
Pathway Genomics, which provides genetic tests to consumers, licenses Staywell’s Harvard Health Content so that customers can access additional information about the conditions reported in the test results.
ONC’s Aneesh Chopra, who chairs the Implementation Workgroup, seeks feedback on how to build a starter-kit for EHR implementation. Specific categories of interest: Vocabularies; content exchange standards; communications exchange standards, and privacy.
Story of how Louisiana has seen improvements in rural health care through implementation of health info exchange.
AHRQ
Recent survey commissioned by Cleveland Clinic, GE Healthcare & Ochsner Health System indicates that 50% of Americans believe other people’s health “was going in the wrong direction” but only 17% said their own health was “going in the wrong direction”. 2000 people surveyed. Results are in line with my observations. Many people are in denial that their habits are unhealthy. Even when they get sick, they don’t believe their own health management was a factor.
Consistent with research by Tomas Philipson, U. Chicago. Healthcare innovation and IT saves lives, but it comes with a high cost. We can keep innovating, but we can’t afford to keep paying for the innovations in the current system.
TOC and links to full report from CDC on trends in health statistics.
“Must read” article in NEJM on creating national program for CER.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius releases report that includes info on requested premium increases by health insurers across the country. Link to full report included.
Description of study in Worcester, MA to implement evidence-based theraputic management guidelines for cardiac patients.
Shared Health Clinical Xchange, the largest HIE in Tennessee, has partnered with Elsevier’s MEDai to provide clinically-relevant HIE.
Meta-analysis indicates that use of statins to control cholesterol is correlated with higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
Veteran’s Admin to monitor how doctors respond to e-alerts sent via the agency’s computerized patient record system (CPRS). Currently, they only tract if doc acknowledges receipt of an alert, not whether the doc takes follow-up action.
Simple “hockey-puck on a stick” test easier to implement in real-world situations: “There are computer algorithms to measure reaction time, using game-like programs. But they’re not so good for use at the sidelines, and they involve licensing fees.”
Excellent presentation of text/audio content–and the info provided is excellent, too. Good points about data alone not being sufficient; data must be put in context and must be shared to be helpful. Read Susannah Fox’s comment to learn more about the people behind the voices in the video.
NaviNet chosen as communications network in pilot intended to document benefits of provider-payer health info exchange in NJ.
Fascinating overview of changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)currently in draft form. Along with the info about specific disorders, I find the new approach toward categorizing disorders along a spectrum of severity very interesting. The degree to which someone has a disorder is considered, rather than placing each level of severity in a separate category. Aspergers as part of the autism spectrum is the example that is getting a lot of press.
GE producing TV ads for Healthymagination campaign during Olympics. Also sponsoring content online. Good to see someone beside Pharma sponsoring content!
Excellent lead article on need for automated data input (from devices, exchange from other systems, etc), better clinical decision support systems, and process change to make use of EHRs “meaningful” in improving health care.
Hope Leman’s long, but very entertaining, comments about DeepDyve’s specialty search and article rental model for scholarly journals articles. Access to much of the scholarly journal content isn’t available to non-subscribers and even discovering the existence of this body of content is difficult, which means the publishers are not reaching growth markets. DeepDyve offers a solution with minimal risk to publishers, yet the buzz for DD hasn’t grown as much as Hope (or I) would have expected. Worth reading — and it’s worth checking out DeepDyve.
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 Jan 23-Jan 31
- Posted February 1st 2010
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Good article on Endeca, a widely used search engine on shopping sites. Endeca’s “guided navigation” (also referred to as “faceted search”) works very well on structured information. Could it be adapted for less-formally structured info?
McKesson & HP partner to provide EHR s/w and hardware for physician practices.
Article questions the role of employers in sponsoring wellness programs that tie participation to financial incentives such as reduced premiums.
Interesting. Wolters Kluwer has set up a system whereby doctors will receive CME credit for clinical research done via their mobile phone.
Time covers e-Patient Dave’s story and writes about e-patient movement under the moniker “patient 2.0″. Provides a somewhat jaded view of non-medical specialist patients’ ability to understand medical info and make judgements. Suggests “rapid-learning” program for e-patients.
Very thorough review of MSFT-Siemens deal to introduce MS HealthVault to German market and make it the system through which patients are provided medical info. HL7 is more widely used in Europe and Infobutton apps will likely catch on more quickly.
Els adds SNIP and SJR to Scopus to provide more complete citation metrics.
Julie Deardorff of Chicago Tribune writes about my recent blog on the AAFP’s FamilyDoctor.org site’s advertising high salt foods. Quotes me, AAFP VP Publishing, and Dr. John Spangler.
Prof. Robert Fogel, U. Chicago, contends that healthcare costs are high because consumers demand the high-cost extras and innovation.
Good interview with David Blumenthal, Director, ONC, on meaningful use of EHRs and plans for national health data exchange.
John Halamka’s brief description of the breakout of grant funding plans by ONC.
Whole Foods to offer up to an additional 10% discount for employees who meet wellness measures that include nicotine use, cholesteral, and BMI targets.
good piece on why healthcare sector could be big market for Apple’s forthcoming tablet. The fact that iPhones are popular among MDs is one big reason.
Good short piece on why publishers are distributing content via Kindles even though there are business considerations.
Filing to Office of Science and Technology Policy from Elsevier regarding proposed regulations to offer more open access to scholarly publishing that is funded by US tax dollars.
Kent Bottles brings together topics from current books by Atul Gawande, Timothy Goetz, and an article by Jerome Groopman to consider the merits of checklists and use of decision trees in medicine. He also covers behavioral economics and choice and mentions the Thaler-Sunstein approach to offering nudges (libertarian paternalism) to guide healthful behavior. Conclusion: medicine and health are complicated. Seems to me that since computers are useful for dealing with complex calculations (even under stress) that it makes sense to use automated checklists and decision support systems to guide complex processes. Provided we can avoid GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) situations.
Thomson Healthcare acquires ProfSoft-Health, a Needham, MA-based healthcare data analytics company. ““ProfSoft’s solutions will enhance the clinical performance measurement capabilities we provide to our healthcare payer customers,” said Jon Newpol, executive vice president of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters.”
Interesting article on how Conde Nast is seeking to leverage brand value of Gourmet, Domino, and Cookie (defunct magazines) as well as current titles Wired and Lucky. Compares CN to Meredith, whose Better Homes & Gardens has used its brand to provide quality seals to products. CN-selected content (tested by Gourmet kitchens?) is one idea they should consider, IMO.
David Williams interviews Bob Wachter of UCSF. Haven’t listened to it yet, but I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile use of time.
IUD manufacturer, Mirena (part of Bayer Pharmaceutical) has been using home parties, a la Tupperware, to spread word about benefits of Mirena IUD. FDC has sent warning letter to Bayer.
Good analysis of what the implications are of NY Times stated plans to allow inbound links to have access for free, but to charge metered access to direct users after an initial allotment of free pageviews.
Everyday Health, the consumer health portal owned by Waterfront Media, files for $100M IPO. Positive sign for consumer health publishers. Everyday is one of the largest consumer health portals that relies on online advertising for most of its revenue.
Brigham and Women’s and Harvard Med School Professor Lawrence DeBuske decides to keep paid speaking role and gives up practicing & teaching. New limitations on accepting pay for for delivering canned presentations played role. Dr. DeBuske apparently gives several talks on behalf of multiple pharma companies each week.
Home page of Jan 2010 report from RWJF on PHRs.
John Sharp’s overview of Robt Wood Johnson Foundation’s new report on PHRs.
ZocDoc, a online directory of doctors that has focused on NY and DC, is expanding to cover SF. Note, a key differentiator of ZocDoc (from the slew of other doctor ratings sites) is its integration with practice management systems for scheduling appointments so that users can find doctors with available appts. ZocDoc says they have integrated with close to 1400 PMS companies. Note, ZocDoc also encourages patient reviews of doctors, but only from ZocDoc users. Reviews of doctors remains a sticky wicket for all of the doc review sites.
Commentary on why it is a positive sign that an MD is now leading Navigenics, a personalized genomics company.
Susannah Fox from Pew Internet started the conversation with her post about Google Health OneBox that lists results from Mayo Clinic, WebMD, ADAM, and MedlinePlus in a special position at top of search results. Great discussion in the comments ensued, including a couple from me.
Andrew Spong’s analysis of Twitter followers/followings of pharma companies.
Brief article describing MedeAnalytics revenue cycle management solution being adopted by St. Joseph’s Hospital in Maryland.
Great news for data geeks and data content enthusiasts! Following up on their promise to add transparency to the federal government, Obama admin posts new data sources from all cabinet departments. I’m going to go download the Medicare data set now.
Info on work Tim Berners-Lee is doing for UK govenment to make sources of gov’t data more available and meaningful.
“Syed Tirmizi, MD, a longtime clinician and medical informatics leader at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, joined Quantros today as Vice President of International Business Development and Government Relations. Tirmizi helped lead the VA into its position as a pioneer in the use of electronic medical records (EMR) for point of care service delivery, enabling meaningful use of data to further patient safety and quality initiatives.”
“Pfizer increased its spending on online professional promotion by more than 90% last year, according to a study, a sign the drugmaker is emphasizing alternatives to live sales reps for detailing certain products.” Study by SDI.
TOC and abstract of just published study on significant benefits of reducing sodium intake for improving cardiovascular disease. See my notes in item below (third item) on same subject.
Headline Commentary October 19-31
- Posted October 31st 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Usage of free PHR services hasn’t yet taken off. Peter Neupert of MSFT hints that wider adoption of IT by physicians and better connectedness between the stakeholders are needed before the value of using PHRs is obvious enough to incent consumers to adopt them.
Does technology interrupt the communication between doctors & patients? That’s the question posed by this book. Sounds interesting.
Short article on health IT with focus on MSFT. Quotes Peter Neupert, MSFT Health head.
New site that compiles info about neuroscience research.
Nice brief overview of EHR solutions for smaller practices with a description of some of the vendors.
Great example of the how new sources of data will transform medical research.
AMedNews writes up the recent PWC report on secondary data from EMRs. This is a major focus of ours at Health Content Advisors.
Jay Parkinson on specialized providers v. general hospitals.
Keas expands through partnership programs with CVS Caremark (MinuteClinics), Quest, and now Partners Healthcare.
Review of Adam Bosworth’s company, Keas, which uses custom “care plans” that collect personal data - directly or indirectly.
Bob Stern, founder of MedPage Today, delivers his perspective on how medical societies that publish research and organize medical conferences inhibit distribution of research information, much of which is funded by tax dollars via NIH, HHS, NSF, etc. The current model is undergoing a slow but steady transformation, which I think is accelerating.
Consumer Watchdog wants change to HHS ruling that gives providers the authority to decide if/when a patient’s healthcare information security has been breached.
CVS Caremark offers mobile site that includes access to medication history, drug info, special offers, and driving directions/phone numbers of CVS pharmacies or MinuteClinics.
Karen Overstreet, named executive director of Lippincott CME unit. Interesting that she’ll report to the Medical Research division, not education. Has there been a re-org?
Hope Leman writes an enthusiastic review of American Well, the online healthcare service that provides access to medical professionals from home and handles billing, too.
FDA will use data from Wolters Kluwer’s Pharma Solutions Source Lx Patient Studies Suite that captures patient-level Rx data and Pharmaceutical Audit Suite (PHAST) that captures Rx transactions to follow trends in flu medication prescribing activity by region and other patient demographics.
Good overview of status of standards for ensuring that secondary data produced by EHRs will be useful for research purposes.
American Academy of Professional Coders offers free app to help convert ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes. See aapc.com.
New edition will include feeds from Factiva and use Factiva Smart Search. Need to check on pricing.
long article on why “lifestyle” medicine is needed to reduce costs and improve outcomes. Note, focus on healthy behavior is gaining traction in large part because of the research that can be conducted on electronic health records of patients.
HealthPort Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based provider of healthcare IT solutions to hospitals and health systems, has set its IPO terms to six million common shares being offered at between $14 and $16 per share. It would have an initial market cap of approximately $360 million, were it to price at the high end of its range. HealthPort is owned by ABRY Partners. www.healthport.com
HealthGuru Media raises additional $3.2 M from Castile Ventures and Village Ventures. VV’s Po Beabody is co-founder/Chairman
New study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that there are 67,000 fewer active physicians than calculations have suggested. The physician work force is also younger than previously estimated, with a greater proportion of doctors in their 20s and 30s and fewer who are 65 and older. By 2020, there will be 957,000 physicians, according to the new estimates, rather than the 1.05 million previously projected. Only 9 percent will be 65 or older, or half as many as had been predicted.
Due to “operating” costs (and debt loads from med school) MDs less likely to go into solo practices.
Team that developed InnovationRx at the Innovation Company bought the rights to the company and relaunched it as Aprexis Health Solutions. Aprexis focuses on patient adherence, with adherence to prescription drugs the focus.
Birmingham, AL based MEDSEEK listed 455 in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. MEDSEEK provides patient portals for hospitals and claims >650 hospital clients.
WK Health announces new customer who will use Provation, now branded as Provation Order Sets, powered by UpToDate Decision Support.
PEHub reports that IMS Health is in talks with PE firms to sell the company. IMS shares surged almost 22% yesterday (10/19)
UnitedHealth exceed analyst estimates despite declines in #insured, due to increases at drug unit.
Prof Teisberg on why gov’ts shouldn’t legislate comparative effectiveness requirements. Essentially because of variation in outcomes. Focus should be on value for each patient.
Argentina the latest country to launch medical tourism program to encourage visitors to plan vacations centered around medical procedures (cosmetic and fertility are top treatments for medical tourists in Arg).
With goal of trimming 100 positions in newsroom, NY Times editor Bill Keller offers buyout to entire newsroom staff. If fewer than 100 respond, they’ll have layoffs.
MVP Health, a regional health insurer in upstate NY, VT, and NH, will reimburse physicians for using RelayHealth’s WebVisit (TM) for patient consultations. MVP is partnering with Mohawk Valley Medical Associate (MVMA) to offer physician’s immediate reimbursement for implementing Relay’s webVisit.
CDW Healthcare, Vernon Hills, IL, partners with Cerner to market EHR solutions to physician practices.
presentation materials from Sept 24, 2009 webcasts on CAHPS Clinician and Group Survey
Wow! AstraZeneca seeks 5,000+ sales people to “self identify” their interest in taking buyout.
Concerns about patient privacy loom over electronic health records segment. George Hill of Leerink Swann estimates that by 2020, data mining could represent a $5 Billion industry.
Epic and Apple working together on Mobile EHR project.
Preview of next week’s Connected Health 09 conference in Boston. Focus: new devices and communications tools will help patients take more control of their health and leave hospital visits for severe events.
Great review of new iPhone version of Merck Manual Home Health Handbook.
New device from Fitbit that tracks exercise & sleep & can be used to monitor calorie intake, too. Fitbit is joining a fast-growing segment of devices that help monitor healthy behavior & can be used by payer segment to evaluate lifestyle of insured populations.
Akaza Research, provider of OpenClinica 3.0 open source s/w for clinical trials, adds electronic data capture features.
Dr. Rob on medical costs and medical codes–and plug for his interview with Ira Glass for This American Life’s series on medical costs to be aired weekend of 10/17-18, 2009.
More proof that medical apps are far ahead of any other professional (b2b) mobile apps.
Quest Diagnostics’ MedPlus group, launches its Care360 ambulatory EHR on Oct.24. MedPlus will market the EHR to teh 150,000 physicians that already use its other Care360 apps and will offer hosted solutions for smaller practices. Quest’s MedPlus has the advantage of having existing relationships with these practices who use their other Care360 apps.
Although there’s resistance, trend toward incentives for following healthy behavior is on the increase.
Developed in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Elsevier’s Brain Navigator tool, a “GPS system” that provides 3-D software to navigate the brain, adds new features for visualizing injection pathways and printing and exporting images. Interesting to note that this collaboration is with Elsevier’s Science and Technology Books division. Great example of how STM publishers can leverage their content through IT/R&D partnerships.
Halamka reports on latest HIT standards Committee meeting.
According to 2006 Kaiser Foundation study, nearly 1/3 of US companies that offer health insurance also offer some sort of wellness program. And, the focus on wellness has increased since then. This article describes some of the programs and $$ incentives for reaching wellness goals.
Quantified Self, group that advocates and facilitates patients to track health and wellness data about themselves, names impressive advisory board.
Very interesting. Healthy Advice Networks, which markets health info to physician practices with content sponsored by pharma and health and wellness brands, partners with HealthScape Consumer, a joint WK Health and Nielsen longitudinal panel to provide data on the effectiveness of sponsoring/promoting in Healthy Advice Network.
iTriage, an iPhone app from Healthagen, offers info on wait times at ERs and info about providers (hospitals). Providers pay to be listed with marketing info.
RightHealth is dba name of Kosmix, a Mt. View California search technology company that initially focused on the health space.
MedSeek announces recent deals for installations of their consumer information portals in hospitals.
Digitas Health lists 140 possible uses of Twitter in healthcare. Nice.
Review of recent conference on Personalized Health at Ohio State.
Florida-based video sharing site that posts videos for docs to use for patient education.
Deloitte offers database and analytic tools on pharma/biosciences alliances.
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 24-30
- Posted August 30th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Excellent article that emphasizes that providing information to stakeholders (esp. patients and doctors) is the best approach to assuring optimal decisionmaking.
ER MD writes about loss of relationships between doctors & patients & how increased use of hospitalists may have contributed.
Market forecast for medical device segment in France.
Good article that describe recent instances of data center projects by providers.
More examples of how Pharma is using social media.
Good news for PE companies.
New book forthcoming from Sage Publications, Encylopedia of Medical Decision Making. Seems like an obvious good online reference work.
John Hussman, founder of Hussman Econometric Advisors, pledges $20M to U. Miami for genetic research. Genetics center has been renames John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.
Profile of Gawande from Harvard Magazine.
Dana Blankenhorn on how Fast Forward (a medical foundation) uses SaaS computing.
James Murdoch lambasts publishing industry for resisting change.
Site with info on generic drug programs of various pharmacies.
A little counterpoint to all of the pharma industry bashing that’s been in the news recently. IMO, some incentives should be shifted to encourage development of needed drugs & not just me-too drugs.
Vendors of EHR systems for large hospitals are now targeting smaller providers, since 95% of large hospitals have already chosen EHR vendor. Cerner, Epic, Eclipsys, and Siemens are 4 big vendors singled out.
Deloitte’s whitepaper on how pharma could make use of data from EHRs to improve their research, clinical trials, and post-market surveillance processes.
Links to reports by Berkman Center on copyright policies at private foundations.
Heart monitor that detects, analyzes & stores info about patient’s heart. AngelMed Guardian. Smart devices are a growth segment.
Good evidence that healthcare analytics companies are well-positioned, with or without health reform. Private sector will increasingly study effectiveness of treatments using outcomes data & comparing them to costs.
WSJ points to Business Week article on biggest R&D spenders. Merck led the pharma cos, but much of their R&D expenses went to licensing, not internal drug discovery.
Editor & Publisher on ebooks and newspapers. To read.
Minnesota provides website with price info on primary care services, labs, etc for over 100 providers.
Good article on the placebo effect.
Interesting case where patient’s wife suggested experimental treatment that eventually was accepted. She wants $300M plus % of profits.
PharmaTimes reports that NEJM editor, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen and BMJ editor, Dr. Fiona Godlee, will argue next month at Oxford Union that clinical trials should not be conducted by the pharma companies that are developing the drugs due to conflict of interest.
United Health promotes compliance with Rx drugs with discount off next Rx. Negotiated lower prices with pharma companies, which will also benefit from long-term compliance.
American heatlh Care Association reports on letter sent by 31 state attys general to HHS sec’y Sebelius to critique CMS Nursing Home Five Star Rating System, which was put in place at the end of the last administration.
Experiment to charge minimal fee vs. free shows that far more will accept free than fee. But, isn’t segmenting the audience the right path?
Description of how Intuit’s QuickHeatlh helps consumers interpret medical expenses; esp. useful for high deductible plans with HSAs.
Hope Leman reviews the book Internet Cool Tools for Physicians, which I have been planning to read since it came out. Thanks Hope, I’ll do my best to remember to order it the next time I’m on Amazon.
Gary Price summarizes program for 8/28 conference at UC Berkeley about Google Books Settlement.
Free whitepaper from Manhattan Research on Pharma use of digital marketing.
iAtros introduces eRoentgen, an iPhone app that helps in choosing best imaging test.
Article includes comments from Susannah Fox of Pew & ePatient Dave (deBronkart) about finding experimental medicine and specialist doctors to combat fatal diagnoses.
More reason to combat obesity: the research shows it leads to shrinkage of the brain, esp. areas used for decisionmaking.
U. Washington dept that studies global healthcare, funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center finds that “universal floor” where multiple patient types are grouped and care is coordinated by nurses. Sounds like the old model with a twist.
Dr. Vince Kuraitis describes the foundations of a “network economy” and asks if healthcare industry fits the bill.
EPub versions of 1 million books now available on Google. EPub offers some advantages over PDF versions.
Study attempts to measure level of empathy (or lack of empathy) in medical students. Thesis and conclusions are rather scary.
Long and quite detailed critique of WebMD the Magazine. Author criticizes the “woman’s magazine” nature of WebMD’s mag (and I would extend the comment to much of what is on the website for consumers). In efforts to make the information entertaining, author says that WebMD crosses the line by not providing scientific basis and important related information for much of the editorial info in the publication. Author also criticizes the acceptance of advertising by questionnable vendors. IMO, it is unfortunate that too much of the info provided on so-called consumer health portals is similar to the info that Dr. Atwood criticizes in this article. There’s a big gap between the scientific literature and the material produced for consumer audiences. Far too little info is published for intelligent motivated consumer/patients.
Interesting & worthwhile read about the future of scholarly publishing. Author posits that old model of journals publishing will be replaced by open model with actual usage metrics replacing journal impact factors.
From Medical Connectivity, brief article on how doctors are using Twitter to communicate with patients. Best for mass communication, such as public health alerts and distributing info on clinical trials.
Program for AHRQ’s upcoming conference (Sept. 13-16). Registration is closed; it’s a sellout.
MIT lab turns toys into med devices. Good use of design expertise.
US Bank offers HSA with access to WebMD Coverage Advisor, which helps consumers manage out of pocket costs.
manage out of pocket costs.
Some research on effectiveness of free text (fulltext) search v. search via taxonomies like MeSH in Medline. Results indicate that fulltext performs as well. My comment: combination is likely the most effective!
Hospitals are finding that reporting medical errors and making the info easily available helps reduce the number of malpractice lawsuits. Transparency helps!
BI lays off pharma sales reps and more layoffs are purportedly planned.
Important issues about how doctors communicate to patients risks & tradeoffs using statistics described in this paper.
High profile case where quality of life v. cost could be debated. Not everyone can afford the treatment Ted Kennedy received, nor will everyone want it.
Suggested reading from RWJF.
A group of predictions for the future; some health oriented, some not.
Interesting comparative study of using 3 different medical search platforms: Dialog (ProQuest), OVID (WK) and EBSCOhost. Same search gave different results, with Dialog returning more than twice as many results as others.
Embedded IT trainers to help with transition to Eclipsys was key.
Wired UK highlights how doctors & hospitals are using Twitter in UK & US.
Information Week lays out basics of enterprise business management that should be applied to health care IT.
Article provides good context for current activity in managing hospital supply chains. Several stories in past week about purchasing cooperatives to reduce cost of supplies.
Sec’y Health in MA writes about Rand report that provides analysis of 12 possible interventions with highest likelihood of reducing costs. Link to full report included.
Survey of medical students by Epocrates shows high usage of health IT, low confidence in info provided by pharma detailers.
Amer Assoc Family Physicians (AAFP) has launced Delta-Exchange, a social networking site for primary care physicians.
AMA uses Impelsys’ iPublishCentral s/w to publish frequently updated versions of its books in ebook format.
Forbes appears to be pro-public utility for healthcare info exchange in this article. Patrick Soon-Shiong describes reducing the gap between medical research and clinical use (translational medicine), a topic that I just noted in the post about the Army & Navy project at Walter Reed.
Army & Navy doctors collaborate real-time with medical researchers on wound care for injured soldiers–bridging the time gap in tradtional “translational medicine”.
Kodak partners with MMR (MyMedicalRecords.com) to resell Kodak scanning technology for digitizing and importing paper records into EHRs.
NaviNet, a Cambridge, MA claims clearinghouse vendor (RCM) (formerly known as NaviMedix), is promoting its clearninghouse services as preliminary health info exchange (HIE). Currently, EDI is limited to certain payment-related data types, but NaviNet suggests that scope could be increased. Their argument: Why recreate the EDI wheel if the basic network is already in place?
Article in chicago Sun Times says 28% of those seeking health insurance will look online to find providers. eHealthInsurance is profiled.
Informatics Corp. of America (ICA) partners with Mark Logic to offer OEM version of Mark Logic server to allow users to search across structured and unstructured data in EHR systems.
Wikimedia is testing a new policy that will insert an editorial review step before articles about living people are published or modified.
iMedX, a US-based EHR/ medical transcription outsourcing company, acquires Worldtech, Inc., a competing health IT/med transcription company that serves over 800 small physician practices in US and has global medical language specialists. Worldtech will become a division of iMedX.
Rx Ohio Collaborative (RxOC), a coop for group purchasing of Rx drugs, expands to include all Ohio public sector entities & now has about 12 participants. RxOC replaces independent PBMs and is expended to yield greater savings.
P&G to sell prescription drug businesses to Warner Chilcott for $3.1 B. Warner Chilcott, an Irish company that specializes in drugs for women’s health, has annual rev. of $938M. Deal will increase size of WC by huge percentage. P&G’s strategy is to sell off slower-growing units to focus on growth.
Aon survey shows that cost of claims paid in 2010 will increase 10.5% over 2009. Many employers say they won’t pass higher costs onto employees (and some employers won’t have higher premiums due to composition of their insured base) since employees have already taken so many hits in pay freezes & increased co-pays. I like this quote: “Employer contributions are not gifts, they’re part of total compensation. And if you end up having a more expensive health benefit that your employer pays most of, that means that your wages aren’t going up as fast as they would have” (Joseph Antos, AEI).
Healthland, a health IT solutions provider to small rural hospitals, acquires American Healthnet, an Omaha based health IT company to expand its customer base. Last year, Healthland acquired Advanced Professional Software.
Brief article on Microsoft’s increasing activity in health/biotech space.
Scary to read that many doctors don’t know when they are prescribing for off-label uses. David Williams suggests pharma detailing/marketing is cause.
Change:healthcare, a Health Content08 Innovator, is selected by Keystone Insititute for Translational Medicine as partner in consortium to help bridge gap between scientific discoveries in medicine and clinical practice. Congratulations Chris Parks, CEO, change:healthcare!
Good piece about using patient-generated data in medical research. Although not as controlled as clinical trials, certainly better reporting mechanisms can be created to increase the usefulness of real-world health conditions and outcomes data.
To read: article on Drupal, a popular open source CMS for Web publishers. Talks about their business model.
Excellent article that describes how iPhone and other wireless apps are being used by nurses in clinical settings.
NaturalNews.com has launched NaturalPedia.com, a wiki with contributions from hundreds of individual authors on topics related to natural health, wellness, and disease. Note, minimal testing of NaturalPedia indicates that it is primarily a shopping site with content used to refer readers to books and other content for sale. The wiki format is clever and the site seems very steeped in contextual advertising. Natural Health is headed by Mike Adams.
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.
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