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Archive for the ‘MU’ Category
Today’s Health Content Headlines
- Posted March 11th 2010
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Please scroll down if the story you are looking for is not the first headline. New stories are added throughout the day and I may have provided a link to the most current story that is now lower down on the page. Follow me on Twitter @janicemccallum.
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.
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 Jan 1 - Jan 22
- Posted January 22nd 2010
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
“Press Ganey Associates, Inc. today announced the addition of Philip Marshall, MD, MPH, as senior vice president, clinical products. Dr. Marshall joins the company at a time of continued growth and will be responsible for expanding the clinical product lines for the company.” Dr. Marshall was most recently VP Product Strategy at WebMD Health.
New Study in NEJM points to benefits of reducing salt intake in american diet. See my article on NY’s planned program to reduce salt and my criticism of AAFP for promoting salty foods in advertisements on their site. Note, a recheck of the AAFP FamilyDoctor.org site indicates that fewer packaged foods are advertised today. My blog appears to have been influential!
Superb analysis of impact of Scott Brown’s win to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate on health reform. David Harlow (whom I finally got to meet yesterday) and Joseph Kvedar offer insightful quotes. Kvedar suggests that if health reform legislation doesn’t pass, we still have raised awareness of need for change to control costs and that some changes will occur even w/o legislation. Harlow says that costs and quality will continue to decline w/o legislation and could lead to a stronger bill with some form of a public option down the road.
UMass Medical selects NDoc to automate home health services care. NDoc provides billing and operational s/w for use at pointofcare for home health services.
Good article from former HBS professor on how companies can mine their own propriety data about customers and partners to their advantage. Lays out the 5 keys to doing it right: 1) create a network to collect proprietary data; 2) use best technology; 3)analyze with insight & precision; 4) figure out how to act on info to your advantage; 5) be lucky enough to have good timing.
Trish (about.com) recounts story of pediatrician who molested patients and how comments on doctor rating sites prior to his conviction were positive. She suggests that the current array of ratings sites all share weaknesses. I tend to agree. Comments can be useful, but there need to be a large number and attributes of the people providing the ratings are needed. Plus, multiple criteria from formally reported and collected info need to form the basis. I’d want to know about outcomes, not just opinions.
Nuval, a Boston-area company that provides numeric ratings that reflect nutritional value of foods, gets official endorsement from American College of Preventive Medicine.
Martin Fenner in Nature’s Nature Network on growing options for reading scholarly articles. Covers various devices as well as the concept of using connected information to provide context. No clear-cut perfect solution yet.
Very good commentary about shortcomings of continued medical education (CME) from a Canadian physician’s perspective. In Canada, CME (called CPD in Canada) is more structured and reporting is more detailed. Dr. Rob is very critical of US system that relies primarily on attendance at medical conferences.
Excellent overview of trends in healthcare research being influenced by patient particpation via Internet channels. Specific focus on last October’s ePatient Connections conference. David Ellis and Julian Bond of HFD conclude that healthcare data analytics will become increasingly important in divining patterns from all the data being generated by epatients and even diagnosing for individual patients. They also point to the importance of mobile computing in healthcare.
Highlights IdeaBounty and InnoCentive as examples of companies that facilitate crowdsourced innovations. In these two cases, winning participants are paid for their ideas/solutions. Good article that describes how 1 company replaced their ad agency with IdeaBounty for creative.
Boston company that repurposes discarded specimens and matches basic EHR data to allow for additional medical research studies to be carried out on the specimens. iSpecimen then aggregates and uses datamining techniques to analyze patterns in the data.
Pearson FT is apparently shopping Interactive Data.
Insititute for Safe Medication Practices reports results of recent survey about impact of recession on hospital staffing, capital expenses, patient acuity, and medication safety.
DeepDyve makes another move toward making scholarly journal articles more accessible. The partnership with CiteULike expands the utility of DeepDyve to knowledge workers who don’t have high-priced subscriptions through their corporate or academic library. CiteULike is a “delicious”-type bookmarking service popular in the scholarly community. DeepDyve also announced partnership with publisher De Gruyter. I am impressed with the pace of innovation and content deals carried out at DeepDyve. Their $0.99 rental price for journal articles is an important step toward opening up access to scholarly research on a much wider scale.
MedScape article that explores the value of online searching for patients. Shallow article with no conclusions, but it does offer some good criticism of existing options.
Good article and comments about expectations of enhanced ebooks. Key themes IMO: 1) publishers have to understand the technology platform/distribution platform that is appropriate for their audience; 2) pricing plays a role in selecting the right platform (CD-ROM allowed fixed pricing at a time when online access charged per second); trying to use new technology as a guise for increasing prices is a risky move.
HubSpot marketing director explains why they have chosen to drop trade show exhibiting from their marketing mix. They still will attend events and seek speaking slots and will sponsor some events, but they don’t find the process of shipping booth & collateral and several sales people to be as worthwhile as other marketing options. Very good comments and responses.
Poll of 800 physicians on Sermo indicate that large percentage feel current Medicare policies are out of sync with market needs. “[O]ver 40% of the physicians polled feel the US government “never will” understand how declining reimbursement rates from Medicare negatively affect the care patients receive from their physicians. They fear reimbursements will continue to decline in the coming years, reducing patient access to physicians.”
MSNBC story that picks up on recent article in NEJM about pros and cons of sites that provide patient comments and ratings of doctors. Hook in this article is how some of the ratings sites, including Angie’s List, now flag doctors who are part of the Medical Justice Services group that require patients to sign contract that prohibits them from posting comments online. I agree that anonymous comments are a problem, and I’ve written before that a single numeric rating is insufficient, but it’s short-sighted of doctors to try to prohibit patients from expressing their opinions online.
Nice article that describes some reliable sources of health info for consumers from a Minnesota pub. Note, they still have PDR listed as owned by Thomson Healthcare, even though it’s a winter 2010 article.
Quidel, a San-Diego point-of-care diagnostic testing company, buys Diagnostic Hybrids, an Athens, Ohio company for $130 Million in cash. Acquisition expands the range of tests provided by the combined company, and should provide some economies in R&D.
Good overview of the two companies and the impact of the acquisition. John Moore of Chilmark views the acquisition as a long-term investment since he doesn’t see much life in the PHR segment at this time.
Quest offers new test for early detection of colorectal cancer.
Adams replaces Carl Byers, athena’s initial CFO, who last June said he wanted to live abroad.
Cegedim Dendrite, the life sciences group of Cegedim, Paris-based CRM solutions provider, acquires SK&A, the leading US healthcare professionals directory. According to press release, revenues of SK&A are about $15 M.
Credit rating firm TransUnion has acquired MedData LLC, a Charlotte, N.C.-based health care transactions processing firm, for an undisclosed sum.
Pfizer provides $3m in funding to Stanford to develop CME framework that incorporates a more participatory learning environment. Can it be donew/o industry influence given the source of the funding? Stanford says “yes”….
Healthcare IT News reviews Allscripts/Misys Q2 results. Rev. up 30% yoy. Allscripts CEO, Glen Tullman, calls 2010 “year of the EHR” due to stimulus funds.
Another content + IT deal that will help hospitals/providers achieve meangingful use of EHRs. Zynx Health provides order sets; Meditech will integrate order sets from Zynx into EHR–press release doesn’t provide much detail on how they will integrate the info.
Origin, a CT-based provider of RCM and clinical and BI analytics, gets growth equity funding from TCV. Previous investors include Beecken, Petty & O’Keefe & Company (“BPOC”), an investor since 2006, and management as investors in Origin.
Quantros, a health IT company that helps hospitals with patient safety and risk assessment, names Gerard Livaudais, MD, MPH, as EVP Product Management.
Not enough info is provided in blog entry to make much sense of the results. Asking people what general categories of content they would pay for isn’t very telling; better research methods are needed. Plus, there’s such a range of content in each type that results aren’t very valuable.
athenahealth’s athenaClinicals was rated highly in recent KLAS ambulatory EMR report on confidence that athenaClinicals will meet meaningful use criteria.
Good article on outlook for Informa. Author indicates that asset sales are likely in 2010 and points to Performance Improvement as a top candidate, since it doesn’t fit with other Informa assets. However, Informa’s CEO, Peter Rigby, is against divestments and would prefer to grow through more acquisitions, according to article. Also, academic/scholary publishing division is called out as their best performer (due to high margins). Given pressures on this segment and lack of innovation from Informa, I would be worried if I were a shareholder.
SF-based Practice Fusion raises $5m of anticipated $7.1 round for it’s EHR software. Practice Fusion offers s/w for no charge and makes money with advertising–and has plans to sell data mined from customers.
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Inc. has won a $72 Million grant from the FDA to build a system to monitor the safety of drugs and medical devices after they have gone on the market.
Adidas introduce miCoach at CES. Similar to Nike’s popular Nike+.
Good commonsense views on what will and will not change in 2010.
David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts and chairman of Illumina, provides his top 5 trends to watch in biotech. Optimistic outlook for advances in curing cancer, but thinks that the data management and analysis issues will be a challenge due to the magnitude of data (”Moore’s Law just can’t keep up”).
Short but insightful article that reports some interaction between Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Atul Gawande, MD, author of new book The Checklist Manifesto. Key point, workflow or “clinical encounter” is not understood by the computer scientists who create EMR systems. Also, systems analysis and performance improvement (my terms) are not respected uses of time for MDs.
Interesting example of how incentives from CMS can trickle down to specific programs within hospitals. In this case, residents can earn up to $1200 per year in incentive pay for reaching 3 goals related to patient satisfication–two from Press Ganey survey results and 1 from UCSF Medical Center compliance audits. Results are measured for a team and each teammember receives payment.
Dr. Fabius, among other things, served as president and chief medical officer for i-TRAX, which was acquired by Walgreens in 2008. “I-TRAX was the parent company of CHD Meridian Healthcare, a leading provider of worksite healthcare centers for large employers.”
AHA endorses Surgical Info Systems for its scheduling, reporting and analytics modules.
Inside Out provides interactive training on the human body for K-12 market.
Nice overview of Cell Press’s (Elsevier) new beta of their planned “article of the future”. Good features for zooming in on charts and link to more data and references. I need to do a more thorough review and hope to see it in action at Cell Press in Cambridge soon.
Brian Ahier summarizes Sec’y HHS Sebelius’ Health Security program.
I’ve mentioned NuVal before. Intriguing company that provides single numeric rating of the nutritional value of foods and works with grocery stores to put labels on shelves. Concept is good, but like the writer, I think the single digit is insufficient. Good for shelf; but maybe more detail could be available via mobile device?
Kaiser and VA (Veteran’s Affairs) will use NHIN to exchange patient data (with permission) in pilot program in San Diego area.
A physician reviews online doctor rating sites. Slams Vitals, in large part because only single numeric rating is available w/o paying. I’ve commented before that single number is ineffective for rating doctors–or most any other item. The reviewing physician likes the comments, however. Note, as list of comments gets larger, some kind of summary indicators become more necessary to annotate and summarize the long comments.
Some good insight here. E.g., 6)PMS vendors will acquire RCM companies (didn’t I just write that yesterday?),8) Payers, PBMs and Pharmacies will use EHRs to deliver information (add publishers to that list).
Nice article from Ingenix analytics on employer wellness programs.
Kevin Noland resigns to make way for former CFO Mark Adams to take helm. Could this be result of change in strategy to focus more on benefits management services than content?
Commonwealth Club program on medicine. Video.
TabSafe, an Indiannapolis company, showcases its medication management system at CES.
AdvancedMD, which provides practice management and RCM solutions to medical practices, acquires PracticeOne, an EHR vendor. Interesting that the vertical integration is occurring in this direction–the vendors of admin/financial systems acquiring the EHR vendors. There’s lots of room for more consolidation in both markets.
“23andMe has completed a $27.8 million second round of funding. In addition to funding from Google and Google founder Sergey Brin (husband of 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki), 23andMe has been funded by Genentech and New Enterprise Associates.”
“Krames has partnered with eClinicalWorks to provide consumer-friendly patient education to physicians using the electronic medical records system, eClinicalWorks 8.0.” Makes good sense.
As my colleague Russell Perkins said, “betcha thought there already was one”.
Sramana Mitra interviews co-founders of NaviNet, a real-time health info exchange based in Boston area. 5-part interview with lots of good stats and info.
Dr. Carolyn Clancy, director of AHRQ, describes new report for consumers on anti-depressants. Includes link to full report.
Gawande speaks about his new book, Checklist Manifesto, and the benefits of checklists in medical settings. Specifically mentions how checklists improve teamwork to the benefit of patients, and addresses the issue of physician resistance (20% of those surveyed after trying out checklists said they didn’t think they were useful; however >90% of that 20% group would want checklists to be used if they were the patient!).
“Atenda is one of the largest home health benefit management companies, providing care and exclusively managing more than 1.3 million lives. Atenda is used by major health plans as a single point of contact for managing all home care services, resulting in improved care and cost savings to plans and their members.” Univita was established by Genstar Capital last year with its acquisition of Long Term Care Group, and subsequently acquired ENURGI.
Infotrends broad multi-client study on changing communications needs of small-to-medium sized businesses. TOC and list of tables only. Complete study >$10K
HIMSS writes up new CDSC created by Blackford Middleton at Partners Healthcare.
Caritas hospital group in Boston expands their relationship with athenahealth to include athenaClinicals. They already used athena’s revenue cycle management (RCM) s/w.
“The National Association for Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the operations and quality of care in its almost 200 member hospitals, is using a web-based research database and reporting system developed by IT Consulting Services of Quantros to report on quality improvement initiatives. Quantros is a leading software and services provider for the healthcare industry.”
Lots of reaction to ONC’s release of MU requirements. This article highlights a few key concerns, including lack of focus on patient’s rights and support for outdated technology that will not provide advancements that are needed.
Nice article on Google’s view of future of advertising. I agree with Arora from Google that online ads shouldn’t be an afterthought, but a critical part of overall advertising strategy.
Article in NEJM questions equity of wellness program incentives in health reform package.
Nice summary of major milestones in medical research in the last 10 years. Emphasizes the impact of the mapping of human genome a decade ago. Also points to advances in preventing disease. Note, although preventive medicine is a much better long-term goal than treating illness, based on my experience, funds tend to be focused on the crisis of the moment and savings of prevention often get forgotten over time (e.g., vaccinations). However, for the present time, there is likely to be renewed focus on prevention in medicine.
One of the questions posed by David Carr in this column about the reports of a new tablet device from Apple (rumored to be announced later this month (jan 2010)). If Apple can produce an e-reader/tablet that considerably improves the user experience over the Kindle, it could take off even at $800-$1000 per device. Publishers of all types–B2C and B2B–should be planning bus models (mostly advertising) around tablet devices.
Good thought-provoking piece by Joe Esposito. He uses example of early enthusiasm from entrepreneurs and Wall St. to build broadband pipes to households, which puzzled the established RBOCs who couldn’t imagine why HHs would need such high bandwidth. Contrasts that situation with today’s need to radical change in scholarly publishing model to provide more direct interactive between researchers and scientists. Implication is that the needed change won’t come from traditional players. I agree.
Like this list, esp. the top 3.
Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe, on trio of young companies that provide outsourced R&D, using crowdsourcing. Innovcentive, Hypios and Yet2.com are highlighted. Innocentive & Yet2.com are Boston area companies; Hypios is in Paris.
Interesting comments from former insiders and analysts on what made Dow Jones vulnerable and changes under Murdoch. Note, I didn’t see any mention of the enterprise division of Dow Jones (there may be some comments, but most focus in on WSJ and the Telerate mess).
Editor of Journal of Spinal Disorders & Techniques for past seven years receives royalty payments from certain Medtronic devices. “Studies involving Medtronic spinal products or that were funded by Medtronic appeared in the journal at least once per issue, on average.” And, are uniformly reviewed in a positive light. More trouble for scholarly publishing sector–fueled in part by Richard Smith, former editor of BMJ.
Mitch Wagner’s last article for InformationWeek w/ 2 examples of hospitals with successful implementation of business intelligence (document management, integration, analytics, dashboards) software.
Nice post that focuses on improving access to healthcare data–by all stakeholders.
“URAC, the nation’s leading health care accreditation and education organization, today announced its new Consumer Education Initiative, which teaches consumers about health insurance and identifies ways they can make more informed decisions about their health care.”
Interesting news about licensing deal between AllTheContent, a Geneva, Switz based content syndicator, and Pharma Channel, which provides info to pharmacies in Europe.
Nice video explanation of HL7 and how the standard facilitates sharing info between various IT systems in hospitals.
Headline Commentary Dec 6-13
- Posted December 13th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Press Ganey acquires Patient Impact, announced 12/6/09. Patient Impact to become the unit specializing in physician practice & outpatient surveys. More details to come. Note, Patient Impact was a Health Content Innovator and presented at our Health Content08 conference: http://www.infocommercegroup.com/healthcontent/index.html
Headline says it all. Gary dissects an actual memo used with TV journalists that promotes tying recent medical research to exaggerated claims of short-term benefits–and the specifically recommends against mentioning research labs or clinical work.
No doubt CME needs a redesign to change the current heavy subsidies by Pharma.
Article on the new building extension of MIT’s media lab designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. Contrasts Maki’s style of open space with lots of glass to original IM Pei buildling with limited windows. Interesting metaphor for move of technology from “black box” to enabling and thriving on “transparency”.
Article questions the affordability of new cancer drug, Folotyn, produced by Allos Therapeutics. Allos says price is in line with other specialty treatments and so far health insurers have agreed to cover it to treat aggressive tumors. Shines light on problem of high cost of developing drugs, but doesn’t offer any solutions.
An indictment of doctors and drug companies that promote drug interventions for preventive care. Uses example of hormone drug replacement for women.
Ad Age lists top magazines that have ceased publishing in 2009.
References CBO study (with link) that describes the allocation of marketing $$ to detailing, CME support, DTC and a measly $400 M in professional journals. Journals publishers need to reinvent themselves as a vehicle for reaching doctors/clinicians.
EBSCO’s DynaMed write-up on breast cancer screening. I don’t find their analysis and coverage very helpful.
Conversation between Milken and Pfizer CEO Kindler
Reports of small survey of device manufacturers; results show that social media isn’t yet part of the marketing mix for device companies.
John Moore writes a brief post about MSFT’s announcement of long-term care provider Golden Living’s adoption of Amalga & HealthVault.
Some commentary on benefits of move to ICD10 codes.
McClellan, former CMS adminstrator, MD, and PhD economist, will keynote Advanstar’s Center for Business Intelligence (CBI)’s Annual Strategic Medicare Policy Summit.
Good overview with links to other stories about Pharma’s slowness in developing mobile apps.
Nancy McKinstry interview: journals renewals are strong even with price increases; hospitals are spending more capital in 2009 than 2008 in anticipation of ARRA funds to come in 2010.
Note, this is the first I’ve heard of ebizMBA, who writes on their site that ebizMBA is “an eBusiness knowledgebase that helps you find the webs best ansers to your online business questions on topics ranging from online marketing and analytics to website development and venture capital”. To their credit, they offer some indication of the parameters they use to measure popularity.
Humana will establish MinuteClinic for its own employees and will encourage all members to use MinuteClinic for basic screening tests for cholesterol, blood pressure, bmi–and will couple basic screenings with its own LifeSynch health coaching.
Ovid to announce Universal Search, which allows clients to search across Ovid and client’s other internal databases in single search. Nice development.
WebMD, HealthVault (MSFT) and GoogleHealth comprise the panel moderated by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn. About 50 minutes long. Worth a look.
Not surprising to hear that Informa has decided against going forward with bid for Springer. Debt levels of Springer make the deal hard to digest and current Springer owners PE firms Candover and Cinven want a sale to conclude quickly. If PE company acquires Springer, perhaps they would sell off pieces.
Very good analysis of trends in IT research. Essentially says that high priced IT research reports are becoming commoditized and used for lead gen that is paid for by vendors. Analysts can still make money consulting, firms can put on events, and carry out customized research. Totally in line with my writings and demonstrated in the content value pyramid in my Publishing for e-Patients preso (on Slideshare/janicemc). Like comment about individual analysts becoming branded more so than firms. Agree there, too.
Dow Jones Venturesource reports Q2 2009 VC investments by industry. Healthcare the best performer and it outpaces IT for first time on record.
Kent Bottles provides excellent summary of recent lecture by David Eddy, MD (the “founder” of EBM) who has consistently challenged the robustness of existing methods of clinical decision guidelines. Dr. Eddy believes the future requires more complex models that consider a larger number of factors and interactions that in effect provide more personalized medical treatment. Eddy’s own company, Archimedes, builds “virtual patients” that can be used for complex modeling of probable outcomes. I don’t know enough about Archimedes to judge its efficacy, but I think Eddy has the right approach. We know that more data are available about patients and outcomes and will accelerating adoption of EHRs, the amount of data will expand rapidly. Along with the improved data sources, there is clearly a need for more complex models to analyze the data and test the benefits of medical treatments.
Good article with data and charts on changes in pharma sales & marketing over time and expected effects of health reform on pharma sales techniques.
Comprehensive article on HSAs and high-deductible health plans.
Perspective on whether use of EMRs reduce liability for physicians. Focuses on discounts offered by insurance cos to doctors and practices that use EMRs.
Schein will merge its animal health business with Butler; Schein to own 50.1%.
Press releases doesn’t provide many details; I will look at Elsevier site soon. Embase is an index to biomedical research; relaunching as standalone product seems old-world.
Good article that mentiones pricedoc.com, healthcarebluebook.com, and outofpocket.com, sites that provide info on prices for various procedures or office visits by doctor.
Story about Full Yield, a wellness program for employers that provides its own food & nutrition programs. Story describes how Safeway, IBM, Pitney Bowes and others have saved money on health care costs via wellness programs. Major issue, however, is that these are companies that self-insure.
Another story that critiques overly simple health care rating schemes. IMO, ratings needs to be based on analysis of outcomes, using real data, not observations from a third-party, which are subject to error.
A one-sided critique of the shortcomings of EHR/EMR systems from Huffington Post. Whereas I agree that there are shortcomings, a more balanced report would have more credibility. Still, it offers some good basic info on what the feds are trying to do with ARRA funding.
Excellent post and comments. I just added my own comment (7th in list).
Article mentions strong interest in healthcare sector by PE. Do PE professionals smell, taste and feel an opportunity in healthcare, too?
Good commentary on public reaction to public health announcements and EBM. More “infodemiology”, that is, providing trustworthy information and monitoring public response to epidemics, is needed.
Excellent video presentation by Peter Norvig of Google. Data, semantics, search and much more.
IDC Health Insights report on EHR vendors ($4,500)
Interesting article and site (which I just discovered) about opportunities in scientific/medical writing and journalism. Site focuses on female scientists.
Sponsored by Google, survey lists most popular resources used to find medical info. Surprise! Search engine/Google is at the top, followed by peer-reviewed journals. No category for online clinical information resources, such as UpToDate, MDConsult, DynaMed, as far as I can see. If no breakout were given on survey, Search Engine category may incorporate these resources too.
Money-Driven Medicine site with free streaming version of the movie. Nice example of offering free streaming with promo for the paid DVD.
FDA would need legislative action to approve new db, but given the ability to track more data from electronic records and online user-input, federal db makes sense.
More on Informa bid for Springer from FT, which quotes analyts.
Study of search behavior indicates that online search is often used to confirm or refute one’s internal knowledge. Hm, sounds rather Bayesian to me.
With over 2.1B Euros in debt (8X EBITA), Springer is a loaded target. Bids are expected to be under 400M Euros. But bigger question is: is there sustained value in publishers of scholarly research, an sector that is being disrupted by new models of scholarly communication and research?
Good review of press related to new mammogram guidelines. Interesting that so many who say they want EBM, object when they don’t like the data. “Don’t like” often means they stand to lose business or stature.
Zynx Health’s order sets will be integrated with Keane’s Optimum EHR system thru this partership. Another example of embedding EBM info into EHRs.
Article describes how students are sharing for-fee medical articles in a Napster-type environment.
“It” in this case, is the information in medical journal articles. Really good article about what could be done to help add context to each medical journal article that reports on new research so that journalists, patients, and even doctors can better understand the implications.
With pressure from patient groups and regulators, hospitals have make significant progress in reducing hospital-acquired patient infections. Checklists and focus on solving the problem (using best practices from other institutions as one means) are noted as key to changing the procedures and culture at hospitals.
Study performed by Prof. Ashish Jha at HSPH and Catherine DesRoches at MGH indicates that using EHRs makes little difference in outcomes. This article goes on to point out that researchers also focus on the importance of changing processes & culture in hospitals to benefit from positive effects of using EMRs/EHRs. I’d add that hospitals and hospital systems that incorporate clinical information systems (order sets, point-of-care CDS) are more likely tho demonstrate improved outcomes. At this stage, not enough evidence-based content has been incorporated into EMR/EHRs.
MD who wrote this post suggests that Kolata’s article is biased toward the big pharma position, since her only sources were from pharma.
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.
Headline Commentary June 22-28
- Posted June 28th 2009
- Comments (0)
- by Janice
Headlines Tagged on Delicious
- » Organizations Stump for Patients’ Access to Electronic Health Data - iHealthBeat
“The future of health care should encourage expanded use of information tools to help consumers better manage their health” is the first line of the press release announcing the coalition. I really like the emphasis on information not just the technology in this statement. Bravo Markle Foundation!
- » Hang Out with Xconomy at DEMO’s Boston Scouting Party | Xconomy
Organizers of DEMO, the big event in San Diego where start-ups get 6 minutes to describe their business, will be in Boston on Monday, June 29 to scout for “stealth mode” innovators for the Sept. 21-23 DEMO.
- » Better Health » Information Overload: The New Electronic Administrative Burden
Great anecdotes of one physician’s experience using EHR system that is clearly poorly designed in designing information flows. There’s a big difference between having ready access to information and having every piece of data pushed out to the user. Health IT really does seem to be at least a decade behind BI systems in Financial Services and other industries. At least, the big EHR vendors, that is.
- » Drug Firms’ Medical Staffs Say What Salespeople Can’t - WSJ.com
Pharma companies are increasingly using medical science liaisons (MSL) on staff to provide info to doctors, esp. because of increased limitations on detailng practices. Evidence shows that docs prefer receiving info from trained physicians (no suprise there).
- » Why Isn’t Health Care More Like a Washing Machine? - The Cheapskate Blog – TIME.com
Another article that uses the analogy of consumer purchases of appliances or cars to healthcare purchases. A much better analogy is buying “car repair” services. Decisionmaking for healthcare & car repair is far less straightforward than new vehicle/appliance purchase. Plus lifetime costs (of appliance, car, or person) depend in part on proper maintenance and there are many other variables that affect outcomes!
- » Qforma Appoints Four Executives in Sales and Field Operations
Qforma, a healthcare data analytics company, expands bus. dev. and sales staff. Qforma recently created the Most Influential Doctors application, which mines data from multiple sources — including research articles — to rate the influence of doctors. Deal with USA Today was widely promoted.
- » Allscripts-Misys shares jump on raised outlook - Forbes.com
Increased incentives for eprescribing help Allscripts-Misys, but improved economy helped, too. Note, more customers buy on subscription basis, compared to perpetual license than in the past.
- » Patient-centered healthcare - The Boston Globe
Thomas Ryan, CEO of CVS Caremark, lays out his thoughts on healthcare reform. With an obvious bias toward benefits of eprescribing, which he says can improve patient compliance, adverse effects, and cost improvement. See also today’s item about Allscripts-Misys improved results due to eprescribing.
- » Reed Elsevier slides on sell-off talk | Business | guardian.co.uk
Citigroup cautions on 2010 estimates for Reed Elsevier, in part due to uncertainty about new CEO and what he’ll do with proceeds of RBI sale.
- » Measuring What Matters: Electronically, Automatically, (Somewhat) Painlessly - RWJF
Look forward to reading this report from RWJF on EMRs, Health IT and Quality Improvement.
- » ARRA EHRs Health Reform and Meaningful Use Debate 6/25/2009 - @2healthguru on Blog Talk Radio
Podcast of recent discussion among several health IT experts on meaningful use of EHRs–and more.
- » Nextgov - Administration urged to engage public on e-health records
Input from advocates of consumer involvement in determining “meaningful use” of EHRs. Some suggest consumer advocate groups act as proxy for public.
- » Hedge fund managers betting Twitter will give them an edge in rapid trading - Telegraph
Hedge fund managers to mine Twitter feeds to assess “event-based” info published on Twitter.
- » Home Health CEO: Expand ‘Meaningful Use’
Perspective from CEO of Comfort Care & Resources, a home health agency in Erie, PA on meaningful use. To him, MU requires connections between all stakeholders in the care ecosystem.
- » GE, Big Vendors Corner EMR Market; Smaller Vendors Explore Health 2.0 - Kaiser Health News
Couple of stories in Kaiser Health News: re- reports Pharmawire/FT story on how big EHR vendors crowd out smaller vendors, esp. GE with its new financing arm for its EHRs. Also reports that Atlas Ventures is looking for investments that will “improve health care by empowering patients”. Atlas invested in Keas, Adam Bosworth’s startup (he was at Google previously).
- » Pharma ad spend falls; TV takes bigger share - FiercePharma
Ad Age releases its top 100 advertisers, with 14 Big Pharma companies on the list.
- » Medidata IPO Prices, No. 3 For Venture-Backed Companies - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ
Medidata, a s/w provider to pharma and device companies that helps manage clinical trials, prices IPO at $14, for market cap of $313. Only the 3rd IPO of the year and the smallest of the 3.
- » New Drug Kills Cancer with Few Side Effects
Early stage clinical trial results published 6/24/09 in NEJM report new drug, olaparib, shrinks or stablizes tumors in patients with certain treatment-resistant hereditary cancers.
- » Healthy Advice Networks Announces Improved Patient Outcomes in Physicians’ Offices with Healthy Advice Programs
Reports improved outcomes from using patient education info from Healthy Advice Networks. Company PR, but wanted to tag this company.
- » Medifacts Acquires Spacelabs Healthcare Clinical Trials Services Division - Drugs.com MedNews
Medifacts, a cardiovascular core lab, aquires Clinical Trials Services of Spacelabs Healthcare.
- » Study says flawed Ingenix databases are used widely - Modern Healthcare
Ingenix’s database for determining out-of-network costs, which has been exposed by NY Atty General Cuomo has having serious flaws, is still used and even required to be used widely. Individual and small business plans suffer the most.
- » Health publisher MediZine expands database marketing opps with acquisition - DMNews
MediZine acquires HealthCommunities.com, a collection of physician Web sites and patient/consumer health information.
- » Leading Healthcare IT Vendors Form Coalition to Promote e-Ordering in Radiology
An new alliance of industry & American College of Radiology formed to promote HIT-enabled decision support for diagnostic imaging decisions. Similar to ePrescribing, the Imaging e-Ordering Coalition supports building incentives to move to diagnostic imaging e-ordering.
- » Imc2 opens health and wellness agency :: BtoB Magazine
Imc2, a Dallas ad agency that already had strong pharma market presence, announced opening of imc2 health & wellness.
- » Consumers, Scientists Tell FDA To Explain Agency Decisions
FDA holds meeting to get input from scientists and consumers on how to improve transparency of their decisions. CU wants more disclosure about mtgs with industry reps. Union of Concerned Scientists said they should allow FDA scientists to air opinions that differ from final agency decision. FDA disagreed with UCS view.
- » Economist Group reports record profit :: BtoB Magazine
Nice to see a publisher with positive growth & earnings. Economist publications differ from general newsweeklies with their deeper analysis of global events and economics.
- » Ezra Klein - An Interview With Atul Gawande
WaPo interview Atul Gawande, whose star has risen since the McAllen Texas article in the New Yorker. Gawande raises an important point about inequality of incomes’ relating to poor health for the segments at the low end of the scale, not just poverty. Robert Fogel from U. Chicago has written on this topic and it needs more attention. My hypothesis: high income segments increase demand for expensive healthcare treatment. As a result, all patients are pushed toward high-cost care (to amortize investment in equip, etc.) that they can’t afford.
- » In Defense of Google Books | Green Business | Reuters
Some good points on the benefits of Google Books. My word of caution to publishers: be informed of the terms and plan accordingly. One pt that needs clarification: authors & publishers may get 63% of the revenue, but it is “net revenue” after costs, so is more likely to be closer to 30% of gross revenue or less.
- » Jen’s Posterous - Why I Didn’t Sign the Declaration of Health Data Rights - Yet…
Jen McCabe Gorman’s very thoughtful post on the recent HealthDataRights.org manifesto and why it needs to be more direct, actionable, and more inclusive. Inclusiveness, that is building on other existing efforts and drawing on the support of groups with the same or adjacent interests, is a recurring problem in many of the well-meaning consumer-focused health sites. Jen has some excellent points in her post.
- » My 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing - O’Reilly Radar
Tim O’Reilly on how he uses Twitter as a publishing and community-building platform.
- » Scientific American Becomes Consumer Div. of Nature Publishing Group
Both owned by MacMillan, new organization will consolidate advertising. Could be smart move; NPG has been more innovative in testing and adopting technology than most other STM publishers.
- » Health Populi: Getting people to use health-y tools
Good post on how to present info to consumers to “nudge” them toward healthy behavior. Links to several studies on the topic.
- » Kibbe: Successful EMRs will be like the iPhone platform | mobihealthnews
Another voice that says UI matters when it comes to IT adoption. Sounds obvious, but good UI requires an understanding of customers’ workflow. iPhone has both great UI and form factor that is available at point-of-need.
- » Meaningful Use Sent Back by ONC Head David Blumenthal | EMR and EHR
Blumenthal, National Coordinator hor Health IT, sends initial recommendations on definition of “meaningful use” back to the committee to work on new set of recommendations.
- » Is Qforma/USA Today Web Site on ‘Most Influential Doctors’ Just Another Beauty Contest?
Good analysis of differing sites and methodologies for rating doctors. In particular, compares Qforma approach of using patient ratings vs. Bridges to Excellence approach of analyzing clinical care records. With >40 different sites that offer ratings of doctors, we’ll soon need a site to rate the raters! Seriously, the methodologies are too opaque in most cases, which detracts from the central purpose of ratings agents — to guide decisionmaking.
- » Telemedicine Helps Monitor Parkinson’s Symptoms in Patients - Medgadget - www.medgadget.com
Interesting case study from nursing home in Rochester, NY where patients with Parkinsons were able to get periodic evaluations via video conferencing with physician & nurse present on-site.
- » Curing Healthcare: Meaningful Healthcare Reform: Challenges and Solutions
Steve Beller responds to paper on whether health reform will yield real savings. One issue is whether wellness programs, increasingly popular among employers, will pay off in the short and long-run. I’m seeing evidence that weight management and exercise can yield very quick results, but agree that long term healthy citizens will live longer and still require care at end-of-life. Assuming MDs will be the only ones providing care — at the same salary levels as today — probably overstates costs. Technology will allow more care to be handled by less-expense care providers (see this week’s feature blog).
- » What is the cause of excess costs in US healthcare? : denialism blog
Looks like good article with review of McKinsey study on healthcare costs in US v. ROW. Haven’t read in detail yet.
- » CelebrityDiagnosis.com Presents Famous Patients As Medical Lessons
Not sure what I think of this! Founders have credible backgrounds, but it seems odd to me. But, then again, I don’t read People or watch E!
- » The Economy and the Economics of Everyday Life - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
Several economists chime in on priorities for healthcare reform.
- » 30 Twitter Tools For Managing Followers | Tools | PelFusion.com
Wow, tools for managing Twitter are really proliferating.
- » Technology Review: A Pound of Cure
Writer Andy Kessler points finger at doctors and hospitals for not wanting to adopt EHRs because they will expose current wasteful and inefficient practices that benefit providers. I think issue is more complex, but I agree with conclusions of the author.
- » News: Change or Die? - Inside Higher Ed
From Assoc. Amer. Univ. Presses (AAUP) conference last week, good debate about future of university presses. Many common themes with this week’s Health Content article on declining value of basic articles and books. Publishing, even university presses, need to consider where they can most add value and change their organizations & revenue model to align with core value in today’s market.
- » News: Elsevier Won’t Pay for Praise - Inside Higher Ed
Elsevier gets into more hot water; this time over $25 gift certificates offered for reviews of textbooks on Amazon. Wouldn’t be a big deal, if the offer hadn’t come with a suggestion that reviews give books a 5***** rating.
- » 10 tips for physicians interested in a health IT career
Since I wrote that doctors are being commoditized along with health care publishers, I feel compelled to provide a link to this post that provides tips on how to keep up with health IT or even shift careers.
- » Secretary Sebelius Releases New Report: Hidden Costs of Health Care
Report from HHS addresses increasing out-of-pocket & premium costs for those who are insured.
- » Obama’s Political Operation To Launch Big Database Of Health Care Stories | The Plum Line
Very interesting. This base of collected stories could be the foundation for a much larger collection. Also, mining anecdotal stories to find patterns should be the goal of some publishers.
- » TriZetto to Offer Clients Free PHRs
TriZetto, a health IT vendor that provides payer s/w will launch free PHR s/w for insurers to offer to their clients.
- » Why A New (And Unusual) Pricing Strategy By A Rhode Island Paper Will Fail | paidContent
Forestalling the inevitable? Newport, RI paper, Newport Daily News, charges premium for web-only access: more than print = web! Although it may have been conceived as encouraging print subscribers to retain subscriptions (i.e., by charging penalty for cancelling print), price for online access is prohibitive. Somewhat akin to B. Globe’s policy of providing Kindle discount only outside of print delivery regions. How about giving customers what they want?
- » Health Content Publishers Voice Your Opinions on Meaningful Use
We at Health Content Advisors have been trying to be a proxy for the voice of experienced medical publishers and other health content/data providers in the discussions about Health IT and the Billions of dollars being spent on EHRs and other IT as part of the Stimulus Bill. I’ve seen little or no evidence that the big STM publishers are speaking up to say that IT without consideration of the content that flows through the iT systems is “meaningless”. The ONC is requesting comments; only 150 have responded. Act now!
- » Journalism organizations too cozy with drug industry - Schwitzer health news blog
Gary Schwitzer raises important concerns about health journalists’ potential conflicts of interests when they accept free events and fellowships funded by Pharma. With more healthinfo available to consumers on Web and other channels, it’s more critical than ever to improve health literacy among our population. If too many journalists become too biased, who will serve as watchdog? Sounds like an oppty to health content publishers to me.
- » Socialtext Goes Freemium With Socialtext Free 50
It’s not only content that loses value due to IT developments; IT loses value over time, too. Constant innovation is necessary to stay in premium territory. Good example here with SocialText, which has lowered its premium prices and offered a free version with limited access.
- » Why Social Media are Essential to Future of Health & Science Communication
Excellent presentation from Mayo Clinic on using social media in marketing communications for hospitals. Much more than a how-to, preso provides superb overview of how media landscape is changing, with marketers (in this case Mayo) having access to inexpensive publishing and distirbution tools. Fits right in with this week’s article on Value of Health Content.
- » Thomson Reuters Proposes to Unify Share Listing in Toronto/NY
With fewer than 5% of shareholder now in UK, Thomson Reuters proposes to unify stock listing to Toronto and NYSE.
- » A Doctor’s View of Obama’s Healthcare Plans - WSJ.com
Abraham Verghese, Professor & Senior Assoc. Chair for Theory & Practice of Medicine at Stanford addresses the need for cost-cutting in health reform plans. He holds firm to the view that physicians are irreplacable, contrary to the article I just posted that suggests that common tasks can be taken over by other trained medical professionals at a lower cost.
- » Atul Gawande on Health Reform
Following up his very popular article in the New Yorker about health care cost differentials, Atul Gawande writes a balanced article on health care reform. Article includes historical context and models for analyzing healthcare reform.
- » “Facebook for pharmacists” to offer news, CE and community - Medical Marketing and Media
JMI Health launching a social networking site for pharmacists.
- » Walgreens, Express Scripts Fight Over ‘Blitzkrieg’ Audits - Health Blog - WSJ
Contract negotiations between Walgreens & Express Scripts get nasty.
- » FitOrbit Launches With Heavy Backers, Connects You To Real Personal Fitness Trainers Online
FitOrbit, on online personal trainer service, backed by some well-known investors and personal trainers (e.g., Body by Jake (Steinfeld)). Concept seems okay, but there are competitors (e.g., CorePerformance among others) and biggest challenge will be to engage users online and convince them to pay.
- » Thomson Reuters Study Finds Baby Boomers and Generation X Face HC Cost Hurdles
Analysis of 3007 HHs in Thomson Reuters PULSE Healthcare survey show that boomers and GenX segments most likely to be postponing health care due to cost.
Headline Commentary June 18-21
- Posted June 21st 2009
- Comment (1)
- by Janice
AthenaHealth publishes analysis of payment records of insurers based on claims data it processes for clients. Great example of “data content” byproduct of primary line of business. In this case, Athenahealth’s analysis helps clients and prospects understand payment practices of various insurers and more important, published results promote Athenahealth.
AHRQ proposes expanding CAHPS surveys to include patient attitudes about health It. Harvard & Rand will conduct a field test in 2009.
STM sales down 1% (up 9% at cc), profits rose 4% (14% cc).
ContentNext, the parent company of PaidContent.org, which is now owned by the Guardian, confirms recent layoffs and realignment.
Reports that Elsevier has been in discussions with some institutions to discuss having their institutional repositories replaced by PDF files hosted by ELS.
Anas Younes, MD on why he Tweets.
Inkwell Publishing, which hires freelancers to write textbooks for Houghton Mifflin Harcout, has stopped paying the freelance content producers because of non-payment from Houghton. Fits with theme of content commoditization, the subject of this week’s commentary on HCA blog.
Jay Parkinson’s Hello Health healthcare model is highlighted. Hello Health offers a model for providers of health care that utlizes technology to improve efficiency and communication between patients & doctors. For now, Hello Health requires direct payment from patients, although patients can seek reimbursement.
Ah, DRM! I haven’t heard much on that topic for a while. Device-specific DRM offers publishers some comfort, but this post and the comments expose the limitations of device-specific policies when upgrades to tech. devices occur so frequently.
Glaxo’s CEO, Andrew Witty, discusses changes in R&D organization, which has moved from “industrial-scale drug discovery processes” of the past 15 years that relied on “an industrial process based on large-scale applications of technologies like genomics, proteomics and combinatorial chemistry” which didn’t deliver on their promise, to more focused research that is “more of an art than a science”.
Review of some EHR vendors that also offer billing services.
Discussion draft of House’s health reform bill “To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.” 852 page pdf doc.
Video interview with Phil Gould, Managing Director of Jadara Pharma, discussing the need for R&D divisons of Pharma to improve methods to decide which compounds to invest in, given the economic conditions that Pharma faces.
Nice to see that Els has iPhone apps for popular medical info products from Mosby/Saunders, including Mosby’s iTerms Flash Cards, Saunder’s Q&A Review for th NCLEX-RN Exam and many more.
Financially troubled Candover sells Wood Mackenzie to PE firm Charterhouse Capital for EV of GBP 553 Million.
Nice piece by Ellen Goodman on the importance of helping doctors focus on providing healthcare, not reimbursement rates and other business issues.
BI/DMC to be focus on RWJF study that will allow patients to view doctors’ notes online.
Good recap of Google Book Settlement, Book Rights Registry, and orphan works rights proferred to Google under the settlement. Interesting that Google, the company that champions free content, is now being feared for possibly planning to charge “exorbitant” rates once they get near-monopoly rights over orphan works.
Full transcript from HIT Policy Committee meeting that will make recommendations to ONC.Links to presentation and other materials., too.
Great post by Richard Scoville on how some community health centers are relying on registries of patient records & outcomes to improve overall care. Unfortunately, most EHR systems aren’t set up to interoperate with registries, which nixes the whole idea of meaningful use!
Medtronic says it paid almost $800,000 to surgeon Dr. Kuklo over past 3 years for consulting, product development and speaking. Dr. Kuklo is accused of fabricating study that reported positive results for a Medtronic spine product.
RWJF launches consumer health care confidence index in partnership with Survey Research Center at U. Michigan, which conducts the “Surveys of Consumers” monthly survey of 500 households.
Proposed principles from Children’s Hospital (Boston) workgroup for Health IT infrastructure modeled on iPhone platform with interchangeable applications.
Dan Clancy responds to Bezos’ comments about Google Books. All publishers–in all platforms & for all audiences–should be following Google Books Settlement and the G Books program!
Adgregate Markets, an online advtsg services provider acquires Gydget, a social media widget. Adgregate’s offering, ShoAdsTM, creates banner ads that have e-commerce capability directly embedded.
Merger, which was called off last fall due to market conditions and lack of buyer for Porex, is back on. HLTH still seeking buyer for Porex. WebMD will be surviving company with Wygod as Chair and Gattinella as Pres/CEO. All stock transaction. WebMD has been a publicly traded sub. of HLTH.
Looks to be a good conference on innovation in health care experience & delivery.
Sponsored by CTIA (wireless ind assoc), Congress, administration officials, & experts to meet to discuss “mHealth solutions to America’s chronic care crisis”. Good quote from Obama at end of article. “We need to explore a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first, let doctors focus on practicing medicine, and encourage broader use of evidence-based guidelines”.
Excellent points by 2 associations that deal with healthcare documentation and medical transcription (AHDI and MTIA). In short, we need representatives from parties that understand clinical workflow and “how” EHRs will be used not just representatives from the technology side. “Defining ‘meaningful use’ is not the role of HIT but…clinicians and experts in health care documentation who can speak to the document workflow process and the complexities of capturing health stories in a way that informs clinical decision-making and promotes coordination of care..”
IBM bets on mobile tech to reach parts of pop that don’t use pcs–and of course those who use both.
CareMedic, based in St. Petersburg, FL, has incorporated Cleveland Clinic’s app that helps identify medicaid, self-pay & charity cases to help manage bad debt & denied claims into its Patient Access Mgmt system.
The Healthcare Financial Mgmt Assoc will publish a detailed report this fall on how to implement best practices in revenue cycle mgmt (RCM). Preliminary results given at HFMA’s annual meeting in Seattle. Bullet point results listed in article.
ThomsonReuters to provide business/finance news to Captivate for distribution via their commercial elevator screens.
Good article on recent research by TNS Healthcare on shifting relationships between Pharma and doctors. No major revelations, but some good data.
Article provides table of Twitter-related start-ups and the investors in each.
Round 1 research reports from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Project HealthDesign available via this link.
Good piece on use of Twitter by scholarly publishers. Focuses on using Twitter to promote info about books/journals on blogs or websites. But, also points out that PR folks have a bit more latitude in what they can do/say on Twitter than in a formal blog/web post.
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