HealthContentAdvisors

“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.

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.

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.

Nuval, a Boston-area company that provides numeric ratings that reflect nutritional value of foods, gets official endorsement from American College of Preventive Medicine.

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.

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.

Pearson FT is apparently shopping Interactive Data.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Adams replaces Carl Byers, athena’s initial CFO, who last June said he wanted to live abroad.

Credit rating firm TransUnion has acquired MedData LLC, a Charlotte, N.C.-based health care transactions processing firm, for an undisclosed sum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good commonsense views on what will and will not change in 2010.

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.

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.”

Inside Out provides interactive training on the human body for K-12 market.

Brian Ahier summarizes Sec’y HHS Sebelius’ Health Security program.

Kaiser and VA (Veteran’s Affairs) will use NHIN to exchange patient data (with permission) in pilot program in San Diego area.

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).

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?

TabSafe, an Indiannapolis company, showcases its medication management system at CES.

“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.”

As my colleague Russell Perkins said, “betcha thought there already was one”.

Dr. Carolyn Clancy, director of AHRQ, describes new report for consumers on anti-depressants. Includes link to full report.

“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.

HIMSS writes up new CDSC created by Blackford Middleton at Partners Healthcare.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nice post that focuses on improving access to healthcare data–by all stakeholders.

Interesting news about licensing deal between AllTheContent, a Geneva, Switz based content syndicator, and Pharma Channel, which provides info to pharmacies in Europe.

Does technology interrupt the communication between doctors & patients? That’s the question posed by this book. Sounds interesting.

New site that compiles info about neuroscience research.

Great example of the how new sources of data will transform medical research.

Jay Parkinson on specialized providers v. general hospitals.

Review of Adam Bosworth’s company, Keas, which uses custom “care plans” that collect personal data - directly or indirectly.

Consumer Watchdog wants change to HHS ruling that gives providers the authority to decide if/when a patient’s healthcare information security has been breached.

Karen Overstreet, named executive director of Lippincott CME unit. Interesting that she’ll report to the Medical Research division, not education. Has there been a re-org?

FDA will use data from Wolters Kluwer’s Pharma Solutions Source Lx Patient Studies Suite that captures patient-level Rx data and Pharmaceutical Audit Suite (PHAST) that captures Rx transactions to follow trends in flu medication prescribing activity by region and other patient demographics.

American Academy of Professional Coders offers free app to help convert ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes. See aapc.com.

New edition will include feeds from Factiva and use Factiva Smart Search. Need to check on pricing.

HealthPort Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based provider of healthcare IT solutions to hospitals and health systems, has set its IPO terms to six million common shares being offered at between $14 and $16 per share. It would have an initial market cap of approximately $360 million, were it to price at the high end of its range. HealthPort is owned by ABRY Partners. www.healthport.com

New study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that there are 67,000 fewer active physicians than calculations have suggested. The physician work force is also younger than previously estimated, with a greater proportion of doctors in their 20s and 30s and fewer who are 65 and older. By 2020, there will be 957,000 physicians, according to the new estimates, rather than the 1.05 million previously projected. Only 9 percent will be 65 or older, or half as many as had been predicted.

Team that developed InnovationRx at the Innovation Company bought the rights to the company and relaunched it as Aprexis Health Solutions. Aprexis focuses on patient adherence, with adherence to prescription drugs the focus.

WK Health announces new customer who will use Provation, now branded as Provation Order Sets, powered by UpToDate Decision Support.

UnitedHealth exceed analyst estimates despite declines in #insured, due to increases at drug unit.

Argentina the latest country to launch medical tourism program to encourage visitors to plan vacations centered around medical procedures (cosmetic and fertility are top treatments for medical tourists in Arg).

MVP Health, a regional health insurer in upstate NY, VT, and NH, will reimburse physicians for using RelayHealth’s WebVisit (TM) for patient consultations. MVP is partnering with Mohawk Valley Medical Associate (MVMA) to offer physician’s immediate reimbursement for implementing Relay’s webVisit.

presentation materials from Sept 24, 2009 webcasts on CAHPS Clinician and Group Survey

Concerns about patient privacy loom over electronic health records segment. George Hill of Leerink Swann estimates that by 2020, data mining could represent a $5 Billion industry.

Preview of next week’s Connected Health 09 conference in Boston. Focus: new devices and communications tools will help patients take more control of their health and leave hospital visits for severe events.

New device from Fitbit that tracks exercise & sleep & can be used to monitor calorie intake, too. Fitbit is joining a fast-growing segment of devices that help monitor healthy behavior & can be used by payer segment to evaluate lifestyle of insured populations.

Dr. Rob on medical costs and medical codes–and plug for his interview with Ira Glass for This American Life’s series on medical costs to be aired weekend of 10/17-18, 2009.

Quest Diagnostics’ MedPlus group, launches its Care360 ambulatory EHR on Oct.24. MedPlus will market the EHR to teh 150,000 physicians that already use its other Care360 apps and will offer hosted solutions for smaller practices. Quest’s MedPlus has the advantage of having existing relationships with these practices who use their other Care360 apps.

Developed in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Elsevier’s Brain Navigator tool, a “GPS system” that provides 3-D software to navigate the brain, adds new features for visualizing injection pathways and printing and exporting images. Interesting to note that this collaboration is with Elsevier’s Science and Technology Books division. Great example of how STM publishers can leverage their content through IT/R&D partnerships.

According to 2006 Kaiser Foundation study, nearly 1/3 of US companies that offer health insurance also offer some sort of wellness program. And, the focus on wellness has increased since then. This article describes some of the programs and $$ incentives for reaching wellness goals.

Very interesting. Healthy Advice Networks, which markets health info to physician practices with content sponsored by pharma and health and wellness brands, partners with HealthScape Consumer, a joint WK Health and Nielsen longitudinal panel to provide data on the effectiveness of sponsoring/promoting in Healthy Advice Network.

RightHealth is dba name of Kosmix, a Mt. View California search technology company that initially focused on the health space.

Digitas Health lists 140 possible uses of Twitter in healthcare. Nice.

Florida-based video sharing site that posts videos for docs to use for patient education.

Another review of Health 2.0 conference with good overview of startups (and some older companies) that presented.

Excellent review of last week’s Health 2.0 conference. John Moore from Chilmark Research understands the Health IT issues as well as anyone and articulates problems of interoperability better than anyone. Only comment from Health CONTENT Advisors: content producers/owners are left out of the discussion. IT companies don’t own the data, in fact at the current time they don’t bundle in much data with their services. But, we see lots of activity in deals between healthcare publishers and health IT vendors occurring and think that health content will receive more attention from the folks who are focused on IT aspect in the near future. Note, John’s comment abt Quicken Health & fact that one can hover over a test and see info about it is a great example of how content adds “meaning” to the use of IT tools.

Kevin Kruse of Kru Research details his reasons for launching e-Patient Connections 2009. I am speaking at the conference on the market for health content for e-patients. Important point: e-Patients both produce and consume health info.

Balanced review of the recent Health 2.0 conference in SF.

Safeway, which has stood out for its programs to encourage healthy behavior (mainly weight loss) of its employees, supports amendment that will allow larger incentives to employees who achieve health goals –as discounts to their health insurance premiums.

Atlantic writer describes Adam Bosworth’s new company, Keas. Keas helps individuals make healthy choices and uses an individual’s personal health data to customize alerts and plans for health. Writer is dubious that consumers will flock to this type of “big brother” service that tells them how to eat, exercise, etc. But, I think she misses the point. Individuals will be pressured to use services like this by the companies that pay for their health insurance and healthcare. Rewards, incentives, nudges–however you want to characterize them–will be need in the form of cash or other incentives to encourage individuals to participate. Eventually, concern for one’s health may be sufficient to encourage usage, but not yet…

List by topic of recommended external resources by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Review of the “tools” panel at Health 2.0, which highlighted integration of FirstDataBank’s drug codes for use by new consumer-focused health resources. Good move by Hearst’s FirstDataBank.

Verizon teams with Xora to provide app to track activity of home health workers and provide navigational tools.

Very good post on the benefits of having audience members using Twitter during a conference presentation. Worthwhile reading for conference producers and presenters.

Article reports on possibility that UK could overhaul CME and require docs to pay 1/2 of CME costs.

Ed Silverman, who used to write the Pharmalot blog, which was discontinued when the newspaper that hosted it gave him a buyout offer and he went to Elsevier to edit the Pink Sheet, will restart blogging.

Notes from Data Drives Decisions panel at Health2.0.

Everyday Health partners with DSHI Systems to offer video symptom checker tool for consumers.

Josh Seidman emphasizes the importance of sufficient customer research prior to developing health IT tools. Josh asked panelists from start-ups that have created health info tools for patients how they did their research and the lack of responses is telling. In-depth research of usage behavior and user-needs seems to be lacking in health IT for professionals as well as patients.

Story on Adam Bosworth’s new company, Keas. May have already bookmarked this story.

Royalty-based venture financing–where investors receive a % of monthly revenue– is gaining attention as new financing model.

IOM held 2-day workshop on Evidence-Driven Practice. More info here.

HealthCentral’s CEO, Chris Schroeder, will speak at Health 2.0 on 10/6 & will highlight growth in number of bloggers on their network, primarily from their acq. of Wellsphere.com.

Announcement of new partnerships with Harvard Pilgrim & the postal service union’s health plan. Also lists some recent features, including ability to graph test results over time.

OptumHealth and American Well are partnering to provide online medical services to Optum’s insured population.

CVS’s Medicare Drug plan(SilverScript and Accendo) will qualify to cover fewer subsidized members in 2010. They forecast losing about 1/3 of their subsidized customers in 2010.

XML version of Fed Reg now available. Big news for value-added publishers of gov’t data. I once produced a CD-ROM version of Fed Register: formatting to make a useful reference tool was not easy at that time.

Author published by S&S describes online storage companies RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile and how they play a role in illegal sharing of ebook files.

Schmidt says Google not a content company, but is in business to help content companies thrive. Disingenuous statement. They are a content producer and will be a content seller if/when Google Books Settlement is concluded.

Description of retail clinics, like CVS MinuteClinic.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn writes about the newly released study from PWC titled, “Transforming healthcare through secondary use of health data”. Jane focused on barriers to data liquidity (data flows between apps/stakeholders0. I’ll write up post that focuses on near-term opportunities for data publishers to offer data collections and analytic tools to mine newly available “secondary data” that is a byproduct of digitizing health records and health events.

Review of Health IT meeting 9/30/09 at Harvard Medical School to discuss “substitutability” aka interoperability/data exchange via APIs.

Fabulous case studies and overview of how the secondary data–or data that can be mined from digital repositories of health records and other recorded health event–from PWC.

CDC funds 4 new centers of excellence in public health informatics at Harvard Pilgrim, Indiana university, U. Pittsburgh and U. Utah. Centers will conduct research using informatics and real-time surveillance of data from hospitals and healthcare systems to discern potential health threats.

Study on the effects of online support groups fails to yield positive results, but more study is needed.

PhRMA, the drug industry trade assoc., revised guidelines for clinical trials and emphasizes transparency in research articles and in reporting results of all trials. Pharma companies have been criticized for not reporting results of drugs that they drop from their pipeline. And recently Pharma and journals publishers have been strongly criticized for ghostwriting practices, where well-known academics are asked to put their name as lead author, even when they have very little involvement with the study.

GenomeQuest partners with Thomson Reuters to include TR’s Geneseq database with GenomeQuest’s analytic tools.

As part of the Communities Putting Prevention to Work initiative, HHS makes $120 M available to US states & territories to use for prevention and wellness programs.

News of layoffs and restructuring debt at Advanstar. Comments offer very negative views.

Another example of partnerships with grocery chains to provide nutritional info to consumers. NuVal was in the news on Sunday for the nutritional labels they provide via several supermarket chains.

Phil Baumann provides more very helpful info on Google’s new Sidewiki.

Rundown of free and paid apps for medical formula calculations.

Spine-health.com wins Web Marketing Association award for third year in a row. Spine-health is a pioneer in providing an online community that provides authoritative health content for consumers and is evolving to become a central source of info for doctors, patient, and other stakeholders.

Good review of multiple ways that doctors are using social media in their work.

AMA on comparative effectiveness (CER)

Focus of partnership on developing monoclonal antibodies and vaccines for prevention of flu and other infectious & non-infectious diseases.

Nice to see videos that provide info to patients and advocates on how to navigate hospital stays.

NuVal, a Boston area start-up, provides rating based on nutritional value of foods. Scoring is done using ratio of good nutrients to harmful ingredients. Grocery stores are adding ratings to their shelf labels. Interesting–and based in my town of Braintree.

Ringful, an Austin, TX-based company, will demo its PreventiveCare.mobi app at DEMO.

Halamka names Quest’s Care360 e-prescribing solution as the “cool technology of the week”. Quest is offering a free six-month trial of the service.

Focuses on overpayment to Medicare Advantage providers.

Video to promote upcoming conference on media convergence. Clever and entertaining presentation of info about media trends.

Uwe Reinhardt offers a primer on how to read health insurer’s 10-Ks.

Peter Jasco, who has written several previous in-depth reviews of Google Scholar, provides an update and describes why GS won’t serve as a citation analysis tool. Hmm, what does that say for “infodemiology” results mined from Google?

FDA to hold hearings on use of social media by pharma.

Quest Diagnostics, known primarily for its lab testing business, offers its Care360 e-prescribing s/w for free during a 6-month test. Quest is also beta-testing a Care360 EHR for small to midsize practices.

Cogent opinion piece with good comments about future of scholarly publishing. Theme: journals as brand, not necessarily as primary distribution vehicle. Also, journals as just one component of scientific research content assets.

NEJM series on health reform; this time why Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model could rein in costs.

Great piece on Dave DeBronkart, aka e-Patient Dave, who is a founder of the new Journal of Participatory Medicine. Journal and its community aspire to change the culture of medicine so that patients have a more active role in all aspects of their healthcare and most of all, so that patients have full access to their medical records.

WK’s Adis R&D Insight adds “intelligent forecasting” from its pharma research service inThought to its drug pipeline info service.

Zagat tool for rating/recommending doctors incorporated into BCBS of Georgia’s online site for members. Makes sense to offer recommendations within a system.

Good post on how the proliferation of ratings and awards for hospitals is diluting the effect. Also, high ratings doesn’t always equate with a good match for a specific patient.

Clinical Site Services, a service provider to CROs and service companies to help them with their site performance, launches its own site that provides health info with the goal of attracting users who may be prospects for clinical trials. Bus model rests on selling ads/sponsorships to CROs, etc. Interesting; will check it out later today.

Uses MarkLogic for QualityAnalytics product that facilitates reporting quality measures and adds search features.

Thomson Scientific launches upgrade to TPharma that includes consensus analyst forecasts for strategic drugs across major pharma therapy areas & combines the forecasts w/ downloadable revenue models for drugs in over 100 indications.

Inverness Medical Innovations to buy Free & Clear, a regional health services provider focusing on wellness and prevention.

Post about new feed that aggregates tweets from 25 patient safety experts on Twitter.

More on FDA’s social media & pharma developments.

change:healthcare, a HC08 innovator, launches ability to post questions on Twitter about healthcare price info (e.g., Rx drugs) and other health issues — with focus on helping people save money.

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.

Sweden’s EQT now frontrunner; TPQ is out; Carlyle & Providence Equity still in but have taken a back seat.

Good notes on Medicine 2.0 meeting in Toronto on PHRs.

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.

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.

Slides, recordings and transcripts from August 27, 2009 Web conference sponsored by AHRQ.

Check out this cool app for reading, searching & Tweeting the just-released Baucus hc bill — from Tizra a search tech company.

Good balanced piece on FDA’s cancer drug director, Dr. Richard Pazdur.

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.

Ted Eytan, MD’s (Kaiser Foundation) presentation on PHRs as used at Kaiser & plans for the future. Outstanding slides (see esp. slide 16).

Apple invites vendors to meeting to discuss healthcare apps. As author says, they’d be idiots to ignore the billions in ARRA funds!

Weems named SVP Health Strategy at Vangent. Govt & Health are key markets for Vangent.

OurParents, a central source of information on eldercare services and related information, introduces user forums.

Nice marketing move to encourage sales of its EHR systems for physician practices.

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.

Bedside patient portals help patients keep in touch with doctors. good idea.

Video Screencapture.

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.

New exec joins CRO company, MPI Research.

Center for Studying Health System Change reports survey results on physician satisfaction.

Elsevier posts warning about scams that are sending email solicitations to scientists/medical researchers about submitting articles to ELS. They’re really phishing schemes to get authors to send “handling fees” to scam organizations.

Jonathan Gruber, prof. economics at MIT, and advisor to Obama on healthcare, writes how tax susbsidies & employer paid insurance distorts the true cost of health care and leads to overuse, esp. among the wealthy who respond to the tax subsidies and have more discretionary income to spend. (Some editorializing on my part of Gruber’s op-ed.)

Hearst to launch Real Beauty, on online portal for makeup, hair care & beauty topics, which will include content from their ind. magazines and allow some personalization. According to WSJ & stats quoted in article, health &beauty advertising has been slow to move to the Web. Seems very odd to me. I think the publishers were slow to innovate online to attract the advertisers. It took an ind. in the UK to provide makeup tips on YouTube to get that ball rolling.

Rumors are circulating, but some downplay them b/c of CardioNet’s legal problems.

Techcrunch calls HealthBase (a new semantic search engine that searches selected medical site & wikipedia) the “ultimate” medical content search engine. Commenters and David Rothman, a respected medical librarian (DavidRothman.net) beg to differ. Based on very cursory look at HealthBase and the comments, it looks to me as though they haven’t taken the time to study medical content nor the care to disambiguate homonyms. Fatal flaws for a supposed semantic search company.

Good post on value of moving to ICD-10.

New magazine that covers medical tourism launches. Published by Medical Tourism Association (Medical Travel Association) also known as the Global Healthcare Association, which includes top int’l hospitals, providers, med tourism faciliators, insurance companies & others involved in promoting medical tourism.

Institute of Medicine (IOM) report emphasizes the need to collect data on race, ethnicity and other variables in order to study disparities in access to and quality of healthcare .

Harvard Medical School drops policy of not allowing students to speak to media unless it is cleared through their communications office due to pushback from students.

Some health insurers are setting up shops at malls to sell policies. Early experiments with retail sites have had mixed results; some have closed due to lack of sales.

HHS award $1.2M to American Health Information Management Association Foundation to continue with HIE project at state level.

Study provides evidence of selective reporting of clinical trial outcomes.

Scott Shreeve on Greenway Technologies EHR and their creative marketing.

Another article on Consumers Checkbook’s new service to rate doctors. Instead of relying on user generated ratings online (as do many companies), CC surveys individuals who have visited doctors (they get info from insurance companies). Results are free and costs are covered by insurance companies that pay to publish results about the doctors in their networks.

eBay to sell Skype to SilverLake, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Canada Pension Plan

Medshpere Systems (which uses open source EHR Vista system of VA) raised $12M to meet demand from hospitals trying to meet requirements for eligibility for ARRA funds.

“The National Quality Forum and Health Level 7, together with the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and Alschuler Associates, LCC, have issued a draft for the Health Quality Measure Format (MQMF), a data standard that would enable healthcare providers to extract quality-related data from their electronic health record systems automatically.” THis is an important step in facilitating the flow of data between EHR systems and for incorporating health content that guides clinical decisions.

Part of a series on hospital accreditation; worth reviewing the full series.

Kent Anderson (NEJM) applies Jim Spanfeller’s thesis that online ads on publisher sites are too cheap to scholarly publishers. Although I agree that AdSense type pricing models aren’t appropriate for high value publications, I disagree with basic premise that brand/banner ads are the way to go online. Publishers need to be more creative in finding ways to connect the marketers who want to reach the publisher’s audience than through banner ads.

One analyst supports Google’s efforts in digitizing books & negotiating the Google Book Settlement, which gives them rights to orphan works. Analyst points to failed efforts by AMZN & MSFT.

Brief article that suggests that big pharmacy chains will benefit from health reform, but big PBM companies like Medco and ExpressScripts may suffer.

Great explanation of ICD codes and the new ICD-10 revision.

Good post with good comments on issues that have held back progress in standardizing medical codes to allow interoperability between various systems. I’d point to yesterday’s B. Globe article about streamlining processes in hospitals to gain further insight. Without a clear view of the workflow and the content that flows through each system, standards and interoperability will be limited.

Artcile reveals appalling distortions of research studies in popular press. Supports how important patient education/science education and comparative effectiveness research are to making sense of medical research studies.

Esther Dyson lays out some ideas for Yahoo’s future, including becoming the premier online organizational tool for consumers.

Videos on how surgeons could use Evernote and WolframAlpha.

Theory that too much info reduces time doctors have to spend with patients. Incorporates Herbert Simon theories.

Good article on improving efficiency in hospitals and dramatic changes in throughput by using established business engineering methods.

Boehringer ahead of pack in using social media to promote results of clinical trials, etc.

Excellent article that emphasizes that providing information to stakeholders (esp. patients and doctors) is the best approach to assuring optimal decisionmaking.

Market forecast for medical device segment in France.

More examples of how Pharma is using social media.

New book forthcoming from Sage Publications, Encylopedia of Medical Decision Making. Seems like an obvious good online reference work.

Profile of Gawande from Harvard Magazine.

James Murdoch lambasts publishing industry for resisting change.

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.

Deloitte’s whitepaper on how pharma could make use of data from EHRs to improve their research, clinical trials, and post-market surveillance processes.

Heart monitor that detects, analyzes & stores info about patient’s heart. AngelMed Guardian. Smart devices are a growth segment.

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.

Minnesota provides website with price info on primary care services, labs, etc for over 100 providers.

Interesting case where patient’s wife suggested experimental treatment that eventually was accepted. She wants $300M plus % of profits.

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.

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?

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.

Free whitepaper from Manhattan Research on Pharma use of digital marketing.

Article includes comments from Susannah Fox of Pew & ePatient Dave (deBronkart) about finding experimental medicine and specialist doctors to combat fatal diagnoses.

U. Washington dept that studies global healthcare, funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Vince Kuraitis describes the foundations of a “network economy” and asks if healthcare industry fits the bill.

Study attempts to measure level of empathy (or lack of empathy) in medical students. Thesis and conclusions are rather scary.

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.

Program for AHRQ’s upcoming conference (Sept. 13-16). Registration is closed; it’s a sellout.

US Bank offers HSA with access to WebMD Coverage Advisor, which helps consumers manage out of pocket costs.

Hospitals are finding that reporting medical errors and making the info easily available helps reduce the number of malpractice lawsuits. Transparency helps!

Important issues about how doctors communicate to patients risks & tradeoffs using statistics described in this paper.

Suggested reading from RWJF.

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.

Wired UK highlights how doctors & hospitals are using Twitter in UK & US.

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.

Survey of medical students by Epocrates shows high usage of health IT, low confidence in info provided by pharma detailers.

AMA uses Impelsys’ iPublishCentral s/w to publish frequently updated versions of its books in ebook format.

Army & Navy doctors collaborate real-time with medical researchers on wound care for injured soldiers–bridging the time gap in tradtional “translational medicine”.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Excellent article that describes how iPhone and other wireless apps are being used by nurses in clinical settings.