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Archive for the ‘Physician directories’ Category

Google Health’s Unfinished Content Strategy

• Posted June 2nd 2008
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• by Janice

 One thinks of search when one thinks of Google.  Since the early version of Google Health that was just released in Beta is focused not on search or content but on  interoperability and security for its personal health records (PHR) platform, it is difficult to quickly size up the opportunities. There are a few content companies among the early partnerships, including HealthGrades, Praxeon, and ADAM.  HealthGrades and ADAM are integrated into the main Google Health page, and Praxeon is a services partner that offers personalized content based on a user’s profile via its MyDailyApple service. 

The prime benefits for content partners appear to be the association with Google and visibility in the list of member services for Google Health.  As pointed out in our earlier entry, a user has to choose to sign up with your service and take added steps to register.  Unless the user takes these steps, the only benefit a member services partner receives is brand recognition for being listed among the other services that have been approved to be included in Google Health. Granted, being associated with Google is not a minor benefit (see Dr. Bob Wachter’s paeon to Google and Google Health, in which he states that companies like Walgreens “can’t put a monetary value on the “cool” value of teaming up with Google“). 

On the other hand, if users register for your service via Google Health, you receive  leads that can be upsold to your direct services, either advertising, paid subscriptions or some other revenue model.

Note that it takes work to become a Google Health partner.  Mount Tabor Online Services, a specialized IT services firm, has found a niche in helping potential partner companies navigate the technical hurdles and other issues related to becoming an approved member services partner.  In their own words, “Mount Tabor can help with secure hosting, technical support for functions involving data normalization and data exchange, and strategic guidance related to application development, integration, deployment and operation“.

It will also take patience to wait for a return on investment.  The adoption cycle for PHRs is likely to be slow and the value of a PHR is largely dependent on the adoption of electronic medical records by provider organizations.

Given these hurdles for participating and the limited returns, I find it puzzling that Google only allowed a limited number of member services partners to distribute press releases promoting their partnership.  Among them, none were content partners.  At this stage, it appears that Google may not have a content strategy for Google Health because they are so focused on developing their platform for exchanging information.  There are inklings of how users will be guided to more in-depth information (links on right-hand column display related results from Google News, Google Scholar, and Google Groups), but the existing content elements of Google Health look like a placeholder for a more developed content strategy to come.

 

Healthcare 3R’s Bring Pain and Gain

• Posted May 23rd 2008
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• by Janice

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

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

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

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

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

 

Buy versus Build at HealthGrades

• Posted May 20th 2008
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• by Russell

HealthGrades, a publicly-held healthcare information company, initially rose to prominence on its tremendous success with an improbable business model: selling background reports on physicians to the consumer market. What made the model improbable was the relatively sparse content in most of its physician reports (with the exception of occasional sanction data, it was pretty much name, address, board certification and med school bona fides) and the fact it could sell them at all in an online environment drowning in free health-related information. But sell reports it did, in vast quantities. And HealthGrades continued to innovate, now offering a limited number of physician reports for free where a hospital has agreed to cover the cost for its physicians. Another nice upside of this approach: it links its successful consumer offering to its hospital rating and marketing offerings. Smart.

Arguably, the key to HealthGrade’s success is its ability to get products to market fast, and adapt them rapidly to changing market demands. The key to this agility is that HealthGrades elects to buy rather than build its content, content that HealthGrades then integrates and markets. This preference for content licensing is true of its physician profile product, and it’s true of its newest offering, a prescription rating and comparison tool for consumers.

This offering, just launched a few weeks ago, draws on content licensed from IMS Health and Hearst’s FirstDataBank unit. Integrate the content, feed it into its remarkable online marketing machine, and a successful new product is the likely result.

And lest you think HealthGrades views licensing as a one-way street, consider its announcement yesterday that it is licensing its physician and hospital content to Google Health. It’s a wonderful move to build even more traffic to HealthGrades content, which makes HealthGrades more important to hospitals to which it sells both ratings and consulting services. At the same time, the HealthGrades cash register continues to ring with sales of physician profile reports to consumers. It’s a powerful virtuous circle that favors content marketing over content creation. That’s not a formula for everyone, but it certainly seems to be the right formula for HealthGrades.

 

Consumer-Driven Health Care Drives Demand for Ratings

• Posted May 8th 2008
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• by Janice

The proliferation of doctor ratings sites continues unabated and is likely to continue. The two main drivers of growth are both related to the consumer-directed healthcare movement: 1) the demand for information about healthcare providers from consumers/patients and 2) the focus on measuring quality and satisfaction in healthcare. 

The recent traffic records achieved by Castle Connolly, the publishers of the “Top Doctor” guides, during their promotion of “Long Island’s Top Doctors” on Newsday.com demonstrates the strong demand for the data.  Searches for doctors profiles in the database (accessible via Newsday) resulted in over 1.2 million profile views on just one day.   

On the quality and satisfaction front, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of HHS, has led efforts to compile standardized ratings of healthcare providers and practitioners through their Consumers Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program.  CAHPS originally measured satisfaction with health plans, but has branched out into measuring patient satisfaction with hospitals, and has begun  measuring satisfaction with physicians through the CAHPS Clinician and Group survey.  The availability of the CAHPS Clinician survey benchmark data (beginning Spring 2009) may spur even more entrants into the doctor ratings business, but it should also raise the bar for the quality of the ratings sites that survive in this competitive field.

 

Physician Transparency: Why the Angst?

• Posted April 24th 2008
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• by Russell

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

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

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

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

Physicians: market thyselves!

 

Availity, Health Market Science Expand Licensing Agreement

• Posted April 22nd 2008
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• by Marji

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

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

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

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

 

Doctors, Rate Yourselves

• Posted April 2nd 2008
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• by Janice

Last week, Angie’s List, the online subscription site that is known for user ratings of painters, carpenters, roofers and other home contractors, announced a new service that allows its 600,000 members to rate their experiences with physicians, dentists, pharmacists and health insurers.  Angie’s List joins Zagat’s, which launched physician ratings last fall. 

Most of the press coverage about the new service has highlighted doctors’ concerns that reviews will be biased toward comments that are not central to the quality of the clinical care provided and that negative comments will be difficult to counteract. However, it is important to keep in mind that the objective of services like Angie’s List is to help users find good doctors and contractors. If the site doesn’t meet that objective, it won’t succeed.

How should doctors be responding to the increasing demand from patients for information about the quality of care and overall user experience with certain practitioners? They can take the tack emphasized in the articles referenced above, or they can create their own services that offer information about their qualifications, range of services, and other differentiating factors to help prospective patients evaluate whether they want to make an appointment with them or not.

If doctors want to ensure that the full picture of the care they provide is presented, including the quality of the clinical outcomes, they are going to have to get in the game and help create information services that complete the picture. They and other healthcare providers should keep in mind that the visitors to these healthcare directory sites are prospective new patients who are seeking a new practitioner—what marketers would call prospects! And just like in other markets, one size does not fill all in healthcare. Preferences for doctors vary just like preferences for cars vary. It is incumbent on the healthcare providers to learn some of the tools of the marketing profession to position themselves effectively. We don’t expect all doctors to become expert marketers, but we do expect them to be aligned with institutions that do understand marketing.

As we move down the road to a value-based system of healthcare services in the US, we predict that there will be an increasing number of marketing services companies that will help physicians and other healthcare providers understand how to market themselves. Xoova and Alijor represent a couple of new companies that offer a platform where doctors can market themselves on the Web. Expect to see many more entrants leverage the advantages of infocommerce to help buyers and sellers of healthcare services make better informed purchasing decisions.

 

dCard: An Open Standard; A Needed Standard

• Posted March 7th 2008
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• by Russell

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

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

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

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

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