HealthContentAdvisors

McKesson & HP partner to provide EHR s/w and hardware for physician practices.

Interesting. Wolters Kluwer has set up a system whereby doctors will receive CME credit for clinical research done via their mobile phone.

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.

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.

Good interview with David Blumenthal, Director, ONC, on meaningful use of EHRs and plans for national health data exchange.

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 short piece on why publishers are distributing content via Kindles even though there are business considerations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Home page of Jan 2010 report from RWJF 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.

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.

Brief article describing MedeAnalytics revenue cycle management solution being adopted by St. Joseph’s Hospital in Maryland.

Info on work Tim Berners-Lee is doing for UK govenment to make sources of gov’t data more available and meaningful.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Silverlink, a Boston area company, provides s/w that helps providers send phone msgs to patients w/ alerts about health coverage & appt. reminders.

Big Pharma is increasingly outsourcing CRO and manufacturing to India.

As expected (at least by me), Twitter will introduce premium commercial accounts that include additional features (and probably better security).

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.

FDA has proposed mandatory digital reporting of postmarket adverse effects of drugs & devices. Pilot program has been in effect for years.

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.

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?

Cool dashboard of Pharma companies’ tweets created by Ignite Labs.

David Weinberger explains why transparency is so important in today’s info economy.

RWJF’s research and links to the proposed Prometheus Payment Model, which attempts to pay for quality.

Interview w/ Dr. Bhan, founder of Ozmosis. Have to go back and read in full.

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).

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.

Good to see NIH funding research on intestinal microbes & the effect of antibiotics on upsetting the balance.

Shwen Gee’s slides from recent session on Pharma use of social media. Excellent overview & intro to Twitter.

Good article that describes why biologics are attractive to big pharma — and why that is leading to acq. of biotech companies by pharma.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Siemens talks EHRs, partnerships, and interoperability.

Good list of people to follow to monitor Pharma social media.

Nice to see CenterWatch’s partnering with TrialX to make it easier for patients to find relevant clinical trials.

Focuses on role of employers–the key beneficiaries of maintaining healthy workers–in providing incentives for healthy behavior.

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.

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.

Good post on applications for Google Wave.

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.

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.