HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for the ‘Social networking’ Category

Monetizing Online Health Communities

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Janice

 My colleague, Russell Perkins, writes this week about how a partnership between Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) and iGuard.org is selling access to the information collected in patient community sites to investors, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare industry stakeholders.   

Sermo, one of the participants in our Health Content07 conference last fall, is now providing paid access to market researchers in the medical field who want to poll Sermo’s communities of experts.    

The Wall St. Journal reported earlier this week about another company, EmergingMed, that is leveraging its online patient communities by playing matchmaker between existing patient community sites and the medical research teams that are seeking recruits to test cutting-edge treatments in clinical trials.  According to the WSJ article, one survey by Harris Interactive revealed that 75% of cancer patients would have been willing to enroll in a relevant clinical trial “had they known it was possible”. 

These are all great examples of market-driven information products and show how social networking sites can broaden their revenue base beyond online advertising.

 

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!

 

Vertical Ad Networks Still in Experimental Phase

• Posted April 17th 2008
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• by Janice

The Health Central Network (THCN) and IAC’s Advertising Sales (IAC/AS) group announced the launch of a new health advertising network this week. THCN owns and operates a collection of healthcare-focused websites, with a core collection of disease-specific sites such as My Migraine Connection and My Allergy Network, which were either acquired or built. Owning the sites gives THCN the ability to impose common standards, tools, and interoperability among the sites and unites them under a single strong brand that appeals to advertisers that want to reach consumers who are seeking information about disease management and healthcare.

Health Central’s new agreement with IAC/AS now provides them with a strong vertical ad network in addition to substantial ad sales resources for serving the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, the relationship between IAC and THCN goes well beyond this cooperative ad network. IAC made a significant minority investment in THCN in January, which PaidContent.org has reported at $50 million.

Glam Media competes with THCN/IAC for the same pharmaceutical and health-related consumer product ad dollars, but with a different vertical ad network model. Glam, which raised an additional $85 million in February, has also assembled a substantial collection of related websites that in the aggregate attract tens of millions of visitors per month.  While THCN’s content is medically-focused, Glam’s network of sites is weighted more toward entertainment and lifestyle. But the key difference is that Glam does not own or operate most of the sites in their network. Instead they offer a range of advertising and marketing services to the affiliated publishers.

As the Web develops into a more mainstream advertising and marketing medium, both of these experiments bear watching. Advertisers and marketers will likely try out both, and success will go to whichever produces the best results.

 

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.

 

Consumer Health Sites Not for the Faint of Heart

• Posted March 21st 2008
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• by Janice

Steve Case, the keynote speaker at yesterday’s EconHealth seminar, and CEO of Revolution Health, used the phrase “not for the faint of heart” to describe the current environment for producing healthcare content for the consumer market. Chris Schroeder, CEO of the HealthCentral Network, repeated the phrase in the introduction to his opening panel. It’s an apt way of summing up the themes of the seminar that focused on the money flow in early-stage digital consumer health companies.

Case used the analogy of his experience getting consumers engaged in online communication at AOL and predicted that the time horizon spans 10 to 20 years before the full “sea change” occurs in the healthcare sector. Significant additional hurdles exist in the health market, which has a complex institutional structure with layers of agents that constrain consumer choice and behavior. The agents include employers who remain the primary payers of health insurance, the health insurance companies as payer-intermediaries between consumers and providers, and government agencies that create policy and regulations—and are also a major payer of healthcare services. Layers of constraints also exist for the physicians and other healthcare professionals who offer health services.

Still, Steve and other speakers did not present a gloomy future for health content start-ups and established healthcare publishers. There is overwhelming agreement that the US is moving toward a consumer-centric healthcare system and there are ample opportunities for companies that create innovative applications to improve the efficiency of healthcare consumption. But the timing of adoption by consumers is very difficult to predict, especially in an environment of constrained choice. Deep pockets help. And, it helps to have alternative sources of revenue to keep afloat while the “tectonic shifts” in healthcare settle. Without significant resources, the most likely future for most of today’s consumer health start-ups will be acquisition by a large more diversified health content or health IT company.

 

Journals Need to Join the Online Social Mix

• Posted February 19th 2008
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• by Janice

A recent post by Dr. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, on Matthew Holt’s Health Care Blog chided the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for publicizing an article that “has important public policy ramifications but does not make available the full text of the article” [unless one pays a $15 fee or is a subscriber].  In the comments to Dr. Levy’s post, a reader questions why JAMA can’t emulate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which not very long ago began allowing free access to articles for readers who follow links from blogs that reference specific articles, as well as opening general access to a limited number of articles that have broad interest.

We think that medical publishers should indeed follow the example of the WSJ (which, under new ownership of Rupert Murdoch, is expected to greatly increase free access to the news on the site, but retain certain high-value subscription content). Why? Because there is a large and growing audience of both medical professionals and consumers who are interested in the content from major medical journals and these readers are motivated to read and possibly pass along information about the articles to others.

Whether through participating in services like Sermo, which is targeted to medical professionals, or via Web-wide social networking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace, or Facebook—and of course blogs—the payoffs to journal publishers are many. They include: increasing exposure, connecting more directly with engaged readers who are not currently part of their core subscription base, and remaining relevant to medical professionals as the conversation moves online. Look for a discussion on whether or not subscription revenue will decline as a result of increasing free access in a future post.