BU School of Medicine creates RED (Re-Engineered Discharge), a checklist that helps reduce readmissions. Other examples of application of health IT in this article.

Earnings in health and pharma division down sharply–from 29M Euros in 2008 to a loss of 79M Euros in 2009. WK says pharma communications, advertising and book sales biggest factors. McKinstry says they are changing portfolio of WKHealth to focus on “clinical decision support areas”.

MIT Technology Review feature series on personalized medicine. Haven’t taken good look at the articles yet, but will return to explore.

Sponsorship and payments from device and pharma companies to fund research and for board representation introduce conflicts of interest for academic health centers. No news there, but some good insight into recent developments in this article.

John Moore at Chilmark provides insightful analysis of today’s announced alliance between Microsoft Amalga and Eclipsys.

Google and Microsoft Health execs address benefits of health IT on healthcare in short article published in The Hill. Two key points: 1) focus on the patient and 2) focus on the performance improvement (”improved outcomes we want to achieve”) with health IT, not just IT for IT’s sake.

Primarily via financing initiatives from Treasury, HHS, and Dept. of Agriculture will fund programs that improve the availability of fresh foods and more healthy alternative foods in communities that currently lack access to large grocery stores. These initiatives are closely tied to first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative that aims to decrease childhood obesity.

CalTech is partnering with DeepDyve to provide discounted access to DeepDyve’s article rental service to alumni. DeepDyve’s Gold plan, which allows rental access to an unlimited number of articles included in DeepDyve’s collection of scholarly journals and other literature that sits behind paywalls. I continue to be impressed with DeepDyve’s initiatives to increase access to scholarly research that has been walled off to non-academics or those who don’t have a corporate subscription to commercial collections.

Transcript of Q4 2009 earnings call with Kerry Hicks and CFO Allen Dodge. Few tidbits: efforts to build risk management business line (Health Credit Solutions) have failed and Health Grades is winding down that business and focusing instead on ratings products. Advertising sales have grown nicely, esp. from AdSense and other networks. However, I still question how well the WrongDiagnosis.com product fits with HealthGrades.

Some good points about quality of patient-reported data and implications for using data from patient community sites in research. I like the points about how some users enter dummy data just to test out a site and the importance of recognizing what data are missing. Both issues related to good data management.

Summary of project funded by RWJF and carried out by IHI to study performance improvement initiatives in hospitals in the period 2001-2008. Link to report included.

E-patients consult Web to find ratings on doctors and providers, but fewer post ratings themselves. Link to full report from Pew.

John Mack on the role Pharma can plan in providing information directly to consumers via social media.

Pathway Genomics, which provides genetic tests to consumers, licenses Staywell’s Harvard Health Content so that customers can access additional information about the conditions reported in the test results.

Story of how Louisiana has seen improvements in rural health care through implementation of health info exchange.

Recent survey commissioned by Cleveland Clinic, GE Healthcare & Ochsner Health System indicates that 50% of Americans believe other people’s health “was going in the wrong direction” but only 17% said their own health was “going in the wrong direction”. 2000 people surveyed. Results are in line with my observations. Many people are in denial that their habits are unhealthy. Even when they get sick, they don’t believe their own health management was a factor.

TOC and links to full report from CDC on trends in health statistics.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius releases report that includes info on requested premium increases by health insurers across the country. Link to full report included.

Shared Health Clinical Xchange, the largest HIE in Tennessee, has partnered with Elsevier’s MEDai to provide clinically-relevant HIE.

Veteran’s Admin to monitor how doctors respond to e-alerts sent via the agency’s computerized patient record system (CPRS). Currently, they only tract if doc acknowledges receipt of an alert, not whether the doc takes follow-up action.

NaviNet chosen as communications network in pilot intended to document benefits of provider-payer health info exchange in NJ.

GE producing TV ads for Healthymagination campaign during Olympics. Also sponsoring content online. Good to see someone beside Pharma sponsoring content!

Hope Leman’s long, but very entertaining, comments about DeepDyve’s specialty search and article rental model for scholarly journals articles. Access to much of the scholarly journal content isn’t available to non-subscribers and even discovering the existence of this body of content is difficult, which means the publishers are not reaching growth markets. DeepDyve offers a solution with minimal risk to publishers, yet the buzz for DD hasn’t grown as much as Hope (or I) would have expected. Worth reading — and it’s worth checking out DeepDyve.

KLAS on current state of HIEs–vendors “pass around packets of information without necessarily taking ownership of what is in the packet”.

More on MSFT MyLife health project that utilizes Windows mobile phones to capture and transmit health-related data. Talks about accelerometers in phones and how they could be used to monitor movement.

Melissa Chang comments on projections from AMR Research on increased spending by B2B marketers on social media and questions where the projected 21% growth in social media spend will be focused. Note, lead-gen sites marketing is projected to increase 17% and online directories -2%.

P&G completes its acq. of MDVIP, a concierge medical practice based in Boca Raton, FL.

David Harlow’s insightful commentary on why medical apologies–accompanied by a commitment to investigate root cause–may reduce malpractice suits. And could lead to performance improvement, too….

Why communicating absolute vs. relative probabilities is important in healthcare–and in fin’l planning.

Thomas Goetz on nomograms, or clinical decision tools, that help calculate risk of specific diseases on a personalized basis.

Good review of recent Time article, Patients 2.0, and differing attitudes about the effectiveness of patient-reported data in medical research. Article points to concern on part of doctors of reliability of patient-reported outcomes data. My view: methods need to be developed for incorporating patient-reported or patient-recorded outcomes data into medical research methods, but these data are too important to ignore!

Or outcomes-based research. By Gilles Frydman, founder of ACOR.org and co-founder of e-Patients.net, a pioneer in participatory medicine. Good introduction to potential benefits of PDR and the need for guidelines on how to conduct PDR, since no accepted structure and review processes currently exist.

Start-up, Truth on Call, offers system for posing questions via Twitter to a group of doctors, for $10 per response. Target audience is fin’l, pharma, research, but will be offered to patients, too.

Text4baby is a program managed by HHS that includes mobile telecom carriers, federal agencies, insurance plans and other healthcare industry reps. 3,400 women have signed up so far.

Article states that pending lab tests are only included on hospitalist discharge summaries 16% of the time. Incredible. Follow-up visits aren’t very useful when docs don’t even know what to check. Inadequate discharge summaries are core problem. IT systems that don’t communicate are equally critical problem.

Rewards for posing good questions and providing best answers about Diabetes 1. Program sponsored by Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center and uses the InnoCentive platform to manage the competition/collaboration.

Good overview of why social networking sites are flourishing. I like comments about how sites are more welcoming now and how sites serve as tools for users–not just discussion boards. LinkedIn is great example. Same applies to patient communities and PatientsLikeMe and CareTogether are good examples of increased utility of online communities.

Nice counter to Twitter naysayers who address only the downside of Twitter (time sink) — without ever having used it. Writer emphasizes how critical Twitter is to the online news business for generating links and being part of the conversation.

Initiate Systems, a master data management company that specializes in healthcare data, is acquired by IBM. Initiate clients include payers, providers, and PBMs. Terms not disclosed; Initiate had raised over $67M in VC funding from Apex Venture Partners, First Analysis Group, Sigma Partners, BC/BS Venture Partners and Paladin Capital.

Anthony Guerra provides commentary on inadequacies of MU guidelines and reimbursement requirements.

Good idea, but it looks as though Nielsen chooses healthy foods based on manufacturer claims.

Patient Safety Act of 2005 scheduled to yield database in 2011. 65 Patient Safety Organizations have been set up, but few are collecting data yet. No plans set to collect from other providers beyond hospitals.

Wow! Glam raises another $50 M at a rumored valuation of $750M. Glam is an ad network with focus on health & beauty sites. Many of the sites tend toward the trashy end of beauty sites, not reputable healthcare info. See comments. Notwithstanding previous 2 sentences, Glam sure is good at fundraising!

Comments about online sites that offer ratings of doctors. Points out weaknesses of current info, esp. fact that ratings aren’t based on outcomes. Hints at other problems: most patients choose docs based on info from referring physician. Docs in network are critical. I’d add: trustworthiness of online ratings sites is not clear.

The main article (see previous entry) about risk calculators to help surgeions communicate risks of surgery to patients.

Healogica, a site that connects potential candidates to clinical trials to shut down. They had about 2,000 registered users but couldn’t get enough CROs and pharma companies to pay for access to the leads they generated.

Great display of information on # tweets by disease type/condition.

Excellent article that proposes ways to improve how medical research is communicated by consumer media. In lecture I gave last week at Simmons College School of Health Sciences, I emphasized the importance of communicating medical research and other healthcare information clearly, especially risk information.

Article questions the role of employers in sponsoring wellness programs that tie participation to financial incentives such as reduced premiums.

Time covers e-Patient Dave’s story and writes about e-patient movement under the moniker “patient 2.0″. Provides a somewhat jaded view of non-medical specialist patients’ ability to understand medical info and make judgements. Suggests “rapid-learning” program for e-patients.

Els adds SNIP and SJR to Scopus to provide more complete citation metrics.

Prof. Robert Fogel, U. Chicago, contends that healthcare costs are high because consumers demand the high-cost extras and innovation.

John Halamka’s brief description of the breakout of grant funding plans by ONC.

good piece on why healthcare sector could be big market for Apple’s forthcoming tablet. The fact that iPhones are popular among MDs is one big reason.

Filing to Office of Science and Technology Policy from Elsevier regarding proposed regulations to offer more open access to scholarly publishing that is funded by US tax dollars.

Thomson Healthcare acquires ProfSoft-Health, a Needham, MA-based healthcare data analytics company. ““ProfSoft’s solutions will enhance the clinical performance measurement capabilities we provide to our healthcare payer customers,” said Jon Newpol, executive vice president of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters.”

David Williams interviews Bob Wachter of UCSF. Haven’t listened to it yet, but I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile use of time.

Good analysis of what the implications are of NY Times stated plans to allow inbound links to have access for free, but to charge metered access to direct users after an initial allotment of free pageviews.

Brigham and Women’s and Harvard Med School Professor Lawrence DeBuske decides to keep paid speaking role and gives up practicing & teaching. New limitations on accepting pay for for delivering canned presentations played role. Dr. DeBuske apparently gives several talks on behalf of multiple pharma companies each week.

John Sharp’s overview of Robt Wood Johnson Foundation’s new report on PHRs.

Commentary on why it is a positive sign that an MD is now leading Navigenics, a personalized genomics company.

Andrew Spong’s analysis of Twitter followers/followings of pharma companies.

Great news for data geeks and data content enthusiasts! Following up on their promise to add transparency to the federal government, Obama admin posts new data sources from all cabinet departments. I’m going to go download the Medicare data set now.

“Syed Tirmizi, MD, a longtime clinician and medical informatics leader at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, joined Quantros today as Vice President of International Business Development and Government Relations. Tirmizi helped lead the VA into its position as a pioneer in the use of electronic medical records (EMR) for point of care service delivery, enabling meaningful use of data to further patient safety and quality initiatives.”

TOC and abstract of just published study on significant benefits of reducing sodium intake for improving cardiovascular disease. See my notes in item below (third item) on same subject.

New Study in NEJM points to benefits of reducing salt intake in american diet. See my article on NY’s planned program to reduce salt and my criticism of AAFP for promoting salty foods in advertisements on their site. Note, a recheck of the AAFP FamilyDoctor.org site indicates that fewer packaged foods are advertised today. My blog appears to have been influential!

UMass Medical selects NDoc to automate home health services care. NDoc provides billing and operational s/w for use at pointofcare for home health services.

Trish (about.com) recounts story of pediatrician who molested patients and how comments on doctor rating sites prior to his conviction were positive. She suggests that the current array of ratings sites all share weaknesses. I tend to agree. Comments can be useful, but there need to be a large number and attributes of the people providing the ratings are needed. Plus, multiple criteria from formally reported and collected info need to form the basis. I’d want to know about outcomes, not just opinions.

Martin Fenner in Nature’s Nature Network on growing options for reading scholarly articles. Covers various devices as well as the concept of using connected information to provide context. No clear-cut perfect solution yet.

Excellent overview of trends in healthcare research being influenced by patient particpation via Internet channels. Specific focus on last October’s ePatient Connections conference. David Ellis and Julian Bond of HFD conclude that healthcare data analytics will become increasingly important in divining patterns from all the data being generated by epatients and even diagnosing for individual patients. They also point to the importance of mobile computing in healthcare.

Boston company that repurposes discarded specimens and matches basic EHR data to allow for additional medical research studies to be carried out on the specimens. iSpecimen then aggregates and uses datamining techniques to analyze patterns in the data.

Insititute for Safe Medication Practices reports results of recent survey about impact of recession on hospital staffing, capital expenses, patient acuity, and medication safety.

MedScape article that explores the value of online searching for patients. Shallow article with no conclusions, but it does offer some good criticism of existing options.

HubSpot marketing director explains why they have chosen to drop trade show exhibiting from their marketing mix. They still will attend events and seek speaking slots and will sponsor some events, but they don’t find the process of shipping booth & collateral and several sales people to be as worthwhile as other marketing options. Very good comments and responses.

MSNBC story that picks up on recent article in NEJM about pros and cons of sites that provide patient comments and ratings of doctors. Hook in this article is how some of the ratings sites, including Angie’s List, now flag doctors who are part of the Medical Justice Services group that require patients to sign contract that prohibits them from posting comments online. I agree that anonymous comments are a problem, and I’ve written before that a single numeric rating is insufficient, but it’s short-sighted of doctors to try to prohibit patients from expressing their opinions online.

Quidel, a San-Diego point-of-care diagnostic testing company, buys Diagnostic Hybrids, an Athens, Ohio company for $130 Million in cash. Acquisition expands the range of tests provided by the combined company, and should provide some economies in R&D.

Quest offers new test for early detection of colorectal cancer.

Cegedim Dendrite, the life sciences group of Cegedim, Paris-based CRM solutions provider, acquires SK&A, the leading US healthcare professionals directory. According to press release, revenues of SK&A are about $15 M.

Pfizer provides $3m in funding to Stanford to develop CME framework that incorporates a more participatory learning environment. Can it be donew/o industry influence given the source of the funding? Stanford says “yes”….

Another content + IT deal that will help hospitals/providers achieve meangingful use of EHRs. Zynx Health provides order sets; Meditech will integrate order sets from Zynx into EHR–press release doesn’t provide much detail on how they will integrate the info.

Quantros, a health IT company that helps hospitals with patient safety and risk assessment, names Gerard Livaudais, MD, MPH, as EVP Product Management.

athenahealth’s athenaClinicals was rated highly in recent KLAS ambulatory EMR report on confidence that athenaClinicals will meet meaningful use criteria.

SF-based Practice Fusion raises $5m of anticipated $7.1 round for it’s EHR software. Practice Fusion offers s/w for no charge and makes money with advertising–and has plans to sell data mined from customers.

Adidas introduce miCoach at CES. Similar to Nike’s popular Nike+.

David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts and chairman of Illumina, provides his top 5 trends to watch in biotech. Optimistic outlook for advances in curing cancer, but thinks that the data management and analysis issues will be a challenge due to the magnitude of data (”Moore’s Law just can’t keep up”).

Interesting example of how incentives from CMS can trickle down to specific programs within hospitals. In this case, residents can earn up to $1200 per year in incentive pay for reaching 3 goals related to patient satisfication–two from Press Ganey survey results and 1 from UCSF Medical Center compliance audits. Results are measured for a team and each teammember receives payment.

AHA endorses Surgical Info Systems for its scheduling, reporting and analytics modules.

Nice overview of Cell Press’s (Elsevier) new beta of their planned “article of the future”. Good features for zooming in on charts and link to more data and references. I need to do a more thorough review and hope to see it in action at Cell Press in Cambridge soon.

I’ve mentioned NuVal before. Intriguing company that provides single numeric rating of the nutritional value of foods and works with grocery stores to put labels on shelves. Concept is good, but like the writer, I think the single digit is insufficient. Good for shelf; but maybe more detail could be available via mobile device?

A physician reviews online doctor rating sites. Slams Vitals, in large part because only single numeric rating is available w/o paying. I’ve commented before that single number is ineffective for rating doctors–or most any other item. The reviewing physician likes the comments, however. Note, as list of comments gets larger, some kind of summary indicators become more necessary to annotate and summarize the long comments.

Nice article from Ingenix analytics on employer wellness programs.

Commonwealth Club program on medicine. Video.

AdvancedMD, which provides practice management and RCM solutions to medical practices, acquires PracticeOne, an EHR vendor. Interesting that the vertical integration is occurring in this direction–the vendors of admin/financial systems acquiring the EHR vendors. There’s lots of room for more consolidation in both markets.

“Krames has partnered with eClinicalWorks to provide consumer-friendly patient education to physicians using the electronic medical records system, eClinicalWorks 8.0.” Makes good sense.

Sramana Mitra interviews co-founders of NaviNet, a real-time health info exchange based in Boston area. 5-part interview with lots of good stats and info.

Gawande speaks about his new book, Checklist Manifesto, and the benefits of checklists in medical settings. Specifically mentions how checklists improve teamwork to the benefit of patients, and addresses the issue of physician resistance (20% of those surveyed after trying out checklists said they didn’t think they were useful; however >90% of that 20% group would want checklists to be used if they were the patient!).

Infotrends broad multi-client study on changing communications needs of small-to-medium sized businesses. TOC and list of tables only. Complete study >$10K

Caritas hospital group in Boston expands their relationship with athenahealth to include athenaClinicals. They already used athena’s revenue cycle management (RCM) s/w.

Lots of reaction to ONC’s release of MU requirements. This article highlights a few key concerns, including lack of focus on patient’s rights and support for outdated technology that will not provide advancements that are needed.

Article in NEJM questions equity of wellness program incentives in health reform package.

One of the questions posed by David Carr in this column about the reports of a new tablet device from Apple (rumored to be announced later this month (jan 2010)). If Apple can produce an e-reader/tablet that considerably improves the user experience over the Kindle, it could take off even at $800-$1000 per device. Publishers of all types–B2C and B2B–should be planning bus models (mostly advertising) around tablet devices.

Like this list, esp. the top 3.

Interesting comments from former insiders and analysts on what made Dow Jones vulnerable and changes under Murdoch. Note, I didn’t see any mention of the enterprise division of Dow Jones (there may be some comments, but most focus in on WSJ and the Telerate mess).

Mitch Wagner’s last article for InformationWeek w/ 2 examples of hospitals with successful implementation of business intelligence (document management, integration, analytics, dashboards) software.

“URAC, the nation’s leading health care accreditation and education organization, today announced its new Consumer Education Initiative, which teaches consumers about health insurance and identifies ways they can make more informed decisions about their health care.”

Nice video explanation of HL7 and how the standard facilitates sharing info between various IT systems in hospitals.

Mentions Polka, an iPhone app, that allows remote monitoring.

From press release: “iGuard is a free, personal drug safety monitoring service that now provides 2 million consumers and caregivers with timely, personalized information about drug-drug interactions, drug-disease interactions, medication safety warnings, breaking safety news and medication recalls that may affect their health. In return, patients provide feedback on their medications to help researchers learn how to treat diseases better and minimize medication side effects. In 2009 alone, iGuard users have contributed toward 92 medical research studies – helping to develop new drugs for such diseases as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and diabetes.”

Healthy Humans (www.healthyhumans.com), an online wellness solutions company, received the 2009 Life Sciences Startup Company of the Year award from the Eastern Technology Council. The award, sponsored by the University of Sciences in Philadelphia, recognizes the company’s business and technology achievements. Healthy Humans provides online wellness programs that address the underlying causes of chronic disease and encourage prevention through personalized solutions and self-care methodologies. The company’s proprietary portal technology combines state-of-the-art medical protocols with evidence-based therapies. Note, Healthy Humans was highlighted as a Health Content08 Innovator at our HC08 conference.

Cerner acquires IMC Health Care, a provider of on-site health clinics for employers. Cerner established its own subsidiary to handle its self-insured and health & wellness needs. With acq. of IMC, Cerner is expanding to serve other self-insured employers.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn on PWC’s new report on 10 top trends in healthcare in 2010. Link to full report included.

More on HHS grant for designing db for comparative effective research.

Nice comparison table of existing e-book readers.

Good article that describes how electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) could become the foundation for effective data management in R&D enterprises.

Pfizer is equipping detailers with tablet computers that limit what samples can be provided to physicians based on their specialty and record the amount and type of samples. Doctors have to sign for receipt. It’s astonishing that sampels given to doctors in the past were not recorded!

A.D.A.M., long-known for its collection of anatomy images for medical education, launches an e-commerce enabled website that sells individual images. Prices seem to depend on the image and use. An graphic with multiple images related to carpal tunnel is priced at $39.95 for use in PPT; a simple image of the eye related to radial keratomy appears to be free, but site asked user to indicate how the image will be used.

Very interesting. “December 14, 2009 — Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), a leading international publisher for healthcare professionals and students, and part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has partnered with ProtoMED Medical Management Corporation (PMMC) to build a student version of its ProtoMED medical practice management software and its ProtoCHART electronic medical record (EMR) software.”

NY Times highlights the conundrum of Wm Styron’s estate where Random House and Styron’s family both claim ownership of e-book rights. I was involved in licensing books for an early e-book reader (SoftBook Press) in the late ’90s and met with all of the major NY & Boston publishing houses, including Random House. At that time, the majority of recent contracts with authors included incomplete clauses that essentially wrote that the publisher had rights to new electronic formats for the content licensed in the contract with terms to be negotiated. It was a terrible situation where rights were tied up but terms and conditions weren’t defined. It seems as though these same publishers have done very little in the past decade to update the terms of contracts that existed at that time, at least with terms that are fair to authors. As in the B2B publishing world,B2C publishers (and authors and agents) have to recognize that the digital version of the work is now the primary work.