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Month: September 2007

HEALTH2.0: David Kibbe on Health 2.0

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David Kibbe, the doc behind the continuity of care record (CCR), and the spearhead of the AAFP’s effort to get family practitioners using EMRs, gave some great comments on the final "looking ahead" panel at Health2.0.  You can see more of David when he keynotes the Center for Information Therapy conference on October 8th in Park City Utah. Indu and I will be running a mini-Health2.0 panel at that same conference (with Revolution, Daily Strength & Organized Wisdom) on Weds 10th. But David didn’t get to say everything in San Francisco, and this is what he wanted to add:

1) What I really, really liked was the way in which so many of these
applications helped the patient/consumer help himself/herself — to be
better informed, to know their options, to take better actions, to hope
and act in their own best interests. This is exciting, and very
necessary, as physicians in primary care are already unable to meet the
demands upon them for care delivery, and this imbalance/shortage is
only going to get worse in the future. And it’s exciting because
empowerment is the key to saving the individual out-of-pocket
spending.  As health costs continue to shift to the individual, Health
2.0 can really be helpful.

Healing without information is indistinguishable from magic…..And magic in health care today is unsafe and very expensive!

We need an informed (& empowered) health nation. Health 2.0 is leading that potential.
I won’t mention any specific examples, but all of the search engines,
all of the social media sites, and some of the consumer tools sites are
exciting in this regard, and quite real now. The demand for their use
will only grow.

2) What disappointed me was how much work the applications require of
the patient/consumer with respect to information discovery, data entry,
and interpretation of results/advice. There are two issues here that
I would focus upon:

Continue reading…

POLICY/TALKS: TONIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD!! Holt v Browning Logan Clements–better leave the kids at home!

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John Graham at Pacific Research Institute is obviously looking for trouble. So he invited two people who really don’t get on — at least in their online comments on THCB — to come comment about Sicko and the Canada-bashers response. I’ve of course had my say about both Sicko and the Canada-bashers before.

So if you want to see me square up to Logan Clements (who is replacing Stuart Browning, who’s cried off sick) hopefully figuratively and not literally, come down to the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood (Los Angeles) on Thursday September 27th. Stuart and Michael Moore (by proxy) will be showing why making anecdotal poorly researched movies actually changes health policy for better but mostly for worse, and I’ll be explaining why neither of them would recognize real research if they tripped over it in the street.

The info is here–Sicko and its malcontents

I think I’m supposed to be defending Moore, by the way. But perhaps John will step into that void. Local LA Pol Bill Rosendahl will be refereeing! Should be fun!

Meanwhile see how many ridiculous claims and outright irrelevant rubbish you can find in the trailer in the Sicko reply under construction. It’s up on Clements’ site.

That should get the juices flowing

POLICY: Wow, even the Sec of HHS admits it

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Best health care in the world? Apparently even the Bush Administration has given up on that line. Here’s what Mike Leavitt had to say yesterday.

The U.S. healthcare system is fundamentally broken, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard University on Tuesday night, Leavitt advocated for a complete overhaul of the overly complex and inefficient current system.

Far cry from the President’s words over the past 7 years.

TECH: Search, Microsoft gets serious

Having said that search is the most important part of Health2.0, I thought I’d better find out something about it. As it happens Microsoft, the #3 search company by user volume, is announcing a major revision to its Live Search tool today (Thursday) and I sat in on the press briefing Weds morning. It’s clear that despite their unaccustomed non-market leading position, Microsoft is very, very serious about search, and that translates into lots of change to their engine.

Essentially they’ve added considerable indexing to extend the reach of searches, and they’ve added considerable changes in presentation. For example misspellings are automatically corrected, with the “correct” results displayed, (unlike the “did you mean” result from Google), several alternative searches are introduced—for instance a search of “San Jose” will give on a right hand bar the choice of “San Jose, CA, USA” or “San Jose, Costa Rica”. In addition they’re using neural net ranking to increase the understanding of what queries mean so “the office” gets you to the TV show not to the MS Office home page.

Verticals—Maps. shopping, entertainment, and health are the 4 biggest vertical responsible for 40% of all searches.

Continue reading…

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS: Why Health Plans need to change their business model

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A reporter called about the PNHP which is running single payer ads attacking Hillary, Barrack and John Edwards. Why are they doing it? Because they want to make sure those guys don’t give into the insurers. Realistically there will be a role for insurers in any reform scenario, so it has to be the right kind of role. And that means their role has to change, alot!

Why? Look at this quote

"[Senator Clinton’s proposal] would have negative implications for managed care companies, since it would limit their ability to manage risk in their most profitable book of business (individual and small group), likely causing margin compression."

– Morgan Stanley analyst Christine Arnold tellsAIS’s Health Plan Week

That is dead right and also dead necessary. The days of Golden Rule taking over United are not over by any means, but they need to end some time. The health plans have to start to be responsible citizens. That means telling Wall Street to go fish for now. Are you interested, Karen? The long term alternative is not pretty.

HEALTH2.0: Marty Tenenbaum’s vision for an accelerator for Health2.0

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At the end of Health2.0 Conference Marty Tenenbaum asked if there was interest in forming a group to accelerate Health2.0. Earlier this was written up on THCB as though it was another standards group. But that’s not entirely what Marty meant. He explains here:

I’m eager to follow up on the creation of an industry initiative to accelerate the Health 2.0 vision. This organization would do for ehealth what CommerceNet did for ecommerce by catalyzing the market. The Blog posting focused on standards. While standards are important, so is evangelism, business development, lobbying, and especially visionary integration projects that demonstrate the potential of Health 2.0 for improving people’s lives.

Early CommerceNet members included startups like Netscape, Yahoo, and Amazon as well as established organizations like Visa/Mastercard, FedEx and IBM. The members of CommerceNet collaborated on initiatives like search, catalogs, security, payment, and shipping/fulfillment, leading to complete end-end transactions where one could actually locate a product, buy it, pay for it and get it delivered. Not only was overall market growth accelerated; many business deals resulted, generating a lot of wealth.

The parallels with Health 2.0 are obvious. Like the days of ecommerce, many energetic entrepreneurs are exploring the seemingly limitless opportunities and obstacles of a huge and important market. Each provides useful but highly fragmented data or services (e.g.,PHRs, search, patient and doctor communities). Aggregating data across communities and integrating services into complete solutions (e.g., selecting the best treatment or physician for you) is much more valuable to consumers and essential if we’re actually going to impact healthcare in meaningful ways.

Everyone interested should move on this as soon as possible to capitalize on the momentum of the amazing conference.

To get involved, you can email **********@******ce.net“>he********@******ce.net and of course comment here.

Health 2.0 UPDATE

Meanwhile, if you missed Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare San Francisco, you have a number of options available to you. This morning we are officially opening pre-registration for the next Health 2.0 over at the Health 2.0 site. To satisfy our communications team, the exact location and date must
remain a closely-guarded state secret, but an announcement will be made
shortly. If you think you might want to come, you may want to consider joining the waiting list. You’ll also get news of potential early bird discounts, break out events and information about rates for start ups. (Attendees at Health 2.0 can skip the arduous process of filling out the form and send us an email with "I want to come to the next one" in their subject line.)  We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

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