At the tail end of last week the RWJ-funded Health-e-technologies Initiative organization gave out its first round of grants.  Many of the subjects looked familiar to those of us who’ve spent time in the (nominally) for-profit eHealth sector.  For instance, Kate Lorig at Stanford who’s already running a huge study on self-treatment among arthritis patients will do a clinical trial by randomizing a sub-set of diabetics into either a web-based set of self-management classes or a control group.  Barbara Rimer at UNC is studying the effectiveness of cancer lit-servs.

Back in the mid-1990s several people were looking at these kinds of interventions having heard good things anecdotally about their effectiveness. For example, back in 1996 I had a cancer patient who was active online come and talk to my health care IT client group to show them what was happening in the on-line patient community. There is also lots of anecdotal evidence from work being done with online self-management programs, and even some real studies. So in some ways these studies are old news.  However, theoretically a health care product or service’s introduction  should go in the order A) Initial use and pilots, B) Clinical study (if possible RCT) C) Market development and adoption.

In the case of these  IT-based self-treatment technologies, by 1997-8 the eHealth market fever had taken over and soon there was a software package and web site for every condition. No one did any clinical trials to see what worked (mind you that’s equally true for most new surgical procedures).  Now it looks like the clinical trials are going to get done.  Presuming that they show that eHealth self-care works, hopefully the lack of funding from Medicare and private insurers that delayed the emergence of eHealth in practice (rather than its emergence on the stock market in the bubble years) will be resolved. (Some companies like Lifemasters and American Healthways have been growing recently, but it’s been a decade of tough sledding, and most of their business is call center-based). After all, if web-based self-care makes patients better and saves money, it’ll be that much harder to deny it a CPT code.

Meanwhile, the Health-e-initiative has launched a discussion-based web site. It’s worth taking a look, and you can post if you like (not that I’ve got round to doing that yet).