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Month: May 2007

TECH/CONSUMERS: Musings on IFTF, Health2.0 and social networking

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I sat in a meeting today put on by my old colleagues at IFTF. (There are some other bloggers here, so there’ll be more about the meeting elsewhere). The room is filled with an interesting mix of techies, health care people, non-health care people, foundations, drug companies et al.

IFTF is fixated on the concept of biocitizenship. They’re interested in how wider communication tools (of which the Web2.0 tools are one) are allowing social movements to spread, and how this has enabled much more activism. I’m not convinced that this combination is as true or as new as they think, but it’s an interesting lens with which to view these emerging communities. For more on the biocitizen, look here — or contact Jody Ranck. I’m not going to detail IFTF’s research here. They’ve done some cool scenarios (including one with Howard Rheingold’s daughter acting as a “not LonelyGirl” faux youtube video as a very new health care consumer) in progress plus they sell their research for money (and if you’re a corporation it’s probably worth buying).

We also heard from the CDC, Revolution Health and DailyStrength.org. They are combining new tools, new communities and new techniques at a staggering rate. They’re also seeing some real growth. Revolution has been seeing big growth and although they didn’t give the numbers, DailyStrength seems to have 4–5,000 people per discussion group. It seems that better, more personalized search, and mapping your personal situation to that of others is the future to handle all this new information. I think that Natural Language Recognition based processing and search is going to be very important (which is why I’m so high on Enhanced Medical Decisions). However, much more of this will be dependent on what IFTF calls computing “sensemaking” (Computing has gone from processing to communicating, to sensing and on to “sensemaking”). That’s going to match patterns and heuristics to match your data. So that you get exactly what you need from all the stuff out there about you—and then that will get combined with the sensor information from medical devices et al.  And then put that all in context-which may be done by computers or humans with computers.

All interesting stuff, but there’ll need to be much more unpacking of these tools and the business models for them in the next little while….

TECH/HEALTH2.0: The trademark for Health2.0

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I’m at IFTF’s meeting today with a group discussion health new media. The Health2.0 term has been used alot and at Dmitriy’s urging I thought I’d clarify something.

Yes I’ve trademarked Health2.0. No, I will not stop anyone using it. I’ll be giving control over the trademark to the collective advisory board for the Health2.0 Conference. All I want to make sure is that no one uses the trademark offensively (pun intended) as for instance has happened with the term eRx.

More from IFTF later…

TECH/PODCAST: Interview with Bob Fisher, CEO of Foresight

Foresight is a highly focused tech company working (mostly) deep in the transactional guts of payers and plans providing claims editing tools, business intelligence and a variety of other services. Recently they had a very convivial user conference in Carefree, AZ and were nice enough to invite me to give a keynote. I also got into a little contention (but not too much!) with Foresight’s CEO Bob Fisher about what’s wrong with health care in the US. So I thought I’d return the favor and have Bob on the blog to explain what Foresight does, and we got to talk a little about the wider issues in health care too. Anyone who has any interest in how health insurers actually work (which should be all of you!) should listen to this.

HEALTH2.0/TECH: And in your Health2.0 moment of zen

I’ll be at an IFTF meeting today where they too are talking about Health2.0 but in the much wider context of a shift in bio-citizenry. Hey, they’ve got way high fallotin’ since my days there as a grunge health care consultant in the 1990s. Of course if I didn’t plug the Health2.0–User Generated Healthcare conference in this post, you’d be disappointed, right?

But one interesting nugget arrived in my email courtesy of Today in E-Health Business. Comscore thinks that the “newbies” in the consumer health space are growing—look especially at Healthline’s increases.

More consumers are turning to the Internet to learn about various health issues, with some smaller Web sites gaining traction in the booming online health information category, says a new study by comScore, Inc., a company that measures Web usage. During the first quarter of 2007, an average of 55.3 million monthly U.S. visitors accessed online health information resources, according to the study released May 21. This figure represents 31% of the total U.S. Internet audience, an increase of 12% from the same period last year, it adds. WebMD Health led the online health information category with an average of 17.1 million unique visitors per month in the first quarter (up 25% from the year-ago period), followed by NIH.gov with 9.8 million visitors (up 8%), MSN Health with 8.1 million visitors (up 1%), and Yahoo! Health with 6.7 million visitors (up 83%). Several smaller players also have grown significantly in the category, the study finds. For example, Healthline.com attracted an average of 2.7 million visitors in the first quarter, up 269% from the same period last year, while QualityHealth.com jumped 114% to 2.6 million visitors in the quarter, compared with the same period a year ago, according to comScore. Meanwhile, recent market entrant RevolutionHealth.com has seen its traffic more than double from 239,000 visitors in January to 486,000 visitors in March. “While the larger and more established health portals are continuing to grow, the category is being shaken up by a few upstarts,” says Carolina Petrini, vice president of pharmaceutical solutions at comScore.

TECH/PODCAST: Generic Medical Devices, really? The interview with Richard Kuntz, CEO

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This is the transcript of the interview with Richard Kuntz, the CEO of Generic Medical Devices—a start up making, well, generic medical devices. The audio is here

Matthew Holt:  This is Matthew Holt with the Health Care Blog, and this morning I’m back with another podcast and I’m talking to Richard Kuntz. Richard is the CEO of GMD, Generic Medical Devices, which is a company which is, as the name suggests, developing generic versions of medical devices. That’s a pretty interesting approach, and I don’t think it’s been done before.There’s actually a pretty big generic drug industry, which has a pretty interesting place in the panoply of pharmaceuticals, but we don’t know much about generic medical devices. And to find out a bit more, I’ve got Richard on board for a podcast this morning. So, Richard, how are you?

Richard Kuntz:  Excellent. Yourself, Matt?

Matthew:  I’m doing okay so far. As I told you just now, we’re testing out this new device. Hopefully it’ll work and we’ll have an error-free podcast! [laughs]So let’s start at the beginning. We know that medical devices come in different flavors, but probably the ones that have caused most controversy in recent years, in the press and elsewhere, have been medical devices, the expensive ones that are used in surgeries and procedures. We’re talking about stents and artificial hips and that kind of stuff, and there’s been a lot of controversy about both how those are solved and also the margins that are made on those devices. And some of these, there have been a lot of controversy around that.But just give us an overall view of this. You decided to go into this business with the goal of looking at medical devices and creating, presumably, an equally high quality but lower cost version. But what kind of medical devices have you looked at, where is the market that you think is the opportunity, and what is your approach to the market?

Richard:  Certainly the pacemakers, ICs, orthopedic hips, stents, are probably the four items that receive most of the press and discussion in general public, but there are literally thousands of other products that go into the hospitals as far as other implants, surgical instrumentation, and supplies.We’re focusing as the first company to begin developing products that are off-patent, that have proven safety and efficacy, that have existing reimbursement to reduce health care costs and help save Medicare. Every time we pick up the newspaper they’re talking about the impending bankruptcy of Medicare, and we intend to remove cost from those devices in the $120 billion device marketplace.There are literally thousands of products that the large companies have enjoyed a long run on, where the patents have expired; yet the prices continue to ratchet up each and every year. So we’re focusing on those products that do have patents that have expired, and truly, the only thing generic about our products is the price.

Continue reading…

Abdullah and the Stonefish foot By Dr. Terry Bennett

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Terry Bennett is the last remaining solo GP in Strafford county, New Hampshire. He attained national celebrity two years ago after a patient complained to the state medical board when he lectured her about her weight. After fighting off the ensuing attempt to censure him, Dr. Bennett went on to become an outspoken advocate for reform in the medical education system. In the final analysis, he believes that medicine has been put in a box. And that it needs to be taken back out again. Today he shares a story about a long ago encounter that helped shape his views on the practice of medicine and his understanding of what it means to be a doctor. — John Irvine

It is Summer of 1988, and I am in Los Angeles, attending the Saudi Arabian National Cultural Exhibition. To the rhythm of drums, an old friend and patient is dancing with a line of other Saudi men. Nothing too unusual about that, it is part of Saudi folkloric behavior, the not-so-obvious-to-everyone-else-there exception, is that Abdullah A.R. is dancing on two flesh and blood feet, which appear completely normal, just like anyone else’s..

Now let me tell you why this is noteworthy.

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TECH: Scott Shreeve, Health 2.0: From Concept to Reality

Scott is being a Health2.0 hero. He’s all over the wiki for Health2.0, preaching the gospel at TEPR today and has a nice piece about the evolution of the concept on his blog called Health 2.0: From Concept to Reality. And of course he’ll be a big part of the Health2.0–User Generated Healthcare conference.

He’s also put out the first real definition. I think his definition is way ambitious but I like his moxie and I look forward to bickering with him about it all the way to September and beyond!

POLICY: Eric Novack responds

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Here is a fundamental problem with the debate that Matthew is having with Amy Ridenour and David Hogberg: Matthew (and single payer advocates generally) focuses his attacks on the general ‘injustice’ that might exist in the healthcare system. In the face of such injustice, the theory goes, the government must step in to ‘even out’ the system (another way of saying that the ‘risk pool’ for unhappiness ought to be as big as possible—or, put another way, misery loves company).

“Free marketeers” (presumably an effort on Matthew’s part to turn those who believe that less government intervention actually is good for economies—for which the evidence is incontrovertible—into a pejorative) are generally no more happy with the current system than ‘healthcare-by-lobbyist’ activists (my own pejorative for bureaucrat run healthcare). However, people who believe in markets want to introduce free market reforms, recognizing that this process must be incremental.

Put another way—single-payer advocates speak in broad generalities of fairness and justice and risk pools—which sounds great to the public, but is short on actual policy implementation. Limited government advocates have, thus far, been focused on actual concrete steps to improve the system.

Continue reading…

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