Susan Blumenthal, M.D (who I’ve met and like a lot) thinks that we can change the world (or at least the health care system) by studying it a little more. Then the incoming President in 2008 will have all the answers and we just have to pass the legislation. (OK she doesn’t quite say that).
I’m all for more better information on what we should do and on what’s wrong now. But I’m torn. Don’t we know the problems already? Don’t we know the solutions? And don’t we know that the health care system actors will do virtually anything to keep the status quo going?
JOB BOARD UPDATE
Last week THCB launched its latest experiment — the THCB health care job board.
Many of you went over to look at our inaugural job postings, which were
offered courtesy of Humana. There are more jobs up today with more on
the way. If you’re an employer tired of being buried in resumes from
the wrong people, you’ll find this may just be one of the best deals on
the web. Yesterday we officially partnered with Kevin MD,
meaning that your post will be exposed to a monthly audience of thousands of healthcare professionals. If you’re hunting for a job, we’re
also collecting resumes (in confidence of course), which we’ll pass on
if we think we might know of a match. Those *******@*********lt.net“>go to Matthew.
THCB’s crack technical staff is hard at work building the board itself.
For now, posts live in their own thread. Go take a look …
JOB POST: Release Engineer
Sermo.com Cambridge, Ma. CNN called Sermo “A MySpace
for Physicians.” The Motley Fool said “Add Sermo to the IPO watch
list.” We say … Sermo aims to revolutionize health
care in the US. We’ve already built the largest on-line community
for physicians, by physicians. And that’s just the start. Sermo’s
unique technology and business model is at the cutting edge of information
markets and arbitrage, and vertical social networks. Learn more about
us at www.sermo.com. > THCB JOB BOARD
HEALTH PLANS: Guess who said this?
"Health insurers are committed to improving health care choices for small businesses and bringing costs under control for all Americans,"
A woman who’ll say anything in absolute opposition to the facts, so long as it makes her patrons look better. Don’t you think she’d make a good next attorney-general?
POLITICS: Powell’s speech at HIMSS
I thought Gen. Colin Powell’s speech at HIMSS was fantastic, funny, moving, intelligent, wonderful and hopeful. Lots of other people were cheerleading him too. However, what else I thought you can see over at Modern Healthcare.
TECH: Interesting employment agreement
There’s a certain fast growing practice management company with a very outspoken CEO, who has a very famous last name. I poked fun about their sorority-crowd employees at HIMSS. But I didn’t know the type of scrutiny that they’d have had to come through. Look at this as part of their employment application agreement:
I understand that the Company reserves the right to require me to submit to a drug test at any time and also reserves the right to require me to submit to an alcohol test and/or medical examination to the extent permitted by applicable law. I authorize the Company to investigate my driving record, my criminal record (Federal, state and local, as well as any record of health care fraud and abuse or other offenses retained by the OIG or other regulatory agencies), and my credit history, and I understand that an investigative consumer report may be prepared whereby information is obtained through personal interviews with neighbors, friends, and others with whom I am acquainted. This inquiry would include information as to my character, general reputation, personal characteristics, and mode of living. (THCB emphasis added) I understand I have the right to make written request within a reasonable period of time to receive additional information about the nature and scope of this investigation.
Well they wouldn’t give me a job! Nor basically anyone else in San Francisco. Then it hit me; what a tradition said company is joining. There’s Henry Ford who sent his minions out to investigate his employees behavior, and then more recently someone else equally outspoken and equally paranoid also started a pretty big health care IT firm and put lots of conditions on his employees behavior too. So I suspect this pretty much guarantees AthenaHealth’s success…..
CONUSMERS/HEALTH PLANS: ‘Consumer-Driven Guy’ Charged With Embezzling Millions in HSA Funds
Fraud and embezzlement by someone pushing HSAs? Who could possibly have imagined that type of character would be attracted to the business?
PODCAST/TECH: Bryan Dieter , CEO of Purkinjie–EMR for the masses?
Here’s the transcript of my interview with Bryan Dieter from Purkinjie, who have a new EMR/practice management product for the smaller physician market. The only thing that I didn’t notice but did get picked up by one of my savvy commenters when the audio podcast was put up, was that Purkinjie’s Chairman is John Doerr’s brother! That’ll be relevant as you read on.
Matthew Holt: OK, the podcasts are coming thick and fast now. Matthew Holt again from The Health Care Blog" and one of my last podcasts from the HIMSS floor is with Bryan Dieter who is the CEO of Purkinje. Bryan, good morning.
Bryan Dieter: Good morning.
Matthew: Don’t be too fussy about the mike, I’ll just wave it around and put it in your face and you’ll talk and it works fine. So Purkinje is the result of a merger that happened a couple years back. Can you talk a bit about what you do and what the components were of that merger and what parts of the IT space you play in?
Bryan: Sure. The merger took place in February of 2004. A company that was founded in St. Louis called Wellinx acquired Purkinje in Canada and we adopted their name as a result of that acquisition. The products that Wellinx offered was primarily an e‑prescribe application, diagnosis driven, into which we incorporated evidence based information for helping the physicians with prescribing decisions. Purkinje, in Canada, as you may be aware, has a pretty large footprint across the country. Some of the customers there include the Canadian Department of Defense. There are a couple of province wide initiatives and community health centers rolling out their EMR product, their e‑prescribing application is being deployed across Quebec and we have a pretty large presence in Ontario as well. The application there is primarily an EMR; it was one of the first to market in the early 90s. They’ve had tens of millions of dollars invested in their clinical knowledge base and we were interested in the product for that reason. What we are in the process of doing now is melding the capabilities of the application from Canada with the United States along with a native browser‑based application that we’ve recently completed the development and just made the announcement of it being in general availability here in the states.
HEALTH PLANS: UnitedHealth keeps gobbling
United is buying Sierra Health Services, a regional HMO in Nevada for $2.6 billion. Sierra is a more traditional HMO than most of the health plans United’s bought in recent years (Golden Rule et al). The price is a modest 15% increase over Sierra’s current stock price, which last month was hit by the rather interesting news that it was taking a bath on its new Part D plan—mostly because a certain other plan (hint: it’s one of united’s big competitors) was shunting its sick people onto Sierra’s plan.
TECH: Silverlink–Automating Outreach
I had an interesting chat with Stan Nowak, CEO of Silverlink. Being a mere dumb blogger I’d never actually heard of Silverlink, but they are going great guns. They have 80 people, they’re growing at 80% run rate and they raised $14m in VC about a year ago. Their business is making automated phone calls for health plans and PBMs. And these aren’t your ordinary automated calls. They’re recorded by professional voice types, they have multiple scripts that people can use a “Press 1 to hear again, press 2 to learn more about this disease, 3 to get to a nurse” approach to navigate around, and they can record data back. They’ve started in mostly informational type calls, e.g. PBMs use them to remind people to refill prescriptions. Then they moved on to helping Part D recipients understand their choices. They now do HRAs on the phone, and now they’re putting a package together for full disease management—starting with diabetes—including communicating Healthwise material over the phone.
As you might expect they claim a 5 to 1 cost advantage over having humans make the same calls, and they believe that they’re not eliminating outbound calling staff, but rather both extending the reach of DM to the at risk population (who the call center nurses don’t have time to call) and minimizing their work. (Stan said that is was surprising how many companies have nurses calling wrong numbers!). They claim really high response rates (up to 80% depending on the type of call).
I’ll have a longer conversation with Stan on THCB soon, but the automated outbound calling play is very interesting—given that lots of people still don’t use the web.
