It is not seemly to speak ill of the dead so this is all you’ll hear from me about the passing of Patrick Rooney, founder of Golden Rule. An obituary is here.
Health 2.0–time to make a move
The Health 2.0 Conference is a scant 5 & 1/2 weeks away, and as of Monday midnight on the west coast the rate for attending goes up $300 to the full rack rate. So please visit www.health2con.com and get your pass today.
The health search future
Over the past couple of weeks, the eHealth world learned that RevolutionHealth engaged Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, to help assess the company’s ‘alternatives.’ The early talk was to raise capital, but the tenor seems to have switched to sales or merging. One talked-about suitor for Steve Case’s start-up is Everyday Health.
This news comes on the heels of a new comScore report that reports 21% growth in the "health information" site category, from 57 million visitors in July 2007 to 69 million in July 2008.
The No. 1 in health search portals continues to be WebMD, which grew by 3 percent year on year. WebMD was also top in display ads versus other health sites. WebMD had 290 million display ad views in July 2008.
What’s on the horizon of Medicine 2.0
Travel and deadlines got in the way of me posting about the second day of the recent Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, but I saved my notes.
Something super-cool I saw there: Medting.com, a "global" repository of medical images, developed in Spain and soon to branch out to the U.S. Is it another YouTube for medicine? Not exactly. Miguel Cabrer, president of the company, sees it as more like a Snomed for multimedia.
In Canada, they’re getting interactive with physicians.
Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association launched a social networking portal called Asklepios—named after the Greek god of medicine—on its site. Access is limited to physicians, but CMA online content director Pat Rich says it’s partially in response to doctors who bemoan the demise of the staff lounge.
In the spirit of Facebook and MySpace, it is more than just a professional site; physicians can use Asklepios for blogging, discussing hobbies, posting photos and even, theoretically, dating.
Perils of Pay for Performance
Dr. Sandeep Jauhar wrote an essay this week in the New York Times about the perils of pay-for-performance (P4P). Specifically, Dr. Jauhar discusses how P4P may have unintended consequences and create perverse incentives due to poorly designed performance measures. The point is well taken, but it’s important not to confuse the merits of P4P with the measurement issues that exist.
With respect to the latter, back in my days as Director of Measure Development for the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), I co-authored a paper with Partners’ cardiologist Tom Lee, Jim Cleeman from NHLBI, and others working with us at NCQA on the development of new HEDIS cholesterol management performance measures. In the JAMA article, “Clinical Goals and Performance Measures for Cholesterol Management in Secondary Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease,” we tried (among other things) to communicate the difference between quality improvement measures and comparative performance measures.
Wonder if your doctor is laughing at you?
That CNN headline grabbed my attention and got me to read a column that basically chastises the 17 percent of internal medicine residents who reported they had laughed at patient in a survey published in JAMA.
The author then goes on to express great relief that 94 percent of those who find humor in their patients considered it unprofessional behavior.
Lighten up! Of course, no doctor — or any professional for that matter — should laugh in a patient or client’s face or use humor maliciously. That’s basic human decency.
But humor is a release, and in a work environment as stressful as a
hospital, people need a release. Maybe that release should occur
outside the hospital walls, but funny things occur in stressful
environments and people do strange things that often merit a chuckle or
two.
Remember pensions? The big differences between Obama & McCain’s health care plans
By Robert Laszewski
This election is different than any other on the issue of health care because both candidates are giving us serious blueprints to reorganize America’s health care system and those blueprints are very very different.
As voters, you have a huge and critically important choice on health care.
There are dozens of details upon which they differ and for those I would point you to my comprehensive posts on the McCain Health Care Plan and the Obama Health Care Plan.
But to understand their big idea differences, I would point you to our pension system to better understand where McCain and Obama are going on health care. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for workers to have what is called a defined benefit pension plan.The worker got a promise from the employer that when retirement came he’d get a certain monthly benefit — often about 60 percent of his final average earnings. That might be $2,000 a month — every month for the rest of his life. Therefore, a defined benefit.
Conference to explore innovation in health care
Second Annual Innovation in Services Conference: "The Service of Health Care"
explores the innovations in technology, policy, operations and methods that address the deceptively simple question: How can we improve the service of health care?
Panels of academic, technology, government and policy experts will discuss the impact of information and digital service on patient care, considering such innovations as telemedicine, mobile services, serious gaming, personal health records, and Web 2.0.
Conference agenda and registration information are available here. A limited number of complimentary spaces are available for students and those with demonstrated need. For more information, please contact CITRIS at (510) 643-2217, or ci****@*******uc.org.
Using social networking to breakdown research silos
On September 4, a group of collaborators at Harvard launched a new website called Catalyst that is publicly available. I encourage you to visit it.
This site is remarkable in many ways. It brings together all the people, lifelong learning, and resources for the Life Sciences across Harvard and its affiliates.
In the People area, you’ll find social networking for the research community called Profiles. It not only shows traditional directory information, but also illustrates how each person is connected to others in the broad research community.
The never ending stent-bypass debate
A new study – a big one ($50 MM) – was recently released that compared the short and long term effects of drug eluding stents to bypass surgery for patients with serious heart disease. The headlines — “Heart Surgery Bests Stents” — pretty much told the story. In this particular case, 18% of those patients who had stents installed to treat their disease ended up either dying or needing another treatment over the next twelve months. Only 12% of bypass patients ended up with complications or passing on. The death rate in both instances was the same – 8%.
Stents — the tool of choice for interventional cardiologists — and bypass surgery — the technique of choice for cardiothoracic surgeons — have been playing this “which is better” game for almost ten years. Needless to say, both sides were represented in the stories that ran covering the results of this study. The bypass surgeons said, “More people should have bypass surgery instead of stents.” The stent docs said this study proved that stenting – which involves a much less aggressive and invasive procedure than bypass surgery — comes in a close second to bypass surgery, even in patients with complex conditions.
