Shiftwise wants to become the Travelocity or the Orbitz of the nurse staffing business by bringing web-based solutions to a field that has been dominated for years by agencies using outdated technology. By allowing HR managers to match available staff and allowing staff to bid for available shifts, the company says its technology allows hospitals — and agencies too — to save big bucks on the process of dealing with temporary staffing. I had a chat with founder Jason Lander about the company’s model and plans for the future.
TECH: PHR of cool
Here’s first press release I’ve seen claiming a PHR that works on your iPhone (from MedeFile). Having said that, as Apple advertises the iPhone as delivering the Internet (not a scaled down version) then presumably any web-accessible PHR is accessible on an iPhone, no?
HEALTH2.0/TECH: Big day for Healthline
It’s a big day for Healthline Networks. The health “search and much more service” (if I call them “search only”, President Dean Stephens gets grumpy with me!) has raised another $21m in venture funding and announced deals with several customers—including some who have put money in as part of the round. Those on the funding and client side include NBC (which owns iVillage), Aetna, & US News & World Report. Also putting money in was Kaiser Permanente’s venture arm, so it’s reasonable speculation (if not announced yet) that KP is thinking of using Healthline too. In addition AOL and Ask.com are also going to use Healthline for search on their properties.
Given that vertical search is becoming a big deal in health care, this is some of the biggest news yet. So lots of activity! Healia was bought last month, Kosmix has been announcing deals, Medstory was sold to Microsoft, and some small company beginning withe letter G apparently is doing something in search too.
Of course, if you really want to know more you should consider coming to the Health2.0 Conference to hear from all of those companies and many more….
TECH: Granger on the UK’s NPfIT
On his way out the door Richard Granger is interviewed in CIO Magazine about the NPfIT in the UK’s NHS. A quick summary:
1) The budget scope went up because there was no PACS in the original program. The original program budget has stayed the same and they are paying for stuff as it’s delivered—late deliveries mean no payment so they’ve spent less than 1.5Bn GBP so far
2) Much of the confusion over whether the budget is blown or not is because (at least in everyone but Granger’s mind) there is no clear budget division between existing programs (e.g. email programs for all the NHS) and Granger’s spend. “We are not paying suppliers a penny more than we were supposed to.” And of course lots of suppliers seem to agree (Accenture has bailed, iSfot is in distress, etc). But that’s not his problem “Did it cost taxpayers money to change contractors? No. We fought hard to protect taxpayers’ interests, to stay focused on getting what we paid for and only paying for what we got. I’d love to meet other CIOs who run a commercial negotiation like that with Accenture. When the news broke, three CIOs rang me to ask how on earth we’d managed it.”
4) The rest of the confusion is because, as has been shown on THCB over the years, no localization and training costs were not built into the system. Any CIO will tell you that training and adaptation tends to cost way more than software and hardware. Granger says that’s essentially not his problem and should come from the operating budget of the NHS. “If someone went on a training course, that got added in as the cost of a system. That’s when they came up with the £12bn number. Under significant pressure, I and the DoH, decided to agree to an NAO report that said the total cost of the NHS Programme would be in the order of £12bn. Notwithstanding that, the costs of the contracts that I manage have not overrun. They are under spent, currently by the best part of a billion.”
5) And what about user needs….Granger says that the suppliers are to blame but that the NHS is going to make sure that they get it right in the end.“We get a lot of views from the end user community about what is right and what is wrong and we must have a mixture of products that hopefully makes their lives easier, although sometimes we fail to do that miserably. Sometimes we put stuff in that I’m just ashamed of. Some of the stuff that Cerner has put in recently is appalling. It really isn’t usable because they have been building a system with Fujitsu without listening to what the end users want. They have taken some account but they then had to take a lot more. Now they’re being held to account because that’s my job.”
Of course now that he’s leaving it won’t be Granger doing that feet-holding.
All in all, it’s a mixed bag on the UK’s project so far. It’s certainly had it’s “good” side—notably writing tough contracts which protected the British taxpayer from massive over-runs familiar to many public works projects. It’s also had it’s bad side—especially ignoring the GP’s current ambulatory EMR vendors and not planning on integrating the local work already done. Whether the whole thing survives Granger and Blair’s passing is an interesting question. But don’t forget that compared to the US they were starting from a point of close to full ambulatory EMR adoption!
TECH: This sounds like deliberate trouble..
I was sent an email about a Global Competition Seeks Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care. Some of you like this kind of thing. The rest may be a touch cynical & I’m not sure $5,000 is going to change the world. but it might…
"Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care" is an open source competition to identify ways in which the health and health care marketplace can offer services, tools and choices that consumers want but are currently out of reach because of cost, complexity or because the right idea hasn’t come along. Changemakers is looking for entrepreneurs both within and outside of the health care field with ideas for new products, services, technologies, business models-or some combination thereof-that enable consumers to manage health and receive care in ways that are more affordable, accessible, simple and convenient. The “Disruptive Innovations” competition is running until July 18. Approximately twelve competition finalists will be selected by a distinguished panel of judges, then a global network of social entrepreneurs will then vote for three winners from anywhere in the world—each of whom will receive a $5,000 cash prize from Changemakers. The Finalists will attend a Change Summit to stimulate future collaborations and insights from thought leaders in the field. Enter the competition
TECH/HEALTH2.0: Vince Kuratis Connecting the Dots…on Google Health
Vince Kuratis, who knows rather more than he should about DM and eHealth, and maybe knows rather too much to be as optimistic as he is—given all that he knows—has a long and excellent article on Connecting the Dots…Google Health Promises to Create AND Dominate Next Generation PHRs.
Briefly Vince’s analysis is that Google Health will allow a personal URL that will be a place that a consumer can store data from all over the health system and link it to their own “soft” data such as Google searches, and then run applications over the top—presumably to do things like diagnose diseases.
You should go read Vince’s analysis, which is pretty close to my own, and irons out a lot of the details.
The only way that I’d differ from Vince (other than I was too lazy to write mine out fully) is that that I’d add in the one interesting VC investment Google has made. It’s in 23andme. Aside from the fact that the CEO is Larry or Sergey (I can’t tell those two apart)’s wife—bet that made the pitch easier!— and that Esther Dyson has her hooks into it as well, the interesting thing about 23andme is that it’s a genetic testing company. And it seems pretty logical that genetic information is going to be mixed into PHRs in the near future….so it doesn’t take a rocket genome scientist to make the link between 23andme and the not yet unveiled Google PHR/personal health URL.
They key question is whether Google (and more importantly American consumers using Google as a vehicle) has the clout to make the health care system willingly and easily give up its data….
We shall see.
TECH: Why physicians don’t want email from patients
Headline: Patient-Doctor E-mail Could Cut Income for Physician Practices. Kaiser Permanente Northwest’s Clinical Systems Planning and Consulting group did a study on its patient-physician email use in its NorthWest region and found that it worked as it was supposed to. Visits down 7-10%. Phone calls down 15%.
This is of course great news. Productivity goes up, patients are happier and their care is probably better. Of course in the bizzaro world of health care that we live in, this would translate into a 7–10% decline in primary care physicians’ incomes. Which is why RelayHealth et al raise suspicion of their potential customers, and why we have to get them off the fee-for-service treadmill ASAP.
TECH: Google trying to use Sicko to sell keyword advertising
Does negative press make health care companies Sicko? The solution is to buy a Google adword…Yup, that’s the headline of a come-on post on the Google Health Advertising Blog!
Wonder if the “health advertising team” at Google isn’t trying a little too hard given that the folks working on the separate health project at Google have also been more than a little negative on the current state of the health care system (to say the least!). Mind you this approach did work (for Google at least) in the middle of the KP HealthConnect Justen Deal drama, when the KP PR team bought the words “Justen Deal” and put up an a Google adword explaining their side of the story.
Much more over at ZDNet. More from me on Sicko tomorrow, and no I still haven’t seen it yet!
TECH/CONSUMERS: Perspectives on the Future of Personal Health Records
I am embarrassed to say that I have yet to read the CHCF report on Perspectives on the Future of Personal Health Records . But this is a reminder to myself to do it soon! (And no, I’m not bitter–honestly–that CHCF picked someone else to do the report!)
HEALTH2.0/CONSUMERS/TECH: Patient groups online are a source and a force
We know that patients have been organizing online and Laura Landro (who’s been there herself) confirms it in a fascinating article. Go read it. Of course this is making some people nervous.
Of course, the rush to link communities and researchers and the move by patient groups to conduct their own research raises some thorny new issues. While the nonprofit, patient-run online groups have no financial interest in research or recruiting for trials, some for-profit health Web sites see their online communities as a way to make money. Such sites, supported by drug-company advertising, may seek to recruit patients for drug-company clinical trials, often without going through physicians who may advise patients about the pros and cons of such trials. Also, the research organized by online patient communities makes some scientists nervous because such efforts don’t use the gold standard of randomized controlled clinical trials.
So you might argue that the for-profit status of Yahoo or DailyStrength raise that thorny issue. But of course the non-profit groups are starting to use for-profit start-ups like Clinicahealth and Solos to supply their online services. And the mix between patient groups, disease groups and big Pharma continues to be a matter of controversy. Meanwhile there’s plenty of evidence that clinical trials per se are not that helpful, and all the data generated online will be very important no matter what the nervous scientists think.
We are on the cusp of a big change here, and everyone’s roles are changing in uncertain ways.
