Do you know about WOWs…they’re COWs but better! That’s workstations on wheels and computers on wheels. The way to get computers mobile by the bed side. Here is Keith Washington, the General Manager of Flo standing by his new model the 1800 (which is worth more than my car!). Here’s his explanation of Flo and their products.
Michael Millenson is exctracting the Michael (google your english slang) out of the future of health IT. It’s a appropriate end to HIMMS for me, and he’s not even here!
First interview is Peter Seiff from Aethon who make the tug robot which potentially could change how hospitals move stuff around, and very nifty it is too. Here’s the interview.
Want to know more about Vocera, the cool lapel-based VOIP company that’s grown fast in health care since it was founded at the height of the boom in 2000? Then listen to my interview with President & CEO Brent Lang.
So I caught the bus outside the Ritz-Carlton (no I wasn’t staying there but a few government employees were!) which took a long roundabout route to the convention center. After the nice people in the press room gave me a tote bag I don’t want.
I staggered to the overflow room to see the video screen. Microsoft says Connect, Collaborate, Informed Decisions. We heard it from Steve Ballmer a lot. Not too sure where he was going with the talk beyond that other than to say that Microsoft rally really cares about health care, but he did have one really cool futuristic video about the future of health care technology…very reminiscent of the great AT&T “You Will” videos—not that they did the company any good!
Then he brought in some guys from Scripps to show us a very cool app for drug development. I think it lost the health care service audience totally, (including me) but it looked cool. I just had no idea why it was in his talk and why he couldn’t show a health care services app? Especially as Ballmer then said that Azyxxi (or whatever it’s spelt) is the most exciting piece of software in all of Microsoft. Not sure whether that’s a reflection of how good Azyxxi is, or of the rest of what his shops putting out!
Two announcements. First MSFT has announced its Connected Health Framework (a software tool set for SOA in health care) One major gripe. Kaiser, Cisco, Partners, the UK NHS, now Microsoft. Can someone please come up with a name not including Connect and Health?
More interestingly for the Health2.0 crowd Ballmer also announced that they’re buying Medstory. Guess that’s why Alain Rappaport never wanted to talk to me! That’ll certainly shake up the search market in health care.
Then the lieutenant-governor of Louisiana, Mitch Landrieu came to offer his fairly genuine thanks that we actually showed up & that things are getting better—at least the tourist area of the French Quarter and the Convention Center. But he also laid into the emergency response system, and the fact that we haven’t rebuilt New Orleans. And he got a big hand when he said we don’t have the moral authority to build other nations if we don’t have the commitment to do it here.
UPDATE #1: Via Silicon Valley.com. Snip:
"Redmond’s intent regarding the booming health care industry
is reflected in the resources it’s throwing that way. The company had
six health care-focused staff members in 2000; now, its Health
Solutions Group numbers more than 600."
Fred Trotter says that he won the beers with Bush (Jonathan Bush of AthenaHealth, that is) on HISTalk. I suppose he’s going to use his time to persuade Johnathan to put his source code on the Web!
Today’s LA Times has a long story about Kaiser’s Health Connect project. As far as I can tell it has no new information at all other than a quote from one pissed off employee who quit last week right at the end saying it was the worst project he’d ever seen, etc.
Otherwise it was a complete rehash of all the stuff that was in the blogs and in Computer World 3 months ago. And it missed the key issue—was KP’s Citrix-based strategy a fatal flaw, or is it just having teething problems. In other words, will HealthConnect work when it’s fully deployed, or is it doomed from the start? That’s what KP members and the rest of us should really be caring about.
Given the leading role the LA Times has played in breaking myriad issues concerning KP (the kidney transplant fiasco) and other California health plans (cancellations) in the last year, I’m confused as to how this shoddy summary—about something that the rest of us wrote about last year—got written so late in the day.
Jeff Greene believes that his "elegant" solution can change health care delivery in one of the toughest places in America to do it–the wild medical mid-west. Jeff claims that the only two places on earth where life expectancy is falling are sub-Saharan Africa and Oklahoma City. (I assume Iraq is soon joining that list!) His company MedEncentive offers a simple way of physicians to follow guidelines, patients to get informed about their care, and apparently payers to save lots of money. Before you dismiss it, listen to this podcast.
(Technical note–For some bizarre reason Jeff’s channel was recorded a few seconds ahead of mine. So he’s answering my questions a little before I’ve finished asking them. Or alternatively, he’s psychic. At any rate it sounds a little odd. But I know you lot never listen to me on these podcasts anyway!)
HIMSS blogger meet-up is on.
Sunday, February 25, 2007Time: 08:00 PM (right after the HIMSS Reception)Location: Mulate’s (Cajun restaurant and bar located right across from the convention center) — thanks to Tim Gee for this arrangement
Come meet Shahid Shah, Tim Gee, John Sharp, and guess whic one of the lurkers at the bar is really MrHISTalk….
This is so important that I’m flying in especially from London for it. Hope to see you there!
This is the transcript from my recent podcast with WorldDoc CEO Rahul Singal transcript.
Matthew Holt: Hi. It’s Matthew Holt, at The Health Care Blog, and we’re back with another podcast. This time, I’m talking with the C.E.O. of a very interesting company, which has its fingers in multiple pieces of the health-care system. I’m talking today to Rahul Singal, M.D., who is the president and C.E.O. of WorldDoc. Rahul, how are you today?Rahul Singal: Doing fine. Thanks, Matt. Good afternoon.
Matthew: WorldDoc is based in Las Vegas, just to let the people listening know. I saw Rahul there at a conference a week or so ago. I’d kept tabs on WorldDoc a little bit in the last couple of years, but I wanted to find out a bit more about what was going on. But a number of interesting health care stories are coming out of Las Vegas. I suspect that both those stories and the roles of WorldDoc are not so well known. Anybody going to your website would see that you’re involved in a bunch of different things: strategy analysis, software, personal health records, pharmacy benefits management. To tell the people listening, what does WorldDoc do and what are your main lines of business?
Rahul: WorldDoc is in its seventh year of operations. We started with 14 board certified specialists. We now have 20. We have the single vision of trying to educate and empower consumer end users about their health before seeing a doctor. So we created a web based software system that helps people understand their acute care problems, things like a cough or red eye or stomach pain, "What’s wrong with me? What can I do to make myself better?" Acute care is one of the things. Preventive health. "Hey, I just turned 40 years old. What tests do I need? How can I maintain a healthy lifestyle? Am I at risk for a heart attack?" Then chronic conditions, things like when you know you have high blood pressure or diabetes or high cholesterol. We teach people about their goals, how to talk to their doctors, how to get to their goal.
We do this all in a software based system, created by the 20 board certified specialists.
Matthew: That’s one part of your business. As you know, there have been plenty of companies over the last decade or so who have created software programs to do some parts of some of that, but you guys seem to have made a real business of it. So what have you been selling, who are your customers, and what kind of services are you selling?
Rahul: Our core customers are self insured employers and their payers. The self insured employers are the true purchasers of health care. Their payers are independent third party administrators or regional health plans, which market to these entities, and then their consumers and end users use them.
Our core web based system comes with a 24 hour nurse line. One of the things that we’ve been able to do is import pharmacy and medical claims into our care engine, so that the pharmacy claims can be done within 24 hours of a claim fill. That means that, if I have diabetes and you have high blood pressure, and we each fill a prescription, then, the next day, the WorldDoc system might message you and say "Hey, for your high blood pressure, do you know what your goals are? Here’s the medication. You may want to talk to your doctor about this alternative, which will save you $1,000 a year."
Matthew: Let’s get down to a more granular example. Let’s say I’m one of your customers who is an employer, and I’m working with a TPA to administer a regional health plan or a TPA to administer my employee benefits. Maybe you want to pick a real example, of one of your employer customers. How does it actually work? What are the pieces that you’re supplying to them? What are the pieces that they’re really looking for?
I understand that a smaller TPA may not have done what some of the larger health plans have done and created their own online consumer health experience, as it were. Perhaps they’re looking to you to provide that. What is the value proposition? What are the reasons for which they will engage WorldDoc?
Rahul: On the health risk assessment side, where organizations profile a population’s risk, there’s a lot of examples in the industry in which an employer or a health plan will incentivize a population to fill out a health risk assessment. We do that as well, it works great.
However, we go a few steps further, so that, if, on the basis of pharmacy claims, we know that 500 people may have diabetes, and we’ve done this with Coast Resorts, a casino here in Las Vegas. These 500 people that were on a diabetes claim file, out of a total population of about 7,000, were sent one letter, which invited them to come to the WorldDoc website and fill out a diabetes report card. About 150 people did that.
What’s fascinating is that these 150 people, whom we taught to know their numbers, put in their cholesterol levels, their hemoglobin A1c, and blood pressures, and we created a profile of "Hey, am I at goal?" Simultaneously, we sent this to the employees’ doctors, and we had that in our database. What we showed, within six months, was that these people that participated, that their blood sugars improved to the same degree as they would have if a nurse had phoned them at home. So, we believe, for working age people, commercial people, "Get on the same page with your doctor, reach your goal." This study was published in the Journal of Managed Care about a year ago, and really empowered end users to take better care of themselves.
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