Got a press briefing from Healia, which is a new search engine focusing on health care. Their goals is to improve the quality and personalization level of the search, and cut out the spam results.

The approach is well thought out. Their engine also allows filtering by age/race/reading level/gender via a column on the left. They automatically behind the scenes assess quality by looking at the documents to
assess the page (rank by both relevancy and quality), and they assign it something called Healia’s Quality
Index Score. Finally they detect the general semantics of the
search term–drug searches will include dosages and side effects.

None of this makes much sense without using it, so you should go test drive it. You’ll see that results for standard medical terms bring back results from a more "authoritative" bunch of sites than a standard Google search, and if you search on specific disease terms (like diabetes) you get a series of tabs that divide the response up into categories like prevention, treatment, etc. You can also turn on or off the filters on the left that give you another range of result choices  or vary the font size right from the top.

So far the VA has licensed the technology, and they’re going both the licensing and portal rout. At the moment it’s small with only a few employees, but they’ve clearly done a lot of formal usability testing and lots of research and thinking about what would be  useful health search engine.
Healia’s founder is Tom Eng, Chairman. Craig Husa is the CEO. Marcos Athanasoulis who runs their tech of happens to be an old friend of mine and I used to work with his wife Monika, but I didn’t realize he was on board until this call!I’ll hopefully soon be getting a look at another major new search engine for health care, Healthline, (for which Enoch Choi appears to be blogging) shortly. But clearly in the post Google IPO world, there is now interest in figuring out the future of  consumer web search for health care once again.

CODA: Meanwhile. Tommy Thompson is pitching new health care software. It’s a self diagnosis tool. May well be very clever n’all, but I dont think it’s going to find a self-pay market at $30 a year. I might though be wrong!

AND: Another sorta health-specific search engine that’s supposed to help you find insurers and doctors that was called Healthia (not that that was confusing it with Healthline or Healia in anyway!) has changed it’s name to Vimo.

Fard Johnmar has a new and free eBook out on Social Media. I haven’t read this one, but Fard did a pretty nice review of health care blogging a while back, even if he charged something like $3,750 less for his book than Datamonitor did for theirs!

David Williams at The Health Business Blog tries vainly to interpret Mr. Bush. No not that Bush, Jonathan Bush from AthenaHealth. But it’s clear that Jonathan shares similar skill with the English language as his more famous cousin. If you know what this means, please feel free to let me know.

Q: So what do you think about the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative [MAeHC] experiment to build full electronic patient records in three communities [North Adams, Newburyport, and Brockton, in a $50 million project funded by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts]?

A: That’s way off on the wrong track. If you could just pay for results, rather than pay for inputs, you’ll probably do better. Markets work better. We changed AthenaHealth 100 times. We had certified nurse midwives on salary and I had no browsers. Now we’re a Web-native, dot-communist bunch of MIT guys, analysts, and recovering Fleet Bank people working together to form this integrated clinical, financial, paper, analog, digital process.

I had no browsers? Maybe he meant he had no trousers? Or maybe he wasn’t able to get on the Internets? To be fair to Bush, several of his comments in the interview about automating the peripheral information floating around in the system such as lab results rather than starting with the clinical workflow of doctors make some sense. But given that significant majorities of primary care docs in many other nations do use EMRs in the office, it seems unreasonable to suggest that American doctors can’t do it. Which leads to David’s suspicions about Bush’s motivations:

So why is Bush badmouthing MAeHC?Bush’s company, athenaHealth receives a substantial cut of physicians’ revenues in exchange for assuming the hassles of billing and collection. In the arcane world of coding and billing, where each payer maintains arbitrary, changing, and unpublished rules, and where clinical practice and billing are disconnected and paper-based, athenaHealth’s revenue cycle management approach offers a strong value proposition.I wonder if Bush is worried that MAeHC’s promotion –with payer backing– of integrated EHR and PMS systems such as eClinicalWorks will obviate the need for athena’s services and blunt the entry of athena’s new athenaClinicals.

I took part in an study (as a respondent) recently and it’s clear from the (unpublished) results that the EMR and Practice management app vendors are on a collision course in the smaller physician space. So perhaps Bush is marking his territory and is nervous about eClinicalWorks et al. if I was anywhere in that space I would be. One interviewee called eClinicalWorks the Southwest of the industry!

From The Blog That Ate Manhattan a really interesting post about the practiacilities of  Converting to an Electronic Medical Record: Advice (and Cookies) From a Doc Who’s Been There.

The NY Times tells us that we shouldn’t keep all our data in one stash.

They’re right. I have everything important at least in two places, but it’s still a struggle to manage.

You can buy online back up, but at the moment it’s just not worth it. Apple charges $100 a year for a gig?  That’s a hell of a markup. You can buy a gig of storage for less than a dollar if you buy more than 100Gs in an external hard drive–-which is what you’ll need if you have movies or much music or lots of photos. Moving it over the net is too slow for those big quantities for now (although it’s getting faster). Moving a gig up or down takes several hours (as those of us who share soccer torrents know)  So that’s the issue for storage.

But what about disaster recovery? I came up with a low tech solution but one with other uses. For less than $200 I bought a fireproof, drop-proof safe that is big enough for all my meager valuables and two external hard-drives. My hard drive lives in the safe if I’m not using it.  Yes of course there’s a chance that either I won’t put it in the safe or that the effect of an earthquake would destroy the disk drive, but it’s not a bad option as it’s something I use anyway for my other valuables, such as passports.

But as the price points change, what I’ll probably end up doing is going with one of the services that the NY Times is talking about. Already one company (Fabrik) is down to 50 cents a month for a gig of storage. That’s still way more than my solution—I’m storing around 100 Gigs (5 of which I really need). So I might be persuaded to put 5–10 of it online for $100 a year. Xdrive will soon introduce something similar (5 gigs for $120 a year) But the ideal solution is a someone selling me 100 Gigs of back up for a little more than than I pay for my external hard drive—say $100.

We’ll get there as storage costs fall. And in about 5 years it’ll be another monthly bill we don’t even think about. But for now the price needs to fall a lot before it’s a mass consumer or even small business market.

And then consumers will start putting lots more online…think banking records and medical records. Perhaps a few tech companies are starting to think about that, eh?

Friend of THCB Matt Quinn does, if people can just trust each other—apparently they’ve got some trust going in Ohio. Well worth a read, althought the main purpose of a RHIO needs to be a central ASP providing applications for smaller practices; and that has some of the same problems of the back-up storage issue I’m writing about elsewhere on THCB today.

Anyway to figure out what’s going on in Ohio, read Matt’s letter to Hospitals & Health Networks.

Managed Care has a  conversation with Molly Coye about the progress in automating and infomating the health care system. You’d think she’d be a pessimist after all these years. But she’s not really! Well worth a read.