By Matthew Holt

I'm doing a first for THCB which is a IM chat interview. On the other side of the keyboard (so to speak) is Alexandra Carmichael who is the CEO of CureTogether.com. Hi Alex!

Alexandra: Hi Matthew, nice to IM with you!

Me: So we're trying this out and we'll talk about Repetitive Stress Injuries later!!

Now CureTogether was a late add to a panel at Health 2.0 last October, but to be fair you are very early in the process of what you're calling Open Source Health Research. Before you tell us what that is, can you tell me a bit about your background.

Alexandra: Sure, you can add Repetitive Strain as a condition on CureTogether.

I started out in molecular genetics, actually, at the University of Toronto, Canada. I left grad school to co-found Redasoft, a molecular biology software company, with Daniel Reda. We grew the company over 10 years to having customers in 37 countries, then sold the technology we developed to Hitachi Software in 2005. We moved to California, consulted with Hitachi for a couple of years, and then were ready to dive into a new project.

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By ROBERT LASZEWSKI

 The Obama budget team has made it clear they are going into the next federal budget process playing it straight on many fronts that the prior administration had fudged on. The
cost of the wars, the cost of adjusting the alternative minimum tax
each year to keep the middle class from falling into it, the cost of
disaster relief, and the cost of avoiding the otherwise automatic cuts
to Medicare physician fees because of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula were all conveniently left out of the Bush budgets making them look a lot better than they really were.

Facing a $1.5 to $2 trillion deficit this year
you might as well throw the lot on the pile, get it over with, and
create an even greater imperative for change—a trillion here a trillion
there "and pretty soon it gets to look like real money."

In the end an honest accounting is all to the Obama administration’s credit.

But on the health care front anyway, it may also be very shrewd politics.

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By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

“The world changed yesterday at 1 pm Mountain time,” Steve Lieber, President of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), told over 1,500 attendees of a webinar on February 18. These new times, Lieber said, “will require our vendor community to react a little bit differently and change business practices.” Lieber said that
health information technology vendors will need to be, in his words,
“more forthcoming” as well as “make absolute iron clad binding
agreements.”

The bottom line: time is of the essence, based the HIT details written within the 1,100 pages of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)…aka, “the stimulus bill.”

Lieber called ARRA, “the most important legislation to ever impact health IT.”

The amount of funding
related to HIT is about $20 billion. Never before in the American
health system has there ever been such an investment, especially at one
time, Lieber told those of us listening on the line. Some
money will flow in the current calendar year, some dollars will flow in
subsequent years, and some funding will be available until they are
completely spent.

Nine areas will receive HIT funding:

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By Landon Gibbs and Brent Parton

Remember what it feels like to gorge yourself on a meal with friends only to find when the bill arrives, your tablemates have conveniently slipped off into the washroom? Well hopefully not, (if so, visit myfriendsareusingme.com) but young Americans should prepare themselves to feel such pain.

Despite all the excitement over the prospects of impending health care reform, the young still have reason for worry. While lawmakers from the Right and Left vigorously seek to caulk the wagon and float across the ideological divide on health care, little is being said about the sustainability of reform and its long-term implications for the future.

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By JOE FLOWER

The reaction in certain quarters to the healthcare reform provisions of the stimulus bill now clearing 
Congress lays bare the nature of opposition to the forthcoming fight for real change in healthcare: It will be viciousness at the top of the lungs.  It will be a scorched-earth campaign.  Its main weapon will be fear. It will be unencumbered by any actual knowledge, subtlety, awareness of history, or access to the thoughts of people who actually know what they are talking about.  Its fury will be unloaded not just in service of narrow and inflexible political nostrums, but in the service of sectors of the industry which fear that a truly efficient and effective healthcare system would cripple their profit margins.

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By Michael L. Millenson

The folks at the Oklahoma Hospital Association might want to get together with the Commonwealth Fund to see if they can borrow a URL for their hospital quality Web site.

Using the two-letter abbreviation for the state name, the Oklahoma association’s just-launched site providing quality and safety information on 80 local hospitals promises “OKHospitalQuality.” On the other hand, the Commonwealth Fund’s almost-as-new site displaying quality information on hospitals nationwide boldly asks “WhyNotTheBest?”

In both cases, however, visitors will largely see repackaged HospitalCompare measures from CMS and the standardized H-CAHPS patient satisfaction survey from AHRQ. The Oklahoma association claims its site is easier to use than that of CMS, and they’re right. For instance, it’s simple to look at state benchmarks and multiple hospitals at the same time.

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We are seeking a full-time partner/investor to build a new company that
dramatically improves the way millions of patients learn and shop
online. We address a $70 billion market. Our current team consists of seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists and physicians from Google (Teams: Health, Search & Foundation), Stanford Graduate School of Business, UCSF Medical School and former high-ranking government officials from CDC/HHS. As a founding CTO, will initially assist with VC presentations, partner meetings, technical collateral creation and overall technical direction. With funding, you will hire the engineering team. If you are an investor, we currently accrue consistent technical progress and have our first hires (and other investors) on standby.

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Health 2.0 is working on a new documentary focusing on the next generation of physicians and healthcare professionals.

We
are looking to cast 3-5 medical students who are willing to share their
perspectives on how the field of medicine is changing, how they expect
to be practicing when they're out in the world, and how Health 2.0
technologies factor into their lives.

Are you (or can you
recommend) a dynamic and engaging medical student or health
professional in training who is currently working to bring the medical
profession/healthcare system into the 21st century?  Are you working on
projects that relate to social media/the web/mobile/ changing the world
with technology?  Then we want to talk to you!

The short film
will debut at the Health 2.0 conference in Boston in April and be
distributed online through various partner organizations. 

Please send all recommendations and references to Lizzie Dunklee, Executive
Producer at Health 2.0 at lizzie@health2con.com.