Our friends at icyou (who by the way are doing a fabulous job with the forthcoming Health 2.0 DVD) are at the 3rd Annual Consumer-Centric Healthcare Congress this week. They have a raft of interviews with some of the smartest people in the pro-consumer care crowd (Michael Cannon and John Goodman), some people from technology (Sheila Mehan from WebMD) some from the old world of health care (Neal Miller from Kaiser talking about how to bribe people to go to the gym ($150 for going 90 times a year! and Bridget Duffy from Cleveland Clinic on patient advocates— Health navigation they call it )—all talking about consumer driven health care.
Above the Fold
POLICY: Innovation in French health care, yes really…
John Cohn’s most excellent article about why Michael Kinsley would still receive the treatments that allow him to continue to add not always intelligent contributiions to the health care debate is up at TNR.
Go read—Creative Destruction.
TECH: What health care consumers want, according to Bill Crounse
Consumers want;* On-line appointment scheduling* Web messaging with physician and support staff* Access to lab and radiology reports* On-line prescription refills* Reminders and "information therapy"* Access to personal medical records* Outcomes and disease management tools
Or so says Bill. As Bill is a Director in Microsoft’s healthcare group and their most exposed presence online and probably in RL too, it’s a pretty good bet that this is the eco-system that Microsoft is looking to build around HealthVault.
Health 2.0 on Location in NYC by Indu Subaiya
The
Health 2.0 team converged in NYC this week for a day of
meetings with the New York Times, Digitas Health and a host of our favorite
Health 2.0 companies based in the Big Apple. First it was lunch with
Carly Kuper and VP Patrick Denton of Digitas at the Gramercy Tavern. Among other things, we
discussed the regulatory and legal challenges that hamstring many
pharma companies from becoming full-fledged Health 2.0 players, despite
the many progressive people within their walls.
Next, we caught up
with Sarah Greene, Director of Health coverage for the New York Times to talk about some
exciting new online features at the Times. Sarah told us she is ecstatic about the reception so far for "Well"" the new blog by ex-WSJ’er Tara Parker-Pope. The Times obviously doesn’t share metrics, but she could tell us that Tara is moving up swiftly in the rankings of their in-house blogs. We were thrilled to meet science editor Laura Chang. (Matthew is a huge fan!) And also had a chance to meet with NYT.com Health section editor Michael Mason.
Unity Stoakes from Organized Wisdom helped organize our happy
hour at the Swift Hibernian lounge. He and partner Steven Krein (Promotions.com, Law.com) are pushing full
steam ahead building out the new face of Organized Wisdom on a
wikimedia platform, hiring for a bunch of new positions and getting all
sorts of attention from the investment community.Continue reading this post …
SCHIP: Care Enough to Smoke? by Eric Novack
Given Matthew’s
crazy schedule as he builds his Health 2.0 empire, a brief note on the
resounding defeat of the Oregon initiative with tobacco tax money. What this means for the debate in Washington is uncertain. Pundits on the left and right seem to think that it will have little effect on the SCHIP debate—few, if any, democrats or republicans will likely
change course. But you cannot argue with this — from youtube:
This Week on THCB …
Phew! What a week on THCB. This week’s posts included: The Grand Opening of the Health 2.0 Blog, The VA – Cerner Deal, The Sparse Information Model, Humana’s Change Now 4 Health Campaign, Why Aren’t More Students Applying to Medical School?, Woodstock of the Wonks , Man Bites Dog. Candor in Washington. Plus updates on Health 2.0 San Diego.
HEALTH2.0: Is Google jumping the shark?
Veteran IT insider Robert X. Cringley seems to think so, and worse he compares its behavior in dealings with smaller competitors to you know who in this article, The Next Microsoft.
Cringley’s other concern is, though, much more serious about a big company behaving badly towards the little guys. It’s that click fraud is a big deal that is going to hurt Google’s main model of making money, Adsense, because fairly soon advertisers will be throwing too great a proportion of their ad budgets down click-fraud ratholes, and not getting enough back from their ads.
Why is this a real concern for the Health 2.0 crowd? Because, most Health 2.0 consumer companies are basing their model on ad revenue one way or another. Most of that revenue will probably come from some kind of broker-based model, and if the main broker (which is Google) loses credibility with customers, that will doubtless have two ripple-on effects.
First, there may not be enough revenue around to justify those ad based business models. Second, if there’s a serious downturn in Google fortunes, that will hit the whole software/Web services sector before it’s really taken off in health care.
So overall, I’m hoping Cringley’s wrong. Thus far I think he is. The cost of click-fraud is not enough to kill the overall high ROI of search-based advertising. But it needs to be watched.
Health 2.0, Computable Data Exchange, and The Sparse Information Model, by David C. Kibbe, MD MBA
One of the processes that Health 2.0 will certainly come to depend upon for its growth and utility is that of computable data exchange. What I mean is this: how do we help our customers/users get their basic health information; how do they upload it to our applications; and how do we store it for them in such a way that it can be re-used, re-connected, and re-purposed? An important corollary of such a process specification involves answering this question: what do we mean by “basic health information” ? I’m going to suggest that we employ what I’ll call a Sparse Information Model to help solve these problems. The purpose of this blog is to get a discussion going about this process.
After all, we don’t want to re-create the experience of the frustratingly infamous “clip board” and its paper forms, which must be filled out over and over again at the doctor’s office or hospital. Health 2.0 applications and web sites don’t want to force users to type in their own health information repeatedly, do they? No, much better would to collect the important health data and information one time, and store it in a manner that can be used many times. To do this all Health 2.0 applications must know precisely how to import, read, and interpret the data when presented with them. This might be the “glue” that holds numerous Health 2.0 partners together, allowing many different kinds of sites and applications — search, social media, decision support tools, pricing sites, etc. — to make the user’s experience of sharing his or her health data seamless and easy, across those domains.
continue reading this post >
HEALTH PLANS: Lisa Girion puts boot in again!
Will someone please stop that nasty Lisa Girion beating up sweet innocent health plans.
Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.
If she doesn’t stop, those insurers might lose their reputations as darlings of the downtrodden consumer.
TECH: Charlie Baker is concerned about Bill Gates….
So on Weds night I met longtime THCB commenter (and old world pension fund manager) Barry Carrol. He told me that he also reads the Harvard Pilgrim blog. I didnât even know they had one.
Thursday morning, Tom Donald at Bazian emailed me a link to a post thereâ¦so I know now that Charlie Bakerâwho runs the artist once known as the Harvard Community Health Plan and now called Harvard Pilgrimâhas his own blog (and has had for most of 2007!). This makes him the second major Boston health care CEO to have one, even if he canât quite match Paul Levy for his frequency of delivery, or Paulâs colleague the man in black superstar CIO John Halamka (who also has a new blog) for ubbergeekiness.
While weâre on the topic left-coast patient safety and hopsitalist guru Bob Wachter has a great new blog also.
â¦and you thought those four all had real jobsâ¦.(ho, ho)
There is a point to all this, really. Itâs that dealing with process change in health care is deeply cultural and that you canât just do it with technology alone. That is what Charlie is pointing out to Bill Gates. Read the post, itâs very worthwhile but itâs also worth remembering that culture gets calcified by incentives.
And something that all four of these relatively new and high powered bloggers all intuitively know, and something that makes health care reform quite tough.
