So Zagats, which is the best known old world ratings guide in the restaurant business, is making a move into health care. And it’s doing it with the biggest blues plan Wellpoint.

So there’s likely to be quite a bit of cynicism about this. After all, why should anyone use a health plan site to rate doctors rather than an independent one, and for that matter is Wellpoint going to let its customers rate it? I can think of a few who won’t rate it so highly!

But beyond the cynicism, it’s clear that some form of ratings is coming fast. And plans might as well get into the game somehow, although given the lack of trust they have in the market, my guess is that an independent ratings company is more likely to succeed. And there are lots of those around. Perhaps the question is whether it’ll be a guide known best for restaurants like Yelp, a general health care site which allows ratings like Revolution or Vimo, or whether a specialist one that just rates doctors like RateMDs or CareSeek.

Quick add: On the panel at Connected Health, Henry DePhillips, ex MedDecision now with Medem says– consumers not going to
rate costs or quality—so that Wellpoint/Zagats are missing the point!

I’m at the Partners Connected Health conference. Yesterday’s entry got killed by an overheating crash—but having blown the dust out of my heatsink, hopefully my Gateway is OK now.

Later today 5 cool Health2.0 companies are going to be showing their goodies on a panel I’m running. (WeGo Health, Enhanced Medical Decisions, DNADirect, PatientsLikeMe, and Praxeon)

I also heard an earlier panel talk from a next generation RelayHealth/online visit type company called American Well (not an oil company) which looks pretty interesting — real time video conf with docs “on call”, apparently some health plan will run it out next year)

Right now I’m at a panel on PHRs. We’re starting to talk about data privacy and trust. Funnily enough open source advocate Fred Trotter has today taken a broad swipe at Microsoft in an article called HealthVault: No Commitments and a Sleeping Watchdog in which he says that there’s no actual audit function and that privacy advocate Deborah Peel has been snowed.

So I asked….James Mault from Microsoft essentially said that they’ve done the best they can so far with a multitude of interested parties and that this is a continual work in process. He did say “ability or third party audits are built into the system” and that “at the end o the day the consumer will tell us what they want”. He didn’t mention the open source issue, and no, I’m sure Microsoft wont show him the code!

Perhaps
the folks over at Hardee’s fast food haven’t heard the country is in
the midst of an obesity epidemic.  They have just unveiled a new
breakfast offering, the Country Breakfast burrito.  It consists of a
two egg omelet filled with bacon, sausage, diced ham, cheddar cheese,
hash browns and sausage gravy.  Surrounding this protein load is a
flour tortilla.  The burrito weighs in at 920 calories.  That’s right,
920 calories, about half of what you should ingest in a day.  This
little baby also has 60 grams of fat.  All those calories and all that
fat will only set you back $2.69.

According to a story by the Associated Press,
Brad Haley, Hardees’ marketing chief, says that the burrito offers the
sort of big breakfast item normally found in sit-down restaurants with
an added advantage.  “It makes this big country breakfast portable,” he
said.

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I hadn’t heard this quote from Esther Dyson describing Health 2.0 before. She puts it very well.

What we heard today was to me something like the mobile phone system;
it kind of snuck in quietly. It didn’t say it was going to replace the
landline phones. It just appeared.

Pre-registration for the next Health 2.0 conference is now open. The exact location and date for this March event must remain a closely-guarded state secret for now, but expect an official announcement from the Health 2.o team soon. September’s conference sold out weeks before the event, so if you want the best odds of obtaining a pass, you probably should take the two minutes it takes to go sign up. If you attended the September 20th event in San Francisco, all you need do is email in**@********on.com with "I want to come to the next one" in the body of your email. Meanwhile, if you missed the September event in San Francisco, we will shortly be making an 8 DVD box with highlights of the Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare conference available for sale. Just send us an email with "I want the DVD in your subject line."  We will provide details on pricing and shipping options when copies are available to ship.

I’ve observed the incessant complaints on various cancer blogs and discussion boards about BC/BS "denial of coverage" on the backs of injured and diseased human beings during their fight with the great crab.

In one case, the patient was denied a CT scan. As the poster said, "because BC/BS is practicing medicine and deciding that such a thing is not medically necessary." Without the CT scan, there was no way for the doctor to definitively tell if a swollen leg is cancer related or a blood clot. The physician couldn’t make a diagnosis based on the best available technique to make that diagnosis.

Another poster presented the case that BC/BS used to cover Pet Scans. Unfortunately, some study came out stating that Pet Scans aren’t more effective than CT Scans to find colon cancer. With that one study, BC/BS had decided not to cover the Pet Scan, even against the physician protest.

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