So this morning and yesterday afternoon at the Ix Conference I’ve heard some really interesting technology presentations from Silverlink (disclosure Ix and THCB sponsors!) & Eliza, who are both in the voice automated outbound call space. Popped in on Resolution Health, which looks like it’s emerging as a big time competitor to Active Health Management, and saw an interesting lite-weight messaging system for docs to communicate with patients (and vice versa) called CareNav. Then quick look at how Healthways working with Pro-Change Behavioral Systems is really tailoring (that’s the big Ix word this year!) HRAs—although not all Americans have taken one or even know about HRAs!
Above the Fold
CONSUMERS/TECH: David Sobel stars on Tuesday morning at the Ix Conference
Yesterday (Monday) there was a great session about advertising in health care—but actually impossible to blog about as it was mostly funny videos! Great stuff from Hollywood writer Marty Montgomery who works with Vic Stretcher, HealthMedia Inc, & also from Michelle Sobel, Emmi. Go look at their sites, but briefly, people are prepared to learn about stuff that they are interested in and entertained by!
Ix this morning started with Earl Steinberg from Resolution Health and Jim Prochaska from Pro-Change Behavioral Systems. Lots of data but shorter version is, targeting and tailoring data to those targeted patients works pretty well.
Next, an award for Susan Edgman-Levitan pioneer in patient information and advocacy who actually founded Picker Institute—the originally patient survey organization. Apparently finding out what patients actually thought and wanted was a new idea before Susan showed up!
HEALTH2.0/TECH: Athena Health: The History of the First Health 2.0 IPO By Scott Shreeve
Scott Shreeve writes frequently about Health 2.0, open source and healthcare, topics that as the co-founder of Medsphere, one of the most-closely followed companies in the industry, he is extremely well qualified to write about. If you enjoy this piece, you will probably also enjoy his recent essay "Health 2.0 Business Model: "Payment Dependent on Results." For more on AthenaHealth have a listen to our podcast interview with always-entertaining CEO Jonathan Bush, one of the real stars of this industry.
Initial Public Offering (ĭ-nĭsh’əl pŭb’lĭk ô’fər-ĭng) n.
1. The first sale of stock by a private company to the public.
2. Stock issued typically to raise capital and gain access to public markets.
3. Sale of stock typically handled by underwriters who determine type, quantity, and price of stock sold.
I have previously written on several occasions about one of my all-time favorite companies – Athena Health.
It is appropriate to once again put finger to key to congratulate
Jonathon Bush, Todd Park, Nancy Brown, Ed Park, Jon Hallock, and the
rest of the Athenista’s for their recent IPO (September 20, 2007). It was the largest IPO of 2007 and bodes well for the ongoing wave of investment in healthcare information technology.
I
find the history, growth, and now the prosperity of Athena to be
fascinating. Athena was founded by my fellow IT co-conspirators,
Jonathon Bush and Todd Park, Athena has steadily advanced over the last
decade birthing the "software as a service"
(SaaS) model within healthcare industry. I say "birthing" because I
have watched the labor pains of Athena fairly closely over the last 5
years since first meeting Todd Park in Waterbury, CT on my first ever
presentation with Medsphere. We discussed then, and watched again and again, as Athena began to take a bigger and bigger swipe at the "healthcare hairball".
TECH/CONSUMERS: Ix Therapy time again!!
Today Indu and I are at the Ix Therapy Conference in Park City, UT. I’m here as a guest of Josh Seidman, Dorothy Jeffress and the crew at the Center for Information Therapy
David Kibbe is up first. His talk is called "Google. Then Gargle." He’s talking about 4 disruptions:
1. EMR, and spread of electronic health records
2. MinuteClinic, and retail medicine from NPs
3. Medical Tourism, drugs and surgery abroad
4. Health2.0
He’s very interested in Microsoft’s HealthVault (although like me he notes that creating a "strong password" for HealthVault is pretty annoying–I also think HealthVault needs a tutorial PDQ too). But nonetheless the option of moving data around easily between multiple entities and providers is pretty disruptive.
JOB POST: Software architect
Phreesia is a
fast growing venture backed start up company looking for an experienced Software Architect.Phreesia is free to physicians in participating practices. The
Phreesia solution includes the leading edge PhreesiaPad™ which adds immediate value to the
physician’s practice by gathering comprehensive intake information and chief
complaints, decreasing the time spent asking basic questions, improving patient
flow and reducing administrative time. Based on the patient’s responses they
are automatically taken to a customized portal with relevant health and
lifestyle information. Phreesia is sponsored by pharmaceutical and healthcare
companies with relevant educational communications to patients at
the point of care.
TECH: Glen Tullman, Allscripts CEO on HealthVault
Microsoft’s HealthVault brings lots of partners to the table. And so far it’s announced one major EMR vendor as a partner. That partner is Allscripts and this morning I got to talk with CEO Glen Tullman. Glen explained his take on Microsoft’s business model, why Allscripts is interested in getting involved and also gives a brief update on NEPSI–Allscripts’ online eRx initiative. Here’s the interview.
Are We Willing to Accept a Two-Tier Hospital System? By Maggie Mahar
Frequent THCB contributor Maggie Mahar returns today with another of her "Inside Baseball" posts on the healthcare industry. Is the recent boom in hospital construction a sign of a healthy and vibrant industry as many prognosticators have argued, or a symptom that something is going very wrong beneath the surface. This piece first appeared at Healthbeat, Maggie’s blog at the Century Foundation.
Yesterday, I wrote about the hospital-building boom and suggested
that we may not need it—and more to the point, we may not be able to
afford it.
In my description of how hospitals are adding costly amenities like
waterfalls and all-private-rooms in order to woo well-heeled,
well-insured patients, I suggested that the money might be better
invested in computerized medical records or Level I trauma units. (In
some parts of the country, trauma units are spaced so far apart that if
you are in a car accident, there is a real danger that the unit will be
too far away to be of any help.)
Barry Carol responded, agreeing that safety should come first, but
also arguing that the private rooms help prevent infections. As for the
waterfalls, he noted that “while they may make good journalistic copy
as illustrative of frills,” given the high cost of hospital
construction “they probably get lost in the rounding as a cost factor.”
See his comment here.
Because Barry had raised a number of good points, and because the
hospital boom is such a large and crucial subject, I decided to return
to it today while responding to his comment.
POLICY: Up at spot on–The Garden Hose Health Care Brigade
I wanted to call it “Hillary Clinton meets Ann Rand,” but my Spot-on Editor decided that she really liked the notion of privatizing the fire department. So I’m up over there dissing on the The Garden Hose Health Care Brigade.
As ever come back here to comment.
TECH: Microsoft Healthvault
Microsoft released its new Health Vault system this morning. You can read lots about it all over the Internet (NY Times article here).
Briefly the Health Vault allows you to save searches and information you’ve collected on the Internet, also data from devices like blood glucose meters and peak flow meters, and finally the ability to store data from various places (e.g. PHR companies, EMRs etc). I’ll be checking in with some of those partners later in the week.
Microsoft swore blind to me that this has been vetted by the privacy crowd (including the more, ahem, extreme among them) and that all this data will be totally portable to other storage applications.
The money will come from people using search, not from (as Peter Neupert said at Health2.0) putting a toll between patient and doctor.
So with Intuit already making noises, Dossia possibly back on track, Microsoft launching, and Google still working on something similar, the games really are beginning. I’ll be back to comment later.
The Perpetual Health Care Crisis By Jeff Goldsmith
I began teaching health policy almost thirty years ago with Odin Anderson at the University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business. Like me, Odin was a sociologist, and one
of his hobbies was tracking the sociology of our nation’s “healthcare
crisis”. He found that the health care “crisis” waxed and
waned (as measured by press mentions and journal articles), but never
disappeared. It had been going on for twenty years by then,
so I guess we’ve now been in “crisis” for fifty years. The
American health care “crisis” is not acute illness – rather it is
like a chronic disease which flares up periodically, accompanied by
fresh prophecies of impending doom and calls for someone on a white
horse to fix the problem.
From 1970 to 1993, health costs
roughly doubled as a percentage of GDP. All the way along, prophets
of doom forecast that the country would simply fall apart when
health costs exceeded 8%, then 10%, etc. . Our economy somehow
continued growing and innovating, and the health system got steadily
more capable at managing our illnesses the entire time. No-one
I know would trade our present, very expensive health system for the
cheaper one we had in 1965 or 1980.
Then, during the mid- 1990’s,
a remarkable thing happened. For the first time since people began
tracking the statistic, health costs remained dead flat as a % of GDP
for eight years in a row. It is remarkable how little attention
this flattening got from the “crisis” mongers. When we finally
get this year’s spending numbers from the CMS Actuary, my forecast
is thathHealth costs will have been flat as a percentage of GDP for
the past five years if you include 2007. Five years isn’t “momentary”,
as Brian Klepper characterized this latest pause.
