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PODCAST/CONSUMERS/TECH: Interview with MaryAnn Stump CEO, Consumer Aware–HealthFacts.org

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This is the transcript of my interview last month with MaryAnn Stump CEO, Consumer Aware. Consumer Aware is the BCBS Minnesota subsidiary that puts out the web site HealthCareFacts.org which ranks and rates hospitals and clinics. Unfortunately I had some technical problems with this podcast recoding, but 95% of what Mary Ann was saying is here—and she said a lot! The original audio podcast is here

Matthew Holt:  This is Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog, and I’m back with another podcast on the blog. Today I’m very excited that I’m talking with Mary Ann Stump, who is, among her many other titles, the president of Consumer Aware. Which, Mary Ann, you’ll explain to us, is a subsidiary of Blue Cross of Minnesota. Tell us a bit more about what you do, and about what else you’re doing at Blue Cross of Minnesota.

Mary Ann Stump:  Ok. Well first of all, good to talk with you Matthew. I appreciate the opportunity. About a year and a half or so ago…I’ve been working with Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota for about 16 years now. About a year and a half ago, when I had been working diligently in this whole space of consumer information‑‑that became known more formally as "transparency"‑‑our CEO and I were talking one day. I said, "You know, I think we really need a team. Sort of a garage type of situation, a learning laboratory where we can really start devoting‑‑with a particular number of people that have an interest in advancing a whole vision around effective and useful consumer information‑‑ someplace where we can sort of work on this in addition to thinking about the business the way that it is today."

We had an affiliate organization that essentially was doing managed‑care tools. Really as you know, the whole managed‑care movement is not only changing significantly, but I think the kinds of things we were doing historically are not the kinds of things that we’re going to need as far as the future is concerned.What he suggested was: Why don’t we take that particular affiliate organization‑‑that I like to think about as a garage so to speak‑‑and say let’s set off deliberately to start to look at how we were going to do things differently as far as consumer information is concerned. Based not only on what we know but where we want to start to see people moving. From being the usual recipient approach to health care and really with the consumer at the center, being customers of care. What are the kinds of tools we would develop in that regard? I’d already been working on a couple things, and so essentially we formalized not only the expectations but the opportunity to be able to accelerate that. So Consumer Aware was born.

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HEALTH PLANS: Guess who said this?

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"Health insurers are committed to improving health care choices for small businesses and bringing costs under control for all Americans,"

A woman who’ll say anything in absolute opposition to the facts, so long as it makes her patrons look better. Don’t you think she’d make a good next attorney-general?

PODCAST/TECH: Glen Tullman, CEO Allscripts interview–What’s the future for eRx and EHR?

This is the transcript of my HIMSS interview with Glen Tullman, the CEO of Allscripts. it includes some comments from Jim Morrow, an MD from Georgia who is HIMSS doc of the year too. The original audio podcast is here.

Matthew Holt:  …It’s Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog. It’s another of my HIMMS podcasts, and this one’s really exciting. I have not only Glen Tullman, who is the CEO of Allscripts, which is one of the dominant players in the EMR market for ambulatory care, and moving to other areas, but I also have Jim Morrow who is a doc from…Where in Georgia, Jim?

Jim Morrow:  From Cumming Georgia, North Fulton Family Medicine.

Matthew:  Ah. From a medium‑sized practice, a family medicine practice in Georgia. He is an Allscripts user. Jim isn’t going to be prepared for this, but we brought him here anyway. Anyway. Good morning, Glen.

Glen Tullman:  Good morning. It’s good to be here.

Matthew:  We do this thing‑‑as my listeners are now familiar with‑‑with the mike, so it will fade in and out because it’s not very professional. [laughs]. Anyway, first off Glen, you’ve been CEO of Allscripts since what? 1997, 1998, something like that?

Glen:  I’ve been with Allscripts for nine years now.

Matthew:  Right, so ’98. And you had the joy of being the head of a public company, which went from a stock price of what, seventy‑eight or seventy‑nine in 2000, to two, or three, or something in 2002? And yet, you’re still there. I can’t think of any other health care CEO who’s gone through that experience. Luckily the stock has been at more than two these days. So how did it feel in those dark days…

Glen:  Well, we’ve been…I’m fortunate, this is the third public company that I’ve run, two in health care, one in the property and casualty insurance business. We were the beneficiaries of the Internet "craze", if you will and the stock price ran up. I continued to tell our people that we hadn’t accomplished our mission, but the market put a high valuation on us and the stock ran up to $89. Then it actually came down.Our investors were fortunate that someone called us "the last man standing." It came down slower than most Internet stocks that collapsed; because we had a real business and a real vision. And I think, today we’ve continued over the years to execute on the vision, to build the infrastructure that you see working today. The stock market seems to be rewarding us for it.

Matthew:  Well, you guys made what, nine million bucks last year in profit? What are you scheduled for this year?

Glen:  Well, I’d like to talk about what we’re accomplishing. I think the accomplishment is that the product is working for physicians. We have over 30, 000 physicians today, over 400 hospitals. When you do things right, when you deliver for your customers, the end result is profitability. So we’re seeing a nice growth in our profitability. The analysts have put a number of different numbers on what we’ll look like next year.I think another key point I’d make is: We are actually reinvesting in software development, and other processes, more money than anyone else in the ambulatory sector. So we’re able to provide a great return on products that are well priced. And also invest in the market. Things like the NEPSI initiative, which is a 30 million dollar investment for us over five years.

Matthew:  Let’s move on to NEPSI.

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TECH: Interesting employment agreement

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There’s a certain fast growing practice management company with a very outspoken CEO, who has a very famous last name. I poked fun about their sorority-crowd employees at HIMSS. But I didn’t know the type of scrutiny that they’d have had to come through. Look at this as part of their employment application agreement:

I understand that the Company reserves the right to require me to submit to a drug test at any time and also reserves the right to require me to submit to an alcohol test and/or medical examination to the extent permitted by applicable law. I authorize the Company to investigate my driving record, my criminal record (Federal, state and local, as well as any record of health care fraud and abuse or other offenses retained by the OIG or other regulatory agencies), and my credit history, and I understand that an investigative consumer report may be prepared whereby information is obtained through personal interviews with neighbors, friends, and others with whom I am acquainted. This inquiry would include information as to my character, general reputation, personal characteristics, and mode of living. (THCB emphasis added) I understand I have the right to make written request within a reasonable period of time to receive additional information about the nature and scope of this investigation.

Well they wouldn’t give me a job! Nor basically anyone else in San Francisco. Then it hit me; what a tradition said company is joining. There’s Henry Ford who sent his minions out to investigate his employees behavior, and then more recently someone else equally outspoken and equally paranoid also started a pretty big health care IT firm and put lots of conditions on his employees behavior too. So I suspect this pretty much guarantees AthenaHealth’s success…..

PODCAST/TECH: Bryan Dieter , CEO of Purkinjie–EMR for the masses?

Here’s the transcript of my interview with Bryan Dieter from Purkinjie, who have a new EMR/practice management product for the smaller physician market. The only thing that I didn’t notice but did get picked up by one of my savvy commenters when the audio podcast was put up, was that Purkinjie’s Chairman is John Doerr’s brother! That’ll be relevant as you read on.

Matthew Holt:  OK, the podcasts are coming thick and fast now. Matthew Holt again from The Health Care Blog" and one of my last podcasts from the HIMSS floor is with Bryan Dieter who is the CEO of Purkinje. Bryan, good morning.

Bryan Dieter:  Good morning.

Matthew:  Don’t be too fussy about the mike, I’ll just wave it around and put it in your face and you’ll talk and it works fine. So Purkinje is the result of a merger that happened a couple years back. Can you talk a bit about what you do and what the components were of that merger and what parts of the IT space you play in?

Bryan:  Sure. The merger took place in February of 2004. A company that was founded in St. Louis called Wellinx acquired Purkinje in Canada and we adopted their name as a result of that acquisition. The products that Wellinx offered was primarily an e‑prescribe application, diagnosis driven, into which we incorporated evidence based information for helping the physicians with prescribing decisions. Purkinje, in Canada, as you may be aware, has a pretty large footprint across the country. Some of the customers there include the Canadian Department of Defense. There are a couple of province wide initiatives and community health centers rolling out their EMR product, their e‑prescribing application is being deployed across Quebec and we have a pretty large presence in Ontario as well. The application there is primarily an EMR; it was one of the first to market in the early 90s. They’ve had tens of millions of dollars invested in their clinical knowledge base and we were interested in the product for that reason. What we are in the process of doing now is melding the capabilities of the application from Canada with the United States along with a native browser‑based application that we’ve recently completed the development and just made the announcement of it being in general availability here in the states.

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HEALTH PLANS: UnitedHealth keeps gobbling

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United is buying Sierra Health Services, a regional HMO in Nevada for $2.6 billion. Sierra is a more traditional HMO than most of the health plans United’s bought in recent years (Golden Rule et al). The price is a modest 15% increase over Sierra’s current stock price, which last month was hit by the rather interesting news that it was taking a bath on its new Part D plan—mostly because a certain other plan (hint: it’s one of united’s big competitors) was shunting its sick people onto Sierra’s plan.

TECH: Silverlink–Automating Outreach

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I had an interesting chat with Stan Nowak, CEO of Silverlink. Being a mere dumb blogger I’d never actually heard of Silverlink, but they are going great guns. They have 80 people, they’re growing at 80% run rate and they raised $14m in VC about a year ago. Their business is making automated phone calls for health plans and PBMs. And these aren’t your ordinary automated calls. They’re recorded by professional voice types, they have multiple scripts that people can use a “Press 1 to hear again, press 2 to learn more about this disease, 3 to get to a nurse” approach to navigate around, and they can record data back. They’ve started in mostly informational type calls, e.g. PBMs use them to remind people to refill prescriptions. Then they moved on to helping Part D recipients understand their choices. They now do HRAs on the phone, and now they’re putting a package together for full disease management—starting with diabetes—including communicating Healthwise material over the phone.

As you might expect they claim a 5 to 1 cost advantage over having humans make the same calls, and  they believe that they’re not eliminating outbound calling staff, but rather both extending the reach of DM to the at risk population (who the call center nurses don’t have time to call) and minimizing their work. (Stan said that is was surprising how many companies have nurses calling wrong numbers!). They claim really high response rates (up to 80% depending on the type of call).

I’ll have a longer conversation with Stan on THCB soon, but the automated outbound calling play is very interesting—given that lots of people still don’t use the web.

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