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Jun 11 2013

Did someone say “palooza”?

By healthcare industry, politics, technology

I’m still recovering from the month of May. I was all up in the healthcare, pretty much 24/7, which differs not-much from my usual roll, other than that in the period of three weeks, I was in DC for eight of 21 days, May 14 through June 5, attending HM13 (the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine, which I covered for The Hospitalist magazine podcasts) and Health Data Palooza IV as just-me on a Consumer Circle scholarship. What I saw and heard at both conferences made me hopeful for the future of healthcare … sort of. As inspiring as both of them were, I found the SHM conference more of a hope engine for just-e-patient me than the rah-rah tech-fest that was #hdpalooza. Granted, HM13 was organized and run by the medical society that has a big upward swing on its membership, and on the income of said members, which means that there was a breadth and depth of content that wouldn’t be available at non-clinical conferences. I got plenty of mental floss out of both of them. Here are the high (and low) lights: Still glaringly missing from all of this rah-rah is the actual, real-world voice of the patient – HM13 can be (somewhat) forgiven for that, since it’s a medical society annual conference. I will note that, in all my interviews for HM13 podcasts, the question, “How can patients help?” was warmly welcomed by everyone asked, and answered with enthusiasm and insight. Figuring out how to break the walls down between clinicians and patients – “gimme my damn data,” two-way edition – using health IT systems as the wedge seems to be a place to start. But letting patients help there is utterly crucial. Speaking of sitting too long … time for a bike ride to my…

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Mar 08 2013

Snowflakes and bitch-slaps at the ePharma Summit

By healthcare industry, technology

I had the great good fortune of being asked (by WEGO Health) to participate on a panel titled Social Media for Pharma: A Match Made in Heaven or Hell?at the ePharma Summit in New York (#epharma) earlier this week. When the opportunity presented itself, I asked to be registered for the whole event so I could do my fly-on-the-wall thing by attending some sessions and schmoozing in the exhibit hall. What did I learn? I learned something I already knew: pharma, and healthcare in general, talks a good game at the corporate level about “engagement” when it comes to patients. However, their use of the word tends to run along engagement-as-shiny-object-syndrome lines; in other words, passive message consumption is the desired model, since two-way dialogues are problematic, with pharma afraid of FDA bitch-slaps in the form of warning letters and healthcare in general sweating bullets about the powerful bitch-slap known as the HIPAA violation, given the $1.5M fine potential. I understand their aversion to drawing the gimlet eye, and the ire, of the feds when they’re considering how to communicate with their marketplace. Pharma is a conservative, slow-to-innovate business that’s focused on shareholder value and ROI for said investors, given that they can spend billions developing a new drug for market before they can sell the first pill of said wonder drug. At least, that’s what pharma balance sheets and annual reports tell us. Pharma is anxious to open dialogues with its customers – the real customers, patients – but isn’t sure how to go about doing that without winding up in deep kimchee with federal regulators. That was the purpose of the panel I was on: to let pharma know what kind of conversation patients were looking for, and what we’d like to hear from the pharma industry. Our…

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Feb 12 2013

Medical Monopoly: Medicine has a major image problem

By healthcare industry, media commentary, politics, technology

When you hear the word “monopoly,” does it fill you with a warm and fuzzy feeling? (Unless you’re Hasbro, you really should say no, unless you’re a cyborg.) Healthcare is a monopoly. We can’t DIY cancer treatment, or surgically repair a broken hip for ourselves, so we have to go to the medical-industrial complex to regain our health if we wander into the weeds, health-wise. We also have deep difficulty accessing pricing information. I’ve talked about that here over the last few years. Maybe not a monopoly in the financial-reg sense of the word, but it sure is mighty like a game of Monopoly. This “chaos behind a veil of secrecy” (all credit for that phrase belongs to healthcare economist Uwe Reinhart) has created the impression in healthcare customers that there’s no way to tell what something will cost before you buy it. You checks the box and takes yer chances. No Get Out of the Hospital Free cards. No pass-the-admissions-counter-collect-$200 option. That’s a rotten way to run a railroad (one of the original monopoly industries in US history), and an even worse way to run a hospital. Dan Munro wrote about this, and the star-chamber cabal that actually sets the prices in healthcare, the RUC, on Forbes.com yesterday. I’ve talked about the RUC myself. And the search for price transparency, which seemed such an outlier activity just a couple of years ago, is now popping up in the Well blog on the New York Times site, as well as on Reuters. The Reuters piece has the addition bonus of quotes from my buddy Jeanne Pinder, founder of ClearHealthCosts.com. (Yesterday was a big day in medical price transparency.) This is the central reason I registered the hashtag #howmuchisthat with Symplur, the healthcare hashtag registry. We all have to start demanding that prices be visible, and that the RUC stop cabal-ing…

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Jan 01 2013

2013 Manifesto: short and salty-sweet

By healthcare industry, technology

Last year’s look-ahead for 2012 was a 5-point manifesto. Reviewing progress against that list, I see that I did pretty well, with only #2 falling a little short – which is not a bad track record. This year, I’m keeping it tight. I’m going with a 2-rule manifesto. Rule #1: Be accountable We’ve all got metrics to measure ourselves against. Revenue, connections, sales, errors, accomplishments – all of those are important. The trouble comes when you focus too much on one area, which usually means that other important metrics wind up taking a back seat. If you focus exclusively on incoming revenue, you might miss some mistakes that will cost you at least some of that revenue. If you concentrate only on building more connections in the industry, you might lose some long-term relationships that are just starting to ripen. For me, accountability this year will be tied to two metrics: raising the revenue gained from the speaking side of my business, and widening my marketing net beyond the mid-Atlantic region. Tracking both will be easy, and each will challenge me to focus very tightly on activities and outreach that will move my game-plan forward. Accountability – at least here at Mighty Casey Media – will be baked in to the spreadsheet I’ll use to track that game-plan. What accountability will you bake in to your 2013 goals? How will you track your progress? Who will you report to? That last one is a challenge for me, since I’m a solo-preneur. Stay tuned, since one of my accountability check-boxes will be reporting progress here, on the Mighty Mouth Blog. Rule #2: Laugh more, bark less That’s a purposeful scrambling of the “wag more, bark less” bumper sticker I see … everywhere. My version of wagging is laughter. If I’m laughing,…

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Dec 25 2012

More motion on mobile health

By healthcare industry, technology

I spent a day last week at Rutgers University in the company of some heavy hitters in mobile healthcare. I’ll be posting a full report soon on Disruptive Women in Health Care, but in the meantime, here are some highlights: “More people have mobile phones than have toothbrushes,” said Tom Wheeler of the mHealth Alliance (not good news if you get stuck in an elevator or on a subway with someone in the only-mobile-phone group) “Delight drives change” was an observation made by Dr. Gopal K. Chopra, the founder of pingmd, about what will drive successful mhealth ideas mHealth Gazelles was a phrase used (coined?) by Ernst & Young Entrepreneur in Residence David Shrier in his presentation about how venture capital can empower the growth of mHealth “Technology is the only path away from the drive off the cliff.” That was one of Joe Carr’s comments (he’s the CIO of the NJ Hospital Assn.) during a panel discussion about the market-readiness of mHealth – he was referring to the fact that healthcare costs are literally bankrupting the nation “The economic model of healthcare is institutionally perverse.” Al Shar, CIO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said that … and is HE right there or what? “We must kill the silos.” Jayant Parthasarathy, the Director of Innovation and R+D at United Health Care … another “is he right or WHAT?” moment It’s the user experience, stupid. No one actually said that, but it was the subtext of almost every panel. Including the one that I participated in, which made the local business pages the next day As I said in the opening graf, watch this space for an update when the full report hits Disruptive Women in Health Care in the coming weeks. And tell me what mobile health apps you use, or you dream of – I really do want to know, and I really will help bring them to life.

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Jan 31 2012

FDA paranoia – who knew?

By politics, PR, technology

In its rigorous search for food & drug safety, the FDA added searching through the personal emails of agency employees who questioned FDA decisions. That would be an oops – for both sides of that story. Here’s the lowdown: on Sunday (Jan. 29, 2012) the Washington Post reported that the FDA was being sued by staffers – scientists and doctors charged with testing medical devices – for harassment and wrongful dismissal as a result of the agency’s surveillance of their personal email accounts. That email surveillance revealed that the FDA staffers were contacting Congressional staff with whistle-blower complaints about FDA approval of devices that the scientists and docs thought were a risk to patients. Hue and cry! Bad FDA! Actually, I agree that the snoopy surveilling of personal email accounts is creepy, even wrong. However, here’s the rub: the FDA staffers were accessing their personal email using computers at work. At the FDA. Within the Federal government IT infrastructure. You know, the people that oversee other stuff like Echelon. And the Pentagon. Gee, FDA guys plotting whistle-blower campaigns on work computers – stupid much? On the FDA side of the story, we have creepy fascist tactics deployed by an agency that should be all about making sure that no pharmaceutical, no medical device, no food product makes anyone sick. Or worse, dead. The record there? Not so stellar. Can you say Vioxx? On the outraged-former-employee side of the story, we have some folks who thought they were veryvery smart (scientists and MDs always think that, trust me), but who played veryvery stupid on the interwebz. Accessing personal email on a computer that belongs to your employer is pretty dumb if you’re doing or saying anything that casts a shadow on the hand that feeds you. Yes, that means you become…

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Jan 05 2012

I have … great news!

By cancer, e-patients, media commentary, technology

My good friend Andrew Spong posted something today on his blog that I took one look at and said, “STEALING THIS!” It’s not really theft if you give 100% credit, though, is it? Andrew talks about his “I have” project, and uses this image to drive the point home: What is the “I have” project, exactly? It’s crowd-sourcing health information in a way that makes it accessible and understandable to someone who’s just heard their name and [insert diagnosis here] in the same sentence. Patients, clinicians, experts of all stripes. That he’s kicking this off with “I have breast cancer” has high impact for me, because I just marked my 4-year breast-cancer-versary yesterday. That original diagnosis day – and before, and since – have been in turn marked by more Google searches than a human could count about breast cancer, oncology, radiation, lymphedema, lymphoma, lumpectomy, hormone suppression therapy, and a partridge in a pear tree. This is incredibly important. I’m not a PhD (Andrew is), so I trust him to kick this off and make it fly. Really. Here are the goals for the project, as he states them: What are the ‘I have’ project’s goals? To offer definitive answers to the question ‘I have [disease state]. What should I do?’ To produce 1 page signpost summaries of the most reliable, relevant, patient-focused, outcomes-oriented, evidence-informed health information available for a wide range of diseases. To publish outputs compiled with SEO best practice in mind to be promoted through social networks and communities in an effective way with the intention that they should appear above the fold on the first page of Google results for the disease they address. Even the best health information is useless if it isn’t discoverable. To harness the expertise of healthcare professionals, patients and curators in co-creating and sharing the…

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Dec 30 2011

From the “Who knew?” desk here at C4C Enterprises

By healthcare industry, technology

I read a lot. I read a lot of healthcare-tech stories, since what will save healthcare in the US (and everywhere else) is technology that eases and facilitates communication between clinicians and patients, clinicians and clinicians, and patients and patients. A virtuous cycle of open communication, where individual patient data is secure from viewing by anyone who isn’t the patient or a clinician directly involved in the care of that patient. Where payers have to get permission to see patient health and treatment data that they’re not actually paying for. One of the outlets I read pretty consistently is Fierce Healthcare and Fierce Health IT. The FierceMarkets  media network has a pretty deep bench on a variety of topics, and I personally trust media outlets who are transparent about what they do, why they do it, and who’s doing it for them. As opposed to, say, anything that Rupert Murdoch has a hand in. But I digress (I am REALLY good at digressing). On to the “who knew?” portion of our program: Who knew that patient satisfaction was linked to a smooth billing process? Actually, I’m betting that most patients know this. The people who still don’t really understand this are payers and many hospitals. There’s hope, though, as long as they actually pay attention to survey results like this. Who knew that working long hours led to a greater incidence of medical errors? Talk about breaking news! Not. Anyone who’s ever pulled an all-nighter knows that your IQ falls in direct proportion to the number of hours you’ve been awake. Most of us stopped pulling all-nighters once we were out of college. For doctors and other medical professionals, not recognizing that they become dumber than a bag of hair once they’ve been on the clock for more than 12 hours is the…

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