[viddler id=4ea657f9&w=490&h=275]
Who am I? Why am I here? Does it really matter anyway? Bestselling business author and corporate historian Jim Collins(“From Good to Great”, “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies ”) has made a career by asking executives unused to such introspective philosophical questions to stop and think about the fundamental assumptions at work in their businesses. Collins has found that the most successful companies (think Google, Apple, Microsoft, probably notFacebook) learn to ask the key questions that keep them focused on what they’re supposed to be doing and teach them to avoid making the mistakes that cause lesser, more mortal companies to trip up over their own feet. Not long ago THCB was on hand to catch Collins and bestselling author (“Getting Things Done”) David Allen speak at an exclusive invitation-only healthcare forum hosted by the Denver-based Breakaway group. In this interview, Breakaway group CEO Charles Fred talks with THCB founder Matthew Holt about his organization’s innovative and very successful approach to teaching healthcare professionals to work with new technologies.
Hospitals Finding Patients On Google and Facebook
When the University of Pennsylvania Health System sought new patients for its lung transplant service last year, it turned to Facebook and Google.
The results of the $20,000 advertising campaign on the websites exceeded administrators’ expectations.
During a few weeks in August and September, more than 4,600 people clicked on the ads and 36 people made appointments for consultations. One of those is now on the hospital’s lung transplant waiting list, and several others are being evaluated, hospital officials say. While the response may seem small, each transplant brings in about $100,000 in revenue.
“We wanted to test the theory of how successful a digital marketing campaign could be,” said Suzanne Sawyer, the health system’s chief marketing officer. “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said, noting only about 60 lung transplants are done each year in Philadelphia, where the health system is based.
Finding a Good Doctor – A Doctor’s Notes
My in-laws are in town for my daughter’s graduation.
When I came home yesterday I was greeted with a big smile and vigorous handshake from my father-in-law. ”I just want to thank you,” he said, standing up from his chair, “for finding us a good doctor. The one you found for us is wonderful.”
My wife smiled at me warmly. I just earned myself big points. Yay!
Her parents and mine are both in their 80′s and are overall in remarkably good health. When I called my father after he had a minor surgery over the summer, my mother told me he had a ladder and was “on a bee hunt.” It’s a blessing to have them around, especially having them healthy.
My parents have a wonderful primary care physician, which takes a whole lot of pressure off of me to do family doctoring, and puts my mind at ease. I’ve only personally contacted him once when my dad had a prolonged time of vague fatigue and body aches. I try not to use the “I’m a doctor, so I am second-guessing you” card that I’ve had some patients’ children pull. I called his doctor more as a son who wanted a clear story about what was going on than as a physician with thoughts on the situation.
“I first want to say that I am very grateful my parents have gotten such good care from you,” I said at the start of the conversation. ”It’s nice to not have to wonder if they are getting good care.”Continue reading…
The Right to Be Forgotten
At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation. Although Reding depicted the new right as a modest expansion of existing data privacy rights, in fact it represents the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade. The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.
In theory, the right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud. But Europeans and Americans have diametrically opposed approaches to the problem. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognizes le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone’s criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor’s Wikipedia page.[1]
The Digital Age and the Doctor/Patient Relationship
The digital age has had a deep and likely permanent effect on the patient-physician relationship. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had physicians beg me to provide them with a way to stop their patients from Googling their symptoms and diagnosing themselves before their first office visit and much to their chagrin, my answer is always the same, “You can’t stop them. Get over it.”
The internet acts as an enormous and easily accessible virtual research library for patients, granting them access on the one hand to quality, data-driven information and personal perspectives that can provide tremendous value and on the other hand to information that is no better than old-fashioned quackery.
But this access to information has not translated into improved interactions between patients and their physicians. It is clear to me that we all need help in rethinking how we can best work together, especially because I believe that we are still in the nascent stages of this age of disruptive new tools that delight some and threaten others. Time and time again I hear stories describing the ways in which this technology seems to be moving us backward instead of ahead:
· When Timothy B. Lee went to a dentist highly recommended on Yelp, he was asked to sign a “mutual privacy agreement” that would transfer ownership of any public commentary he might make in the future to the dentist.
· A TechDirt blog post reported that plastic surgeons have sued patients for their online negative reviews and a neurologist sued the son of a stroke victim for negative comments about the physician’s bedside manner.
The Rise of Big Data
Health care is in the process of getting itself computerized. Fashionably late to the party, health care is making a big entrance into the information age, because health care is well positioned to become a big player in the ongoing Big Data game. In case you haven’t noticed computerized health care, which used to be the realm of obscure and mostly small companies, is now attracting interest from household names such as IBM, Google, AT&T, Verizon and Microsoft, just to name a few. The amount and quality of Big Data that health care can bring to the table is tremendous and it complements the business activities of many large technology players. We all know about paper charts currently being transformed via electronic medical records to computerized data, but what exactly is Big Data? Is it lots and lots of data? Yes, but that’s not all it is.Continue reading…
Are Patients Becoming Day Traders?
Let me say first that I am a practicing primary care doctor who is very much focused on patient centered care. Though I cannot go back to being a patient who is unaware about what a doctor does, the terminology she uses, or what the importance of certain test results are, I can empathize with the overwhelming amounts of information, challenges, and stressors patients and families can have in navigating the healthcare system to get the right care. This is the reason I wrote my book.
However, over the past few months I’ve noticed a particularly disturbing trend. Patients are not consulting doctors for advice, but rather demanding testing to force diagnoses which are not even remote possibilities. A little knowledge can be dangerous particularly in the context of little to no clinical experience. Where many patients are today are where medical students are at the end of their second year – lots of book knowledge but little to no real world experience.
More patients are becoming the day traders of the dot.com boom. Everyone has a hot stock tip, only now it is “be sure to ask your doctor for this test” or “ask for this medication because it is the only one that works”. Everyone is an expert with his own suggestion on what should be done. If a medical expert, like a doctor, weighs in and does not agree, then there is a set of patients and doctors who begin to argue that these doctors are out of touch or arrogant.
Hardly.Continue reading…
Google + Shines the Light on the Value of Data Portability
By VINCE KURAITIS
It’s understandable that a healthcare delivery system would have a mindset and business objective to keep referrals within its network of care providers. Businesses have a right and an obligation to try to hang on to their customers.
It’s a different issue whether closed or walled garden HIT is an acceptable means toward that end.
Outside of healthcare, we understand and can accept that businesses used closed, proprietary IT as part of their business model. Apple has designed their iPod with an eye toward incompatibility and high hassle factor in not being plug-and-play with other music players and systems.
IMHO, however, healthcare is different. Keep your proprietary business model away from my body and gimme my damn data.
Google+ v. Facebook on Data Portability
We are witnessing an important dynamic begin to play out between FB and Google+. I note a significant difference in mindset and policies toward data portability.
FB seems to have a mindset to maintain customer data within its walled garden as much as possible. For example, when G+ first opened, I remember seeing an early article about how easily to import some of your FB data into G+; hours later I read an article how FB had plugged this leak. Deleting your FB account is difficult — there are articles walking you through the 634 steps you need to go through.
G+ seems to be built on a diametrically opposing mindset. You can download your data. You can export your data and import it into another social networking site. You can easily delete your G+ account and wipe out your data.Continue reading…
The PHR School of Hard Knocks
By now everyone has seen the announcement last Friday that Google Health is being formally retired. Thanks to the several years I worked on Google Health, my phone was ringing off the hook Friday afternoon and emails were pouring in all weekend long.
Let me first start by saying that I am not going to comment on any specific company details. I think the broader question to ask anybody that has worked in health IT and consumer tech for the past 15 years is what have you learned from this experience. Or how about, is there a market for PHRs in the future? Given that I started looking at PHRs back in 2005 while I was working for David Brailer at the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), here is what I would say I have learned:
1. Healthcare is paternalistic – consumers are blind to costs and data.
Let’s face it. Our current healthcare system is set up to be extremely paternalistic. Health plans, hospitals, and physician practices steward patient data on the patient’s behalf. Patients don’t know the costs of a simple outpatient procedure or inpatient stay. Because health care is not a true market-based commodity in this country, patients end up being lousy healthcare consumers. Unlike the banking, airline, and retail industries, this makes it much harder to convince a broad array of consumers to engage in a service that helps them organize, manage, and share their medical records online. The value proposition becomes even harder when consumers are not rewarded with industry aligned incentives for taking the time to manage their personal health data (e.g., discount on health insurance premiums, lower co-pays at doctor office visits, or something beyond a measly $50.00 benefit credit for signing up for a PHR at their place of employment).
Google Hits Reset Button on Google Health
By JOHN MOORE
Google Health has seemingly been stuck in neutral almost from the start. Despite the fanfare of Google’s Eric Schmidt speaking at the big industry confab, HIMSS a couple of years back, an initial beta release
with healthcare partner Cleveland Clinic and a host of partners
announced once the service was opened to the public in May 2008, Google
Health just has not seemed to live up to its promise.
Chilmark has looked on with dismay as follow-on announcements and
updates from Google Health were modest at best and not nearly as
compelling as Google’s chief competitor in this market, Microsoft and
its corresponding HealthVault. Most recently we began to hear rumors
that Google had all but given up on Google Health,
something that did not come as a surprise, but was not a welcomed rumor
here at Chilmark for markets need competitors to drive innovation. If
Google pulled out, what was to become of HealthVault or any other such
service?
Thus, when Google contacted Chilmark last week to schedule a briefing
in advance of a major announcement, we were somewhat surprised and
welcomed the opportunity. Yesterday, we had that thorough briefing and
Chilmark is delighted to report that Google Health is still in the game
having made a number of significant changes to its platform.
