Medicare selects 4 companies for a PHR pilot program

Medicare announced their selection of 4 companies to run a pilot PHR (personal health record) program in Utah/Arizona. So who are the companies? I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that Google Health is one of them. The other 3 are: HealthTrio LLC, NoMoreClipboard.com, and PassportMD.

This collaborative pilot should provide some really exciting results! There is such a need to improve health information management on the consumer end. As IT capabilities improve, so much can be done to improve public health by empowering consumers and helping clinicians have access to vital health data.

More information about the selected companies may be found here:

https://www.google.com/health
http://www.healthtrio.com/phr.html
http://www.nomoreclipboard.com/
https://www.passportmd.com/

2008 AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition

The 2008 AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition is about to begin in Atlanta, Georgia. It's been a few years since I've been to Atlanta. Although I've never attended an AAPS annual meeting, it seems to me that the meeting draws people who are primarily researchers (e.g., PhD, PharmD, etc.).

Annual Physician Compensation Survey by Physicians Practice

Physicians Practice released their annual physician compensation survey. Every time I see one of these types of surveys, I seem to see totally different types of results. Perhaps that's because the range varies so widely based on practice setting and specialty. This survey did not separate the earnings by specialty. Why didn't they?

We all know that salary varies so much based on specialty. This is why we see a bi-modal distribution with a fair percentage at the highest end, and the majority towards the lower end.

Everyday Health gets more visits than WebMD

According to Medical Marketing and Media, Everyday Health surpassed WebMD in unique visitors in October. According to comScore data, Everyday Health had 25.7 million unique visitors in October, compared with 19.6 million for WebMD. AOL Health was third with 10.4 million, followed by About.com Health at 9.1 million.

Have you visited Everyday Health? How about WebMD? As consumers aim to learn more about their personal health conditions, these types of health portals will receive more and more traffic.

If you're a healthcare provider, which website do recommend to your patients? Is the information reliable? Understandable? Up-to-date?

The next robotic pill that can deliver drugs: intelligent pill

Philips has now developed an innovative pill that can deliver medications in a specific part of the body. This could be one of the first therapeutic robotic pills if it makes it to the market. This iPill doesn't appear to have a camera, but it has built-in sensors to let it know when to release the drug. I wish I was still at MIT designing and creating prototypes of different medical devices.

Just got back from the NAMCP Fall Forum

I just got back from Las Vegas. I was there for the NAMCP fall managed care forum. It was an excellent meeting and I enjoyed listening to the speakers and interacting with medical directors from various managed care organizations. Because of the recent election, much discussion focused on health policy and reform. There were discussions focused on IPA/PHO/MSO. They made me want to read the book titled, "IPA, PHO, and MSO Development Strategies: Building Successful Provider Alliances." You can find this title on Amazon.

There was also a heavy focus on healthcare IT and genomics/pharmacogenomics. I enjoyed these disucssions since they emphasized how technology is impacting the health care environment for consumers, providers, and payors. Web 2.0 is making a tremendous impact on the way patients are making health decisions and providers and payors need to know how to leverage Web 2.0resources.

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