Consumer Focused Health

We’ve decided to move to self-hosted wordpress. I just like the ability to customize a lot of elements. Hello new blog url and goodbye pagerank.

Check us out at http://blog.consumerfocusedhealth.com

We are entering an unprecedented season of change for the United States health care system. Americans are united by their desire to fundamentally reform our current system into one that delivers on the promise of freedom, equity, and best outcomes for best value. In this season of reform, we will see all kinds of ideas presented from all across the political spectrum. Many of these ideas will be prescriptive, and don’t harness the power of innovation to create the dramatic breakthroughs required to create a next generation health system.

We believe there is a better way.

This belief is founded in the idea that aligned incentives can be a powerful way to spur innovation and seek breakthrough ideas from the most unlikely sources. Many of the reform ideas being put forward may not include some of the best thinking, the collective experience, and the most meaningful ways to truly implement change. To address this issue, the X PRIZE Foundation, along with WellPoint Inc and WellPoint Foundation as sponsor, has introduced a $10MM prize for health care innovators to implement a new model of health. The focus of the prize is to increase health care value by 50% in a 10,000 person community over a three year period.

The Healthcare X PRIZE team has released an Initial Prize Design and is actively seeking public comment. We are hoping, and encouraging everyone at every opportunity, to engage in this effort to help design a system of care that can produce dramatic breakthroughs at both an individual vitality and community health level.

Here is your opportunity to contribute: continue reading »

Just wanted to see who else was going to be in DC for the World Health Care Congress. Just flew in today– X PRIZE will be announcing an initial prize design for a potential $10M Healthcare X PRIZE (with WellPoint CEO, Bill Bradley, and Newt Gingrich).

Anyone else in town?

Quick note to mention we were selected as one of the top 100 health policy blogs!

Happy New Years to all!

We’ll get back to policy issues shortly…

We’re excited to announce that HealthShoppr has gone into beta and we’re now booking appointments in our first vertical, massage therapy!

Consumers have tremendous amounts of information in the products and travel space– HealthShoppr looks to create the same level of sophistication in the purchase of health appointments, starting with massage therapy.

Compare therapists, determine who’s best for you, read reviews and see specializations. HealthShoppr puts consumers in control and helps them find the best-fit health professional for themselves. Using a retail booking platform, consumers are able to make the trade-offs for themselves between desired time, desired services, desired training/experience, desired reputation/ reviews, and desired price.

Using our platform, appointments can be booked in minutes– no more calling around blindly hoping for a time that fits your calendar.

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The NYTimes has a really interesting article today on real world testing of drugs.  How are consumers to be informed today?  There are limited head to head trials, and almost all of the data comes from highly selected groups of individuals under conditions that are nearly impossible to replicate in the real world.  Ivory tower medicine indeed, giving us the best case scenarios only…but far from the outcome impact for all the spend and utilization occurring in very different ways out in the real world.

Although thousands of medical studies are completed every year, most have relatively limited goals. They often carefully select patients who have few medical problems other than the one under study, making it easier to get one clear result. They may not look at effects over the long term, assuming that if a treatment helps initially, patients will be better off.

But while such studies can help a drug acquire approval or answer a restricted research question, they can leave patients and doctors in a lurch because they may not tell how the new drug or treatment will work once it is tried in real patients with complex problems. Such limited studies, while they can have value, may no longer be enough, particularly when care has become so expensive and real evidence more crucial.

“They are at the heart of why we have trouble making decisions,” said Dr. Scott Ramsey, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington.

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One of the fun things about having a product nearing launch is getting feedback and ideas from really smart folks…and its gratifying to get to a stage where people start seeking where the company could go in a way that I hadn’t even started to think about.

Had a great conversation with Ted Eytan and he shared a few thoughts about our retail, long-tail model on his blog.

Thanks Ted for your thoughts…look forward to sharing the launch soon!

Image by Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr

The X Prize Foundation, which has previously created contests around private manned spaceflight and sending a robot to the moon announced a prize for fixing healthcare today (via Jay Drayer).  From a moonshot perspective, this is likely to be the most difficult to date…even for them to create relevant metrics from which to judge the winner.

Contest details will be worked out by early next year. But essentially the competition will look for ways to “dramatically improve” cost and quality, said Brad Fluegel, a WellPoint executive vice president.

WellPoint and X Prize officials note that U.S. health care spending is projected to reach $4.2 trillion by 2016, or 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Such spending in other developed countries makes up 11 percent of the GDP or less.

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For those of you who haven’t seen it, BusinessWeek just came out with a nice primer on Health Benefits as we go into both elections and the annual benefit selection process.

As we would expect, microbusiness is the leading edge of benefit shifts, as these owners of very small businesses bear both the full brunt of benefit costs and need to determine appropriate trade-offs relative to business survival.  The statistic that floored me was how quickly employee benefits were being jettisoned by microbusiness due to cost.

More respondents—67%—reported having health insurance for themselves, as compared with 54.9% in 2005. However, there was a shocking drop in the percentage that said they’re providing coverage for their full-time employees. In 2005, 46.2% said they were offering employee coverage; in 2008 the number went down to 18.6%. That’s one of the most massive drops we saw in terms of all the questions we asked across both surveys, and the sole reason is cost, which was cited by 65% as the top barrier to providing coverage.

So it seems the cost-saving impulse is a strong one going into this year, and I’d expect, given the recent economic conditions that it will become even stronger.  So how does this reflect on the cheaper, HSA option?  The results appear to be mixed, largely because in many cases the savings don’t go to the worker, while they bear the burden of additional administrative confusion.
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In this time where we set the financial future of our country, I urge you to vote NO on the Bush proposal.

Using fear tactics, and Machiavellian influence techniques, the Bush government has proposed a completely insane framework (that gives the Treasury unprecedented power) to attempt to give “concessions” that make the plan merely mostly insane (mortgage our financial future on the mere word or the “experts” who have badly predicted current events and have already panicked into allocating the taxpayers money on AIG, Freddie, Fannie, Bear, etc).  Both Republicans and Democrats who believe in Constitutional checks and balances should be appalled at the naked grab for power by an imperial executive branch.  These are the times that try men’s souls…and the time that we need to make a stand to protect our nation’s soul as embodied in the Constitution.  This will hurt our pocketbooks in the short run, but to do otherwise will continue the abuses against transparency and open discourse that erode the democratic values of this country over the long term.

As a physician entrepreneur working to change the healthcare sector, I know the issues with credit on Main St…and I can tell you the existing players aren’t helping to support my enterprise either.  But inserting politics that favor big players over responsible small business would completely undermine the faith I have in being an entrepreneur in this country– that if I do a better job than the big guys, they will fall and I can change the world.

The key issue is that the troubled banks have no connection to local communities, lax due diligence and risk controls, and balance sheets that make external investors wary.

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