Health 2.0 Conference Day 2: Consumer Aggregators
Welcome to Day 2 of the Health 2.0 conference. There was an interesting talk this morning focused on "Consumer Aggregators", which demoed new applications from WebMD, Google Health, and Microsoft Heath Vault.
Welcome to Day 2 of the Health 2.0 conference. There was an interesting talk this morning focused on "Consumer Aggregators", which demoed new applications from WebMD, Google Health, and Microsoft Heath Vault.
Wayne Gattinella of WebMD summarized the state of affairs, saying that people want to access information on the go, and there's a drastic need for medical applications to go mobile. According to Gatinella, this means creating applications for both physicians, in a point-of-care setting, as well as patients, who want on-demand information about their health.
All three companies agreed that people are sharing more and more personal health data online these days. Gattinella paralleled patients sharing their medical information to using credit cards online 10 years ago. At first, people were skeptical and scared. After successfully trying it out a few times, fears subsided, and the convenience benefit far outweighed the perceived risk.
Each application displayed different, but equally cool, themes. Microsoft built their application around the idea that patients should be able to customize the layout as they wanted -- place your blood pressure widget here, your LDL cholesterol level widget over there.
Google Health's application stressed the fact that less than 25% of what a doctor tells a patient during an office visit is actually remembered by that patient when they get home. Google closes this gap in communication in the MDLiveCare application by feeding all of the doctor's notes back into the patient's Google Health record, so that the patient can recap the visit at a later time.
WebMD had a nifty iPhone application with a 'symptom tracker', which launched with of a cartoon-like drawing of a human body (i.e. the "virtual patient"). Sore ankle? Click on the virtual patient's ankle, and you'll be presented with some common symptoms that involve the ankle, such as 'swelling', 'rash', or 'laceration'. As the patient navigates through the menu system and answers questions, their symptoms are further refined until the system figures out what is wrong. Ultimately, the patient is presented with a description of the possible problem, e.g. "Click here for information on ankle sprain", which takes you to the WebMD entry for sprained ankles.
I really liked how the focus of this group was "on-demand" information, and all of the applications were tailored to helping the patient gain control of their medical information. The data is theirs to begin with, let's give them a way to harness it...
Kick Your Butts
There's no way around it, smoking is bad for you. On top of the negative health effects, smoking also strains our economy. In fact, current estimates suggest $100 billion health care dollars could be saved each year by reducing the number of smokers. So to offer some food for thought for any smokers out there, I wanted to share some of my recent findings. First, I came across some interesting statistics that I wanted to share (from Science Progress):
There's no way around it, smoking is bad for you. On top of the negative health effects, smoking also strains our economy. In fact, current estimates suggest $100 billion health care dollars could be saved each year by reducing the number of smokers. So to offer some food for thought for any smokers out there, I wanted to share some of my recent findings. First, I came across some interesting statistics that I wanted to share (from Science Progress):
19.8 percent of adults in the United States (43.4 million people) were current smokers in 2007.
30 percent of all cancer deaths involve smoking as the primary cause.
443,000 people died prematurely every year as a result of smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke during the period between 2000 and 2004.
During that same period, smoking caused $98 billion in productivity losses each year.
For every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, 20 more people suffer with at least one serious illness from smoking.
20 percent of high school students were smokers in 2007.
3,600 people between the ages of 12 and 17 pick up smoking everyday.
I also found an interesting study that discussed the paradox of nicotine use: Users are thin and have low body fat, but are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. So what is it in cigarettes/nicotine that's causing heart problems? A research group at Charles Drew University investigated the effects of giving nicotine to mice. Although the mice lost weight and ate less than the control animals, the nicotine-fed mice developed insulin resistance, which is a precursor to diabetes, and may explain the increased development of heart disease in nicotine users.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Affordable Health Care
In my opinion, our inalienable rights should be restated as the title of this post suggests. But despite my wishful thinking, health care costs continue to rise. By 2030, the boomer generation will place 57.8 million people in the 66-84 age group, further burdening current government funding for Medicare. The outlook is bleak, and the system needs fixing. One idea for lowering health care costs is to move health services out of the clinic, and into the home. New web-based services and personal diagnostic equipment now enable patients to receive medical care from the comfort of their living room. Is it realistic this model will reduce costs and stick? I'll cover the web-based services in this post, and follow up with another post on home diagnostic equipment. Web-based doctor's appointments are now available in several states. For example, at $10 per month, and $50 per consultation, SwiftMD offers an online health care plan in New York and New Jersey. Within 30 minutes of scheduling an appointment, subscribers have either a phone conversation or an online video chat with an available physician. If prescriptions are required, the physician sends the request electronically to the pharmacy of the subscriber's choice. A step further in service, Hello Health adds conveniences such as the ability to text, instant message, or tweet your doctor, and also offers clinic appointments or house calls for more serious conditions. Both SwiftMD and Hello Health do not cover major medical expenses, so if the subscriber has to go to the emergency room or be admitted to the hospital, the cost is theirs. Also, neither accepts insurance, but compared to ever increasing health insurance premiums and the number of uninsured patients, an affordable "pay for what you need" model may just work.
In my opinion, our inalienable rights should be restated as the title of this post suggests. But despite my wishful thinking, health care costs continue to rise. By 2030, the boomer generation will place 57.8 million people in the 66-84 age group, further burdening current government funding for Medicare. The outlook is bleak, and the system needs fixing. One idea for lowering health care costs is to move health services out of the clinic, and into the home. New web-based services and personal diagnostic equipment now enable patients to receive medical care from the comfort of their living room. Is it realistic this model will reduce costs and stick? I'll cover the web-based services in this post, and follow up with another post on home diagnostic equipment. Web-based doctor's appointments are now available in several states. For example, at $10 per month, and $50 per consultation, SwiftMD offers an online health care plan in New York and New Jersey. Within 30 minutes of scheduling an appointment, subscribers have either a phone conversation or an online video chat with an available physician. If prescriptions are required, the physician sends the request electronically to the pharmacy of the subscriber's choice. A step further in service, Hello Health adds conveniences such as the ability to text, instant message, or tweet your doctor, and also offers clinic appointments or house calls for more serious conditions. Both SwiftMD and Hello Health do not cover major medical expenses, so if the subscriber has to go to the emergency room or be admitted to the hospital, the cost is theirs. Also, neither accepts insurance, but compared to ever increasing health insurance premiums and the number of uninsured patients, an affordable "pay for what you need" model may just work.
A recent article highlighted the services of Hello Health, and discussed the ways electronic media is reshaping health care. More important than describing cool, new ways to communicate with your doctor, and boutique concierge services offered by modern clinics, the article does a fine job pointing out the importance of social networking in the future of health care. Physicians use websites such as Sermo and UpToDate to stay abreast of advances in health care and treatment, as well as to network with other doctors in the field. Patients, on the other hand, have traditionally been stuck with tools such as WebMD, NIH's MedlinePlus, and the Mayo Clinic site, all of which just give background information on diseases, and pave the way for dangerous self-diagnosis.
Such patient websites provide little help to the proactive patient who is curious if others with a certain condition are experiencing similar symptoms or medication side effects. Enter PatientsLikeMe, a website that focuses on user-generated data (via self monitoring and reporting) and lets others know what to expect on the road ahead. PatientsLikeMe provides a useful social networking community if you are already diagnosed with a condition, but what if you are a 40-something male with a BMI of 28, blood pressure at 135/85, and recently diagnosed with metabolic syndrome? Is there anyone out there with similar stats that can offer information about what regiments have kept them healthy? In other words, let's not wait until we are diagnosed with heart failure to seek out advice from our peers -- we need social networking tools when we are still just "at-risk" for the disease.
While electronic access to your physician is much cheaper than going to an office visit, to truly drive health care costs down, we need to increase the personal responsibility of the public -- we need to heighten our medical knowledge, track our own body metrics, and pool our data. Social networking sites provide the necessary framework to disseminate such information and personal experiences across large populations. Armed with the proper information, patients will be able to make their own decisions about their health. Now that's a true health care revolution -- so go tweet your way to better health. I'll discuss home diagnostic testing soon...