Only 2.7 percent of adults have an electronic PHR today (representing about 6.1 million persons). Most (57.3 percent) do not keep any form of personal health records, and 40 percent keep some paper health records.
What you can do: If you're a PHR vendor PR person, utilize the survey findings to support your solution. Use the statistics in press releases or collateral to help make your case. Highlight the privacy and security safeguards that your product takes, given that privacy is a major obstacle to PHR acceptance.]]>
2) Eric Schmidt, Chairman/CEO of Google
3) Bill Gates
4) Hillary Clinton
5) Barack Obama
6) Ted Kennedy
7)
8) George W. Bush
9) John McCain
10) Newt Gingrich
These popularity/political contests are amusing. As a healthcare IT PR practitioner it’s good to see the vendors in the top spots, as it indirectly helps all our causes. Personally I think none of them deserve to be there. Revolution, Google and Microsoft’s consumer health efforts are so early stage with virtually no users that they really should be in the low ‘teens.
No one seems to like Bush, but you can bet that doctors have privately thanked and rooted for him in not cutting Medicare reimbursement rates. That would put Bush from #8 to #1 no question. And Newt’s quasi-political think tank which charges vendors $50,000+ for representation is in many circles (as discussed by the Associated Press on occasion) a questionable operation. I could go on. But most people will agree that in our own real world, the most powerful person in healthcare is your or your child’s very own doctor.
PHRs, such as Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault and ActivePHR from ActiveHealth Management, are free and controlled by the consumer and could achieve a high degree of interoperability with clinical systems operated by healthcare providers and other third parties, says Gartner. Microsoft recently announced a pilot project with Kaiser Permanente to enable data transfers between consumers' medical records and Microsoft's HealthVault online health site.
Gartner says these publicly available applications are built on important characteristics of cloud computing - they are enormously scalable resources that offer services directly to end users and to other IT products through an application program interface (API). Gartner reports they have the potential to achieve several important benefits:
According to Robert Miller, a professor of health economics at the University of California, San Francisco, this $150 billion estimate is actually “manageable” because it amounts to less than a 1 percent increase per year in the nation’s total health care spending.
Miller said hospitals are further along the path toward implementing clinical information systems, partly because they get some boosts in revenues when they install EHRs. With hospital profit margins around 5 percent, most hospitals can afford it.
Miller’s projections call for hospitals to spend $35 billion to acquire and expand EHR systems and $55 billion in new operating costs over eight years. Financial incentives and reporting requirements are going to be key to getting useful data from EHR users, Miller said.
The Rand Corp. reported in 2005 that the total cost over 15 years would be $114 billion, an amount Rand said would be completely offset by cost efficiencies and other financial benefits of EHR use.
What you can do: HCIT PR practitioners may want to consider highlighting the ROI of their EHR solutions in contrast to all this talk about costs. For those vendors with low cost hosted solutions, take full advantage of this feature in comparison to the bigger and more expensive licensed solution vendors.]]>
I've written before on this topic in my "Good Business Writing: An Oxymoron?" post, with some extra commentary from Gary Baldwin of HealthLeaders magazine (now with Health Data Management.) Today my colleague Brian Bogie weighs in on the topic, with some insights from Eric Wicklund of Healthcare IT News...
Companies have news they need to communicate to their constituents. This news is made up of new customer wins, product announcements, partnerships, recent hires, etc. The most common method of distributing that news is the humble press release. Tried and true, a well written press release can get the word out quickly and effectively. Unfortunately, a great barrier stands in the way of effective communication in a press release: buzzwords.
It’s not the buzzwords fault, really. In a culture of hype, the buzzword is royalty. It shows you are “with it,” you are “now,” and you are “happening.” Ok, really bad examples, but you get the idea. With business book titles leading the way for a real-time, paradigm-changing, seamless business consciousness, we all end up believing the hype. And we are all guilty of using them. Besides, isn’t the news about our client’s fantastic new technology, or the greatest partnership in the history of mankind that you just signed with Microsoft worthy of a buzzword or two? For that answer, I went to Eric Wicklud, managing editor of Healthcare IT News.
Eric was kind enough to give some thought to the overuse of buzzwords. A master craftsman when it comes to understanding and reporting on news of the healthcare technology industry, Wicklund has simple advice: just say no.
Illustration: Katy Hanlon
“Long-winded words are tossed about as often as acronyms in the healthcare field these days, making it difficult to conduct a normal conversation or read through an article without consulting some kind of reference guide,” says Wicklund.
Please follow the "Continue Reading" link below...
]]>Chosen among a field of more than 30 applicants, the communities selected include Alabama, Delaware, Jacksonville, Fla., Georgia, Maine, Louisiana, Maryland/Washington, DC, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pa., South Dakota, Virginia and Madison, Wis.
Financial incentives will be provided to as many as 1,200 primary care physician practices in the selected communities that use certified EHRs to improve quality as measured by their performance on specific clinical quality measures. Total payments under the demonstration for all five years may be up to $58,000 per physician, or $290,000 per practice.
If you are a PR practitioner for one of the EHR vendors who have participating doctors in these communities, it’s a good opportunity to leverage the project. Promote to the media how your EHR solution is helping move the country toward the National Health Information Infrastructure. Demonstrate the ROI and payment incentives your software is delivering to your customers in the form of a case study pitched to the healthcare IT trades and local media. Encourage trend stories on the project which could include your customer reference. For more ideas, feel free to contact me.
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Today I step away from the usual healthcare IT issue discussion to explore analyst relations (AR). As I’ve mentioned before, Gartner, Forrester and Health Industry Insights (see links in Blog Roll section) are the big three, followed by boutiques such as Datamonitor, Frost & Sullivan, AC Group, HIMSS Analytics, Manhattan Research and some others.
Forrester’s recent AR e-newsletter (subscription available for free on their site) has some interesting insights worth sharing: “Big AR teams can obviously undertake more work than small ones, but all AR teams, regardless of size, must still use skillful management if they are to achieve their aims. For example, a Forrester survey shows that bigger teams reach out to more analysts and generate more analyst-driven marketing collateral, but achievement of targets for analyst evaluation leaderships, and other positive print, does not come easier as teams get bigger. Meanwhile, single-person teams, which make up more than one-third of global teams and more than half of regional teams, have an additional challenge -- fragility -- because their very survival is at stake.”
“Although most AR teams report through corporate communications or the chief marketing officer (CMO), many drift aimlessly before they get there. Along the way, other bosses exert their self-interest and expect a greater contribution to sales -- even though this is very tough in practice. AR managers can simplify their tenure and maximize the chances of personal success by assessing the pros and cons of each reporting line and migrating AR to either corporate communications or the CMO in a controlled fashion. Once there, they'll find less pressure to deliver sales contribution, which need not mean they avoid it altogether; instead, they can choose the best time to use sales contribution to demonstrate over-delivery against easier targets.”
The Symptom Navigator, which is free, matches medical symptoms with relevant assessments and appropriate treatments. Consumers are presented with an image of the human body and they click on the affected area of the body to receive a menu of related symptoms. After selecting a symptom, the user is walked through the possible causes, home care, when to consult your doctor, and what to expect from your doctor.
Healthcare IT PR pros with applications for the iPhone should consider promoting them to the media in trend stories on healthcare apps. When you have referenceable doctor or consumer customers for the app, consider case study pitching.
Fees vary to the services. TalktoaDoc charges $2.98 per minute after the first minute. Physicians receive 55 percent of the fees charged to the patient. American Well works through the health plan (at this point,
It will take six to eight years for such services to reach any critical mass, based on how much money health plans think they can make. Payors, as they are doing with PHRs, will power adoption slowly but surely. RelayHealth for example is working with heavy weight
This move echoes my past sentiment that it will be the health plans who make PHR adoption a reality. Prepopulation of data is key. Witness the success of ActivePHR. Otherwise PHRs will go nowhere except for those individuals highly motivated via medical condition.
Actual malpractice payment amounts or patient names aren’t disclosed, according to the article in the Raleigh News & Observer. The Web site would note that malpractice payments don't always suggest negligence, and that some specialties draw more lawsuits.
Doctors need to face the inevitable tide of quality and cost transparency. They are vendors like everyone else.
CCHIT’s certification of EMRs met with mixed reactions early on, with smaller vendors crying foul over the $20,000 fee. Since then, it’s become a somewhat important stamp of approval in large enterprise purchasing decisions. This will likely happen with PHR certification as well.
PHR vendors should watch criteria development and participate in the comment period to provide your view.]]>
Getting priorities straight - the busiest booth of the conference.
The second busiest booth of the conference.
Make sure your health plan covers Wii wrist sprains before visiting Portico’s booth.
This boat manufacturer was selling new technology paradigms. Fish love them.
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