Genetic Art

I was reading about this company DNA 11 the other day, and I found it a pretty cool concept. They take your DNA and make it into art focusing on the 1% that is unique. According to the article in American Way magazine, prices ranged from $390 to $1,200 with 25 color options [...]

Wisdom Of The Crowd – Socializing Wellness

You probably caught the articles last year about how obesity seemed to spread throughout social networks. Now, in an article in the Washington Post (5/27/08), they talk about another example of research showing that smoking is similarly affected by social networks. Theoretically, this research could have significant implications for using social media (i.e., [...]

Guest Post: Health Researchers Obtain Grants for Video Game Study

12 US research groups were awarded grants this week in order to conduct studies on how interactive video games affect players’ health. There has been a lot of press lately for Nintendo Wii and its many health benefits. It seems that the Wii isn’t the only gaming system to influence a person’s lifestyle choices where [...]

Wii Fit: Using Technology To Teach Wellness

I talked about the Wii a few months ago when we first got one. At the time, I didn’t know that Wii Fit was coming.
This past weekend we happily bought it, and I enjoyed it. It tells you your BMI. You can do yoga. You can do aerobic exercise (running, hula [...]

Book Review: Health Care Reform Now!

Health Care Reform Now! A Prescription For Change is the latest book by George Halvorson (CEO of Kaiser Permanente). I have been talking about it and using quotes from it for a few months. I finished the book a few weeks ago and figured that I better carve out the time to capture [...]

Medco’s Trend Report

Medco’s Trend Report recently came out for 2008 (which looks back at 2007). Here are some of the graphs and information from it.
“Generic drugs have been a tremendous asset in controlling runaway health care costs,” Medco Chairman and CEO David B. Snow Jr. said. “Generic cholesterol medications have helped contain our drug trend to [...]

Silverlink Coming To A City Near You

I am really excited about a new initiative at work.  We have pulled together a great set of speakers and are doing a road show around the country.
The speakers include:

E. Kinney Zalesne, co-author of Microtrends
Liz Boehm, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
James Taylor, Author on Enterprise Decision Management
Fred Jubitz, Former VP of Consumer Cards at American Express
Stan [...]

Medco on Future of Pharmacy

Medco has introduced a new publication called Perspectives. The one I just read was by Dr. Robert Epstein who is their Chief Medical Officer and is about how pharmacy will become personalized, specialized, and consumer driven. It is a well written piece with some good and interesting facts. Here are a facts [...]

Going to WHCC

I am excited that I get the opportunity to go to the World Healthcare Congress in DC later this month. This looks to be a great conference, and I am going to blog from the event. If you’re there, look me up. I will be sitting at the bloggers table at the [...]

Maternal-Fetal Surgery: Trade-off Examples

One of the key parts of healthcare is the need to make tradeoffs especially when it comes to treatment plans. Exercise requires a commitment and can make you sore. Some drugs have side effects that may impact other parts of the patient’s life. Surgeries carry risk.

With that in mind, I found an [...]

Cigna’s Digital Coupon

Cigna recently announced some changes to their website. The one that caught my eye was the ability for a patient to print a coupon for a reduced copayment on their first fill of a generic drug.
I think it is a great step. My hope and questions would be as follows:

Is it to promote [...]

The Patient Experience Matters

It is a topic I am just hearing about although I heard my architecture friends talk about it 15+ years ago. Forrester even has a patient experience ranking now called the Customer Experience Index. They ask consumers 3 questions:

Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how effective were they at meeting your [...]

Facebook Application To Drive Blood Donations

I must admit I am pretty conservative so it was with some reluctance that I finally joined Facebook.  After the Health 2.0 conference formed a group out there, I decided to join earlier this week.  First, my brother reached out to me.  Then, a roommate of mine from college who I hadn’t talked to in [...]

Health Transformation 2.0: Follow-up

The other day, I provided a few comments on this book (manifesto) that I picked up, and I reached out to the author. He got back to me last night and was kind enough to provide the PDF of the publication.
In his words:

“These are simply my thoughts and thoughts inspired by a community of [...]

Health Transformation 2.0

I grabbed this little book off the table at Health 2.0.  I am finally getting around to flipping through it (rather than sleeping).
I can’t figure out if it’s associated with a company.  If yes, they have done a great job of disguising it.  [For what purpose, I don't know.]  It is very well laid out [...]

Medication Adherence Devices

I think we all can predict that the medical device industry should explode over the next few years.  USA Today had a recent article on a “smart pillbox” which caught my eye.
According to Forrester Research, the market for home health monitoring technologies is expected to reach $5 billion by 2010 — and $34 billion by [...]

Great Book - Microtrends

At PBMI, one of the best speakers was Kinney Zalesne who with Mark Penn wrote the book Microtrends. I just finished reading the book - all 370+ pages. I found it to be one of the most engaging non-fiction books I have read in a long time…which says a lot. I have [...]

Convergence: MiCoach

As a runner, I found this interesting new product c/o The Hospital Impact blog.  The video is pretty engaging on the MiCoach.  It blends a GPS technology with an MP3 player with a personal coach with a phone and links it to a website for tracking.  If I wasn’t a runner, I would have some [...]

What Does Spitzer Teach Us About Sharing Information?

While staying away from some of the issues around Spitzer, there is one that I found very interesting.  How does someone spend $4,000 (or $80,000) total without their spouse knowing?  I guess maybe when you have too much money that can happen.  I talked with 10 of my friends about it and in general they [...]

Guest: 5 Ways an iPhone Can Improve Doctor-Patient Relationships

I feel lucky to have people want to post on my blog. Susan Jacobs is a part-time teacher and regular reader. She is also a regular contributor for NOEDb, a site for learning about and selecting an online nursing degree program. Susan invites your comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address [...]

Another Good IDC Quote

We have been out talking to the analysts to get their feedback on the market and share some of our new ideas.  I mentioned a good quote a few weeks ago from IDC, but I was even more excited by their publication last week (see 1/2 way through the document).
The story is called “Communications Technologies [...]

Health 2.0: My Notes

I am just flying back from the Health 2.0 conference out in San Diego. I feel like there is a ton of information that I want to share so kudos to Matthew and Indu for the great job. (And, if you make it to the end of this post, you must really like [...]

ATDM: Automated Telephone Disease Management

No. It’s not my term or even a company term. I am not sure who came up with it, but it was actually used in a published study from 2001.

“Impact of Automated Calls With Nurse Follow-Up on Diabetes Treatment Outcomes in a Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System.”
Diabetes Care 24:202-208
2001
John D. Piette, [...]

Information Latency: Why Don’t We Change?

I have had this note to self for a while so I am finally going to put a quick entry out here on the topic.
The issue is data latency or more appropriately information latency.  The data often exists right away, but the challenge is how to you get the data into a usable form, with [...]

Nuclear Medicine - What???

I compare what I know about nuclear medicine today to what I knew about genomics back in 1998.  [I remember my boss calling me and telling me to pull together a presentation for our team at E&Y to give to Jay Geller (CEO of Pacificare at the time) on e-business with a focus on how [...]

A Great Communication Example

Don’t get.  Don’t worry.  You’re probably not the target.  This is a Google recruiting advertisement that they put up a few years ago.  It led you to a website which had another puzzle for you to solve.
Why is this so great?  It’s targeted exactly to the niche of engineers that they wanted to have apply [...]

Healthcare Gift Cards, Memberships, and Futures

Gift cards have become the popular holiday gift.  [Here is the money I was going to spend on you but since I don't know exactly what you want, please go spend it on yourself.]  As copayments go up and consumers own more of their healthcare spending, I wonder how long it will be before we [...]

PHR as a Chip

I am sure some people think of this as a crazy notion.  Would this ever happen?  What are the implications?  What is the value?
People getting “chipped” seems scary to a lot of people.  But, an intelligent chip that could collect body information - weight, blood pressure, etc - and feed it to a PHR (personal [...]

Forrester on Individual Health Market

It is a few months old, but Forrester put out a report called “The $115 Billion Individual Health Insurance Opportunity” back in October of this year that is packed with facts and a few interesting concepts. The key point is that established companies need to maintain success in the B2B world that we live [...]

Applying Technology Trends to Healthcare

McKinsey recently put out their 8 technology trends article (access available with free registration). I thought I would translate those to the topic of healthcare communications. Hopefully, we don’t have to be hit by a bolt of lightning to change, but we realize and can document the ROI of acting now and improving [...]