MResult Healthcare Insights

One of the groups our CEO, Yann, is involved with is the Metro-Hartford Alliance Health care Task Force; a group of representing influential area health care providers, payers and health care industry leaders. They’re charged with identifying opportunities for job growth and economic development and as you may expect with such a group there is no shortage of great ideas.

A really interesting idea is to develop a state-wide information exchange for hospitals and physicians to share patient information. This would be similar to a RIO, but geared more towards consumer-friendly presentation of information. Think of it as an “online concierge” for your health. The advantages would be controlled costs, improved care, and better outcomes. The challenges? Who pays for it after the initial funding runs out?

Which underscores just why health care is such a difficult issue to sort out. What’s called for is not better technology or even more efficient ways of doing what we’re doing today. We need to develop new ways of doing business that incent reform.

Thanks for a great year!

2009 has been a big year for us; with the development of a new product, new clients and expanded offerings. We’re especially grateful, of course to our existing customers, without whom none of this would be possible.

Happy holidays to everyone!

According to this article from BusinessWeek, insuring millions more Americans will only exacerbate the shortage of Physicians in the US. Congress is moving to eliminate caps on medical residencies placed back in 1997 (to control costs!) But given how long it takes to train new physicians the situation will not be remedied over night. We believe technology will have a role in managing the increased workload, but technology is not a panacea. Concentrate on identifying process improvements first. Then implement technology to enable those improvement.

The Coming U.S. Doctor Shortage (BusinessWeek) »

HHC Diabetes Micro Site

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has recently launched a microsite aimed at it’s 58,000 diabetic patients. The goal of the site is to make users more active and informed participants in their own care. For the most part it is well designed and informative and worth taking a look at. But we feel it misses a big opportunity to be a “hyper local” resource.

For general health information any hospital is going to have a tough time competing with general purpose sites like WebMD. Where hospitals shine is in the opportunity to present local residents with things they can do in their own community. The HHC site does provide information for local Diabetes Programs and Care Center contact information, although you need to click around for it. But the content under the sections for Eating Right, Staying Active and Controlling Stress are as generic as can be. This would be the perfect opportunity to list truly localized content – such as a list of “heart-healthy” restaurants or  neighborhood jogging paths. Let users browse these resources by location (most cell phones ship with GPS capabilities!) and you have an incredibly useful, incredibly relevant resource for your patients.

HHC Diabetes Wellness Center by way of HealthLeadersMedia.com.

A federal advisory group recently recommended 31 performance and data capture measures for incorporation into the Health and Human Services Department’s standard for meaningful use of electronic health records.  A link to download a spreadsheet with criteria details is included in the article – Health IT panel recommends 31 IT measures.

Back in November we posted a link to an interview with Sue Schade, VP and CIO of Brigham and Women’s and Faulkner’s Hospitals. Her recommendation was, in short, “yes the guidelines are still in flux but they are solid enough to get started”. We agree with this, but you do want to make sure that whatever platform you choose is flexible enough for you to refine even after implementation. Look for an EMR that will allow you, with your own resources, to modify what information you capture.

This story from healthcarelawyerblog.com talks about a Detroit LTAC’s settlement of a suit filed under the False Claims Act – more». The claimants allege that the LTAC submitted claims to the Medicare Program for services which were not medically necessary because they were provided beyond the date when the patient should have been discharged, or because the patient did not meet admission criteria for an LTAC. Under the terms of the settlement the LTAC admits no wrong-doing, but the total payout was over $800,000.

There is fraud out there, to be sure. But it’s equally true that admission criteria are complex and many additional factors can play into deciding whether or not to admit a patient. Going back and justifying an admission that might have happened months ago can be nearly impossible without an underlying set of processes and documentation to govern the admission process. These processes don’t have to be onerous, but they should be based on accepted criteria (our Pre-Admissions Screening Program is based on the NALTH criteria) and they should be automated to the extent that a proper digital “paper trail” exisits for the decision making process.

This article from BusinessWeek makes the case for taking a considered approach to Social Networking – Beware Social Media Snake Oil. As we’ve written before, there are pros and cons to social networking as a platform. Defining your approach to the medium should be part of your overall marketing content strategy.

Very interesting article on strategizing key words for search. Key word research is the foundation for either Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click The author’s point is that companies should not focus just on services or attributes for which they are well known, but should also focus on the attribtes they wish to educate customers on.

Keyword Campaigns Must Grow Longer Tails »

We’re talking with a client about search optimization, and the question came up on the differences between SEO (Search Engine Optimization) vs. PPC (Pay Per Click).

In Pay Per Click you purchase keyword phrases. When users search against those phrases, your ads are displayed as content links along side the actual search results. The more you pay, the higher your ad is on the page. In Search Engine Optimization you place your key words in the contents of specific pages on your site. When users search against these phrases your pages (hopefully) appear within the actual search results. How high up you appear depends on how relevant the search engine thinks your page is to that search phrase. How relevancy is determined is something of a black box, and each search engine has their own slightly different formula for determining it.

Pay Per Click is best done in the context of a campaign of some sort, and is particularly well suited for supporting offline marketing. So if you were running radio spots promoting your wellness center it might pay to purchase phrases that echo copy from the radio ad. This can also be done ‘in attack’. In a famous case study from the 2006 Superbowl, Ford produced a touching ad featuring Kermit the Frog. GM, however, purchased the keyword “Kermit” and routed traffic to their own microsite!

Search Engine Optimization is not so much a campaign as it is an ongoing process of refinement. It’s about understanding if you have the right content on your site to match what people are searching for, and that you are using the same words to describe your services that your patients are using to search for them. It sounds obvious but is worth repeating. If your patients are searching for “cancer” and you only use “oncology” you’re not going to be found. Along those same lines, hospitals are most likely to benefit from localizing their content. Go to Google and compare the results you get from “Diabetes Care” to those you get from “New Haven Diabetes Care” to see how well Yale is doing at localizing their content.

The White House pushes Healthcare IT as a ‘pillar’ of cost containment  (more » ) At the same time Harvard Researchers describe savings from Healthcare IT as “wishful thinking’ (more » )

Both viewpoints are right in stating that Healthcare IT is just one piece to the puzzle. There’s no doubt that technology can increase worker productivity – other industries have been gaining advantage from this for years. But productivity is basically a measure of volume – how much work can you do in a given amount of time. It is not a measure of whether the work you are doing is delivering sufficient value or is in sufficient alignment with your business goals.

At the end of the day it is good thinking about business process and how you deliver clinical care that will help you manage costs. Technology will just enable the initiatives that come out of that thinking.