Highlight HEALTH 2.0

Health 2.0 physician Jay Parkinson, M.D. recently joined Myca, a Montreal-based company that aims to enhance access to consumer care while creating new efficiencies and revenue for doctors [1]. Prior to joining Myca, Parkinson’s Brooklyn medical practice combined house calls of the past with 21st-century technology. For a yearly fee of $500, Parkinson made an initial visit to his patients and offered two additional house calls as needed. Using IM, email and video chat, he would make himself available to his patients between the hours of 8 a.m and 5 p.m. weekdays for unlimited consultation. Parkinson used a web-based electronic medical record (EMR) system called Life Record to keep his medical records.

According to Parkinson, joining Myca didn’t compromise any of his ideals and was simply a natural progression of his practice [1]:

No innovation is going to come from within the industry. It’s going to come from outside the industry. There are 47 million uninsured who have to pay cash for healthcare, and there’s another likely 40 million that are going to need supplemental insurance. That’s a significant buying power that no one is even thinking about in the healthcare industry. I’m not anti-corporate. I’m just anti-stupidcorporate. I’m very much a businessman.

Links to articles describing Parkinson were included in a past edition of Medicine 2.0 here at Highlight HEALTH 2.0. Parkinson and his unique medical practice have been the focus of a great deal of discussion over the past year, both in the news and blogosphere.

Myca and Hello Health

Myca focuses on health and wellness applications, utilizing advanced communications and mobile devices to make it easy for consumers and health experts to connect. The company is expanding from the development of a mobile health application called MyFoodPhone Nutrition, which incorporates camera phone food journaling and video feedback services, to a broader platform for delivering healthcare services.

That broader platform is a healthcare service called Hello Health. A single communications and clinical information platform developed by Myca provides a solution to three top healthcare issues: access, high-quality medical care and cost management. The system offers patient and physician interfaces that extend far beyond a traditional EMR. For a monthly fee, members can access Hello Health doctors in the clinic or at home and by IM or video chat. Sound familiar? Following in Parkinson’s medical practice model, Hello Health incorporates several technological improvements only a company with resources like Myca could provide.

Interestingly, unlike many services that focus on physician quality and offer the ability to rate doctors, Hello Health will focus on patient satisfaction. According to Parkinson [1]:

It’s not going to be a rating system for doctors. It’s going to be private information based on your effort with your patients. To me, e-Bay is the model. They have one question they ask: ‘What is your satisfaction with the seller? Positive, negative, or neutral.’ It’s as simple as that. At the end of the month, you tally them up, and take the aggregate score, and the doctor will then make more or less depending on their average score.

If doctor scores decrease, Hello Health takes a larger portion of fees collected. This is the incentive that will drive a new model of practice, one that is more effective and takes advantage of technology. In an interview last month with the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, Parkinson described Hello Health as [2]:

… a neighborhood-based, Internet-enabled practice that sees you in person and communicates with you over the Internet. Patients become members for a Netflix-priced monthly fee and then pay fee for service. In-person visits, whether house call or in-office, will range from $75 to $150 cash. We will submit your claim to your insurance for you so you can be reimbursed but you pay cash up front.

As Alan Brookstone points out at CanadianEMR, complex diseases such as cancer likely won’t be as easy to manage using the Hello Health model of healthcare delivery. Nevertheless, for primary care, it streamlines service, provides accessible doctors, offers consumer convenience and may just be the next big thing in healthcare.

Hello Health should launch by the end of this month.

Additional details on Hello Health can be found on Jay Parkinson’s blog. More information on Hello Health Drs. Jay Parkinson and Sean Khozin can be found here.

References

1. Jay Parkinson Sells Out? MDNG. 2008 May 12.
2. Technodoc Jay Parkinson Says Hello to Franchising. Wall Street Journal Blog. 2008 Jun 9.

Welcome to the twenty-seventh edition of Medicine 2.0, the bi-weekly blog carnival of the best posts pertaining to web 2.0 and medicine.

Medicine 2.0 is the science of maintaining and/or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis and treatment of patients utilizing web 2.0 internet-based services, including web-based community sites, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, folksonomies (tagging) and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), to collaborate, exchange information and share knowledge. Physicians, nurses, medical students and health researchers who consume web media can actively participate in the creation and distribution of content, helping to customize information and technology for their own purposes.

Communication amongst and between healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers is a necessary element to improve health and is critical for the delivery of optimal medical outcomes.

This edition of Medicine 2.0 covers a wide array of posts with one thing in common — Communication.

Web 2.0 Tools and Slideshows

Gunther Eysenbach’s Random Research Rants

Dr. Gunther Eysenbach presents an archiving system for Citing Blogs, Preserving Cited Webpages etc with WebCite.

Clinical Cases and Images

Do you Twitter? Dr. Ves Dimov offers A Doctor’s Opinion: Why I Started Microblogging on Twitter.

Scienceroll

23andMe presented a slideshow recently in Second Life in the latest session of the Scifoo Lives On series. Dr. Bertalan Meskó covers 23andMe in Second Life: LIVE.

Jay Parkinson+ MD + MPH

Dr. Jay Parkinson asks us to Look, posting a presentation from George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, about health reform.

Pharma 2.0

Bunny Ellerin writes about Within3 and the results of a survey at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference. There’s no doubt that social media is Changing Physician Behavior.

Online Video

Gene Sherpas: Personalized Medicine and You

Dr. Steve Murphy writes about the upcoming second Helix Health CliniCast on genetic testing, genomic medicine and the science of accurate warfarin dosing, asking How’s that for Genomic Medicine by Press Release?

Digital Pathology Blog

The Digital Pathology Blog reports that Mayo Launches YouTube Channel with videos highlighting the latest research and treatment advances at Mayo Clinic.

WSJ Health Blog

The Wall Street Journal Health Blog discusses online doctor consults, announcing that The Doctor Will See You on the Webcam Now.

Information Tools and Tests

College@Home

Many of us might forget there’s other search tools out there besides Google. Laura Milligan provides a comprehensive list of 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of.

davidrothman.net

David Rothman posts An Evaluation of the Five Most Used Evidence Based Bedside Information Tools in Canadian Health Libraries, a recent study published in the journal Evidence Based Library and Information Practice.

Medgadget

Personalized Medical Search Engine: With Medgadget describes the inclusion of Medgadget in Scienceroll Search, a personalized medical search engine powered by Polymeta.com.

NursingDegree.Net

Jessica Merritt highlights a number of ways to use Google’s Personal Health Record (PHR), offering The Ultimate Guide to Google Health: 60+ Tips and Resources.

Canadian EMR

Digital records and privacy can be a mixed bag. Alan Brookstone reposts the media report UK Health Agency Loses 31,000 Patients Records.

Sharp Brains

Alvaro Fernandez writes about the Brain Age, Posit Science, and Brain Training Topics, reporting both good and bad news regarding the assessment and training of cognitive skills.

Microarray Blog

Albin Paul discusses the options for a Semantic Search Engine for PubMed — Microsoft Vs Yahoo Vs Google Vs Oracle in Semantic Web Search.

Tomographyblog

András Székely discusses TomographyBlogSearch in the Making, describing the SeekRadiology Project, a search engine for diagnostic imaging.

Doctor-patient Communication

Canadian Medicine

Graham Lanktree reviews a study of prepared patients and internet information, which finds that the Web Buoys Doctor-patient Communication.

Medical Economics

Gail Garfinkel Weiss writes how the shift from authority-based medicine to one of shared responsibility is playing out in the exam room in The New Doctor-patient Paradigm.

The iPhone

Dr Penna

Dr. Sreeram Penna provides a list of health care applications currently available for the iPhone in Mobile Medical Software for the Iphone 3g.

Efficient MD

Dr. Joshua Schwimmer also writes about potential applications on the iPhone for doctors in The New 3G iPhone, the App Store, and Doctors.

Conclusion

That concludes the 27th edition of Medicine 2.0. My thanks to everyone who submitted an article. You can find more information about the carnival as well as the hosting schedule and past editions at the Medicine 2.0 Website.

Have you written a blog post about web 2.0 and medicine? Submit it to the next edition of Medicine 2.0 using the carnival submission form.

DSHI Systems is a physician-led medical technology company and a supplier of triage decision-support software solutions. Last week, the company announced the release of freeMD.com, an electronic doctor that performs an interview, analyzes symptoms and provides expert advice — all for free [1]. The website contains an expert system that emulates the triage function doctors perform when assessing the potential severity of a group of symptoms. FreeMD is able to analyze more than 3,000 symptoms and injuries in infants, children and adults.

FreeMD.com combines text and a video doctor to ask questions about your symptoms and past medical history, and then generates a record in the form of a personal web page. The personal web page contains important information about your condition, your answers to the interview questions, and links to specific health information. Consumers can print out a copy or email the record to their doctor for review. It’s as easy as clicking “E-Mail” or “Print” in the toolbar at the top right of the page.

According to Dr. Stephen Schueler, M.D., CEO of DSHI Systems [1]:

Consumers are on their own when making the decision to see a doctor. Do they go to the emergency room, urgent care center, doctor’s office, or the nurse retail clinic? How does the average person know what to do? We have created a life-like experience that provides personalized recommendations.

FreeMD provides answers to important questions, such as: what might be causing my symptoms; do I need to see a doctor; how do I care for myself; where should I go for care? The website enables consumer-driven healthcare by empowering consumers and enabling them to avoid dangerous delays in care. The system also suggests where to go for care, reducing dependance on the emergency room.

FreeMD Breakthrough Technology

• Uses video to conduct the interview (also uses text and photos)
• Analyzes thousands of symptoms and injuries
• Generates a personal web page that contains care instructions and a detailed health record

FreeMD Evidence-Based Medicine

• 100% physician-written and maintained
• Proven accuracy through millions of interactions
• Reviewed by doctors and nurses for more than 10 years

For the last eight years, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has used DSHI Systems’ Veterans Health Gateway, a sophisticated software system used by nurses to provide health advice via the telephone [2]. A similar system, 24/7 WebMed, has been used by University of Central Florida (UCF) students since 2004 to look up information on specific illnesses and allow the site to guide them through a series of questions about symptoms to determine the illness [3]. UCF now uses FreeMD, which replaces the older 24/7 WebMed system.

According to the website, freeMD doesn’t make a diagnosis, but instead determines your risk for one or more condition(s) that could explain your symptoms. Nevertheless, I tried freeMD a couple of times tonight while writing this article and was impressed with its recommendations. Give it a try and let me know your thoughts.

References

1. DSHI Systems Debuts FreeMD the Web’s First Virtual Doctor. DSHI Systems Press Release. 2008 Apr 21.
2. Veterans Health Gateway (VHG). Document Storage Systems, Inc. Services & Solutions. Accessed 2008 Apr 30.
3. UCF Students Can Access Health Information, Advice on 24/7 WebMed Site. University of Central Florida News & Information. 2004 Nov 21.