Healthcare Innovations

Muddling to a New Model

athenahealth is an odd company, but maybe just the one who can herd all those doctor-cats in a new direction.

Collective Intelligence: Crossover Healthcare: The Network is Nirvana, 2008-Jan-28, by Scott Shreeve

So instead of remaining a service operation only, [athenahealth] became a business intelligence engine that aggregated insurance rules, created software to analyze claims accuracy at the point of care delivery, and then advised physician practices on how to optimize their revenue. This was done through a series of technology, product, and service innovations. However, more important than any of these, the single greatest (smartest) thing that athena did was to build these solutions to function cohesively as part of a solutions Network. You see, every single provider on the athena Network is linked into the same database, uses the same version of the software, and benefits from the shared learning of every other provider on the network. Everything that athena does is an aggregation of the collective intelligence of all of its users.

Healthcare Search Engines

Dr. Parikh argues powerfully that doctors should NOT discourage patients from using the internet but steer them to the right areas. Also, we have a round-up of recently launched health search engines from Frank Gruber.

Salon: Is there a doctor in the mouse?, 2008-Jan, by Rahul K. Parikh, MD (subscription or day-pass required)

Over the past few years, Internet entrepreneurs have realized the vast potential of healthcare information. One example is Organized Wisdom, a search engine for medical issues. What gives it an edge over general search engines like Google and Yahoo is that its content is vetted by health professionals. If you type "autism" into Organized Wisdom, you'll receive an organized set of links to reliable sites that allow you to look at the symptoms of autism, potential treatments, research studies, and support groups. If you do the same using Google, the first site you'll see is Autism.org. If you click the link, you'll be taken to a page sponsored by groups preaching that vaccines are unsafe and favoring "alternative" treatments that are untested and potentially dangerous.

Other good sites are linked to academic centers like the renowned Mayo Clinic, private groups like Kaiser Permanente (full disclosure: I'm a Kaiser doctor), and the government's Heal

Alt Search Engines: A Health 2.0 Round-up. by Frank Gruber, 2008-Jan-7

I don’t need a medic but sometimes I have medical questions, like what is “Steakhouse Syndrome”, “Chronic Pain” or “Blurred Vision.” Of course you can check out Web MD or HealthLine but there are a few new medical searches that offer more of a Web 2.0 approach. This article will examine a number of the new health and medical sites on the Web.