28. February 2008 by Jon Moss.

Google on Thursday laid out plans for one of its most anticipated new services, a digital health records system meant to give users more control over their personal healthcare.The plans would put Google’s database of health records at the heart of a broader health information system that draws in health insurers, doctors and others, potentially giving the internet company a central role as the health industry moves towards greater use of information technology.

The initiative also opens a new front in Google’s spreading confrontation with Microsoft. The software company launched its own personal health records system, known as HealthVault, late last year.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive, outlined the Google Health plans at a conference in Florida on Thursday. The system will be based on personal health records that patients authorise their health insurers, doctors and others to move into Google’s database.

Other companies will then be able to write software applications that make use of these data, for instance creating services that help patients manage their medications or warn parents when their children need inoculations.

“There are a lot of applications you can’t envisage today,” Mr Schmidt told the Financial Times, adding that the overall aim was to improve the health of users by improving the quality of care.

That “platform” strategy could one day make the Google database the foundation of a more automated health information service. “We hope to get partnerships with all the health companies, so that if you have a prescription we just suck it straight in,” Mr Schmidt said.

Personal health record systems are not new, but the idea has been slow to catch on since there have been few incentives for doctors to automate health records or for patients to try to draw all their personal information together in one database.

The biggest incentives for people to use the new system include the ability to take control of their own records when they change health insurers or doctors, Mr Schmidt said. Also, patients who obtain drugs from more than one pharmacy will benefit if their records are consolidated in one place, he added.

For now, Google has no plans to sell advertising around the health service, Mr Schmidt said. Instead, it hopes to raise awareness of the Google brand and encourage greater use of its search engine.

-FT

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26. February 2008 by Jon Moss.

If you don’t have UnitedHealthcare as your group medical provider, then you probably aren’t aware of EmployerEservices.  If you do have United, and don’t know, then you may want to question your existing broker.

EmployerEservices allows your company to manage virtually every aspect of benefit administration online and in real-time.  The benefits are increased efficiency as well as saving time & money.  Here are some of the tasks that can be accomplished on EmployerEservice:  We’ve found that most clients want us to do the service on their behalf using the system, but some really like the hands-on control.  If you’d like to know more check out http://www.welcometoemployereservices.com/online/, or contact us for more information.

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19. February 2008 by Jon Moss.

Humana has a nifty little tool allowing for the access and analysis of small employer group plan utilization.  Would it be helpful for you as a small business to be able to know how often your employees:

• visit the doctor
• purchase prescription drugs
• meet deductibles & out-of-pocket maximums

 That type of information is extremely important to employee benefit specialists.  It allow us to determine which benefits are more important to the employees, and which ones are less used.  When implementing an HSA or HRA knowing this type of data is crucial to the success of the plan.

 Humana has recently updated BUD to allow brokers, and the small businesses they advise, access to actionable, group-specific benefit information previously available only to large companies, allowing employers to model the impact of different benefit designs, track health plan usage, and ultimately better budget for employee health care – a large and growing bottom-line expense for many small firms.

“BUD empowers brokers to deliver an unparalleled level of guidance to small companies as they make critical decisions about their health coverage,” said Jerry Ganoni, president, Humana Small Business. “Many companies unknowingly provide richer benefits than their employees use or want. With knowledge gleaned from BUD, small businesses are better able to choose the most appropriate health benefits solution for their workforce.”

Designed with the help of Humana’s actively-appointed brokers and agents, BUD features two primary tools to help employers choose and use their health plan with confidence: the Health Utilization Tool and the Contribution Strategy Tool, both of which protect the privacy of employee health information by removing identifying data.

The Health Utilization Tool offers employers information about employee usage of key services, including doctor office visits, prescription drug purchases, inpatient admissions, outpatient surgery and emergency room visits. Brokers can show small employers how the usage of these services by their own employees compares with that of similar accounts in the same geographic area and industry. Brokers can help employers track deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses to see how many employees have satisfied zero percent, 50 percent or more, and 100 percent of their in- and out-of-network limits.

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11. February 2008 by Jon Moss.

ZocDoc is an online appointment tool for searching for doctors and scheduling appointments as easily as making a restaurant reservation for dinner online. The company launched early last autumn in the New York city area, focusing initially on dentists. 

Nearly 6 months later, ZocDoc has about 50 dentists that have signed on board to try out this free scheduling service, and is now ready to roll out its tools for doctors as well, beginning Feb 14th. When I first spoke to Cyrus Massoumi and Dr. Oliver Kharraz prior to the launch about its upcoming expansion, and was anxious to hear about how the company had grown in these past few months. “It’s all been organic,” Massoumi said. “Doctors are approaching us, asking when we’ll be ready to add them to our site.” 

In addition to layering doctors into ZocDoc, the company will be launching its service in two new cities, branching out on its nationwide plan. Users voted, and the next two cities that will have ZocDoc’s search and appointment services will be San Francisco and Washington D.C. This roll out strategy is quite typical for localized search tools such as ZocDoc, and seems to be allowing for a rather focused effort on building up databases. 

ZocDoc, along with other localized search tools like Grayboxx, has the opportunity to leverage the capabilities of its web-based service to enable doctors’ offices across the nation in an integrated manner that would have been more difficult ten years ago, as is evident by previous startups like OpenTable, which obviously has a similar business model for allowing people to take reservations for restaurants online. It will be interesting to see the “new age” version of such a service penetrate the market without the burden of having to introduce software or generally new concepts.

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