The Athens Regional Medical Center in Georgia is using a different technology to improve patient care in one small way.

The hospital is using QR codes to help women schedule mammograms. The hospital has been inserting the little black-and-white boxes into their various forms of advertising, such as newspapers and magazines.

When a woman uses her smartphone to capture the code, she is taken to the Athens Regional website where she can book her mammogram.

Marketing manager Courtney Alford-Pomeroy has this to say about the campaign (as quoted at Athens Banner-Herald -

We felt that women in our community were looking for more convenience in accessing their health care…the QR code was a test to see how popular this is going to be in our market.

The multiple-source approach to the QR code placement allows Pomeroy to see where their marketing is the most effective, whether that be magazines, newspaper ads or postcards.

It came down to wanting to be able to track where people were reading about our services and pulling up our services on the website. I want to make sure that we’re targeting people in the places that are most convenient for them.”

And just how successful have the QR codes in the ads been? Apparently the hospital has seen a 15% increase in the visits to the online mammograms form. Also, those who use the QR code to visit the online mammogram request site are more likely to actually schedule an appointment.

Pomeroy said that she plans on using QR codes in their next “health and marketing campaign.”

Do you think QR codes would increase the chance that you would schedule a procedure? Mammograms? Prostate exams? Even basic physicals? Let us know in the comments.

Dr. Beverly B. Green, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and other researchers examined if high blood pressure could be monitored over the Internet without having to visit a doctor.

"Our demographic was middle-aged, working people for whom Web-based care is particularly convenient, particularly for reporting BP numbers and simple or structured communications," Green told Reuters Health.

The clinical trial looked at 778 people with uncontrolled high blood pressure and access to the Internet. They were divided randomly with some receiving traditional care, or home blood pressure monitoring and online training, or home monitoring, online training, and management by a pharmacist online.

The Internet allowed people to email their doctors to refill prescriptions, make appointments, receive test results, and find health information.

After one year, around one third of the people in the first two groups were able to get their blood pressure to a normal level. More than half of those who received online care managed by a pharmacist were able to get their blood pressure to normal.

"Web communication (e-mail and secure messaging) improves health care because it is always available (24/7), allows people to respond at a time that is convenient to them, and often in a much briefer way than over the telephone or certainly during an in-person visit," said Green.

Green said future studies are planned that will examine managing other chronic conditions like diabetes.

Similar initiatives are taking place at companies like Revolution Health Group LLC and Google, which launched its online healthcare service, Google Health in February.

Information stored in Kaiser’s personal health records, including patient’s test results, prescriptions and immunizations, will be transferred to Microsoft’s HealthVault, an online service that allows patients to manage medical data from a number of Web sites and selectively share information with them.

The initial program will be open to only 156,000 employees of Kaiser Permanente. Microsoft and Kaiser say the pilot program’s long-term goal is to bring medical data online and allow user’s to access their data wherever they go and share it with doctors or pharmacies.

Health-care analysts say companies such as Google and Microsoft face obstacles in attempting to bring the country’s health-care system online. The industry is heavily regulated and people have been hesitant to adopt online personal health records, partly because of security and privacy worries.

The initiative is expected to reduce health-care costs by allowing people to make better, more educated choices about their healthcare according to the Wall Street Journal.

Healthy Thoughts From Google

It is straight out of Google’s modus operandi for information these days: find it, organize it, make it personally relevant. The company would like to see the health care industry treat information in a similar fashion over the next decade.

Google VP Adam Bosworth spoke at the 2007 American Medical Association of Informatics (AMIA) Spring Congress about this topic. His talk focused on three main principles of making health information more effectively available:

• Discovery – Consumers should be able to discover the most relevant health information possible

• Action – Consumers should have direct access to personalized services to help them get the best and most convenient possible health support
• Community – Consumers should be able to learn from and educate those in similar health circumstances and from their health practitioners

Fulfilling that vision requires “two core changes in electronic medicine,” Bosworth said in his talk. Health data needs to be computable, a change that should happen with the advent of forthcoming standards for doing so.

Authentication and trust form the other issue. Unsurprisingly, it’s an area where Bosworth said Google can help (emphasis added):

We face this issue every day. For example, people want to expose one of their Google calendars to some time management service or to Salesforce.com, but not all their calendars, let alone their email, their personal Google Documents (spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations) or their other personal data. Thus, giving up their user name and password to the service is totally inappropriate.

And it is important that not only are access rights constrained, but that they can be revoked because the customer may end up losing trust in the individual or online service with whom the data is shared. To us, trust does not mean a national identity since as far as we can see this flies in the face of the very human need to compartmentalize and maintain privacy.

We have come up and are shipping a solution known as Account Authentication Proxy for Web-Based Applications, also known as Auth/Sub. For more information see http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/AuthForWebApps.html.

In short, Bosworth is saying trust Google to help with this, and not the government.

A few weeks back, BusinessWeek ran an interesting story called Get Healthy–Or Else, about how Scotts, the lawn-care company, is tackling the high cost of health insurance. Some might argue their approach is forward thinking (one employee’s life was saved by being nagged to go to a physical) or invasive (another employee was let go for failing a drug test for…tobacco.)

In this week’s issue there was a two-page spread for feedback from readers called Wellness–Or Orwellness? Whether you agree or not with what Scotts is doing it makes for thought-provoking reading. Readers raise issues of privacy, fairness, and whether healthy people should be paying for obese people’s health care costs.

My .02? Companies should get out of the health care business. Employees often feel trapped in a job (not here at flyte!) because they’re afraid they’re going to lose health insurance. Some employers may subconsciously (or even consciously) hire younger, seemingly-healthier people to lower premiums. Health care costs are part of what’s crippling the American auto industry. (Lack of foresight, over-reliance on trucks and SUVs and bad management also factor in.)

By getting businesses out of health care and letting them focus on their core business would be a boon to companies and the people who work there. 

Comments

The message is that someone doesn’t have to be alone in looking for health information, but they can be as private as they like.

Bashir has about ten years of experience in search, and he and his fellow TauMed creators have been working on improving the health search experience. Doing so means going vertical, he said. “It’s to avoid duplication while enhancing credible sources.”

Search occupies one segment of what TauMed offers. TauMed has HONcode accreditation; that comes from the Swiss-based Health On the Net Foundation. Search results come from resources like A.D.A.M.’s Health Illustrated Encyclopedia, and from a variety of trusted online resources.

Bashir noted their practice of licensing such premium content. On the technology side, they do mining on that data so it can be presented to a visitor based on other text in a page. As one changes topics by clicking on a related search term in the sidebar, TauMed updates the search results, terms, and related health news on display.

“One shouldn’t have to leave content just to find related info,” said Bashir.

Since its mid-December launch, Bashir has been bringing community resources into play. Searchers familiar with services like Yahoo Answers and Answerbag will see a similar health-focused offering on TauMed.

Visitors can post questions, other users can post answers, and the community can vote on those replies. People who want to go farther in discussing health issues can signup for a Health Share. These Shares can be opened to the TauMed community, or kept private as desired.

People can personalize TauMed through the use of a feature called My Health Space. We walked through its functions during our conversation.

Profiles in My Health Space can be public or private. When signed in, the profile keeps the person’s search history and categories visited on TauMed. I asked Bashir if this could be cleared out as desired, and he demonstrated how to do so with a single click.

TauMed offers an alternative to the health verticals one might use today. It’s more focused than a general search engine would be on health issues, and its community and personalization provide a deeper visitor experience for those who want it.

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