Anything that can take the burden and frustration off of patients from the healthcare industry’s hardly navigable morass of bureaucracy and costliness is a welcome change. Building on existing offerings from both companies, Microsoft and GE believe that they can ultimately improve the quality of healthcare given to patients. Quoted from Microsoft’s press release, Jeffrey R. Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE, explained the goals of the partnership:

The complementary nature of GE Healthcare’s and Microsoft’s individual expertise will drive new insights, solutions and efficiencies to further advance the two companies’ shared vision of a connected, patient-centric healthcare system. The global healthcare challenges of access, cost and quality of care delivery are creating a new focus on the performance and accountability of healthcare delivery systems — in every country, at every level of care. This venture will demonstrate what is possible when leading companies with complementary capabilities work together to meet a common goal.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer added:

High-quality, affordable healthcare is one of the biggest challenges facing every nation, but it’s also an area where technology can make a huge difference. Combining Microsoft’s open, interoperable health platforms and software expertise with GE’s experience and healthcare solutions will create exciting opportunities for patients and healthcare providers alike. Working together, GE and Microsoft can help make healthcare systems more intelligent and cost efficient while improving patient care.

Some of the platforms planned by the joint venture is a software suite that will include Microsoft Amalga, Microsoft Vergence, Microsoft expreSSO, GE Healthcare eHealth, and GE Healthcare Qualibiria. The two companies hope that their endeavor will address many of the problems they have identified in the current healthcare system, such as healthcare associated infections and chronic disease management. Michael J. Simpson, current vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare IT, will serve as the company’s CEO. The two companies also project that the venture will produce job growth within its first five years of existence.

Despite the fact that the new company has not yet been christened with a name, it is slated to launch sometime in the first half of 2012.

Interestingly, social media is even making its way into the healthcare industry. Now, while you might not be able to “friend” your doctor on Facebook, the industry is putting forth an effort to integrate social media.

Healthcare, like the finance industry, is difficult, since it is heavily regulated. It is taking some time for health professionals to get on board, but in the meantime, consumers have embraced it with full force. Whether it is for keeping friends and family updated on a loved one’s condition, connecting with others in similar situations, or educating people on their own health experience, consumers have successfully made healthcare relevant to social media.

Sona Mehring, the CEO and Founder of CaringBridge, calls this activity “compassion technology.” She coined the term back in 1997, before most of the social sites that we’re familiar with were around. She told us that technology has a tendency to be cold and impersonal but that she knew it could be used in other ways. She wanted to “merge technology with its ability to connect people in a very emotional way.”

Through the tragic loss of her friend’s baby, Brighid, Mehring put her “compassion technology” to use. Before Brighid passed away, she created a website to keep everyone up-to-date on her condition. Through the experience, she wanted to give other people the ability to do the same and created CaringBridge.

At this point, social media and healthcare are most commonly used together to create a support system. This usage has been very successful and has given a sense of empowerment to patients. Fortunately, as evidenced by organizations like the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, healthcare professionals are showing a desire to become involved with it as well.

As seen in this post from the organization, there are many challenges involved with integrating social media into healthcare. The interactions that doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers make will vary from patient to patient and disease to disease, but they have the potential to build stronger and more trusting relationships.

Social media isn’t designed or intended to replace traditional practices, but instead, is meant to enhance them. It has effectively done this in many industries, and it looks like it might complement the healthcare industry going forward.

Would you like to see your healthcare providers utilize social media and social functions?

Forty percent of online consumers use social media for health information (reading or posting content).

Individuals who use healthcare social media fall into two broad groups; the highly engaged patient who takes an active role in health management (80%) versus individuals who lack confidence to play an active role in their own health (20%). Social efforts must address these two audience types with very different needs.

Consumers engage with healthcare social media for both rational and emotional reasons. Emotional healthcare social media users want support from people who are going through a similar experience. Rational social media users are searching for information about their specific conditions and symptoms.

"Our research shows that social media is a valuable forum for patients to discuss their health issues and concerns while connecting with others facing similar circumstances," said Mark Miller, senior vice president, Epsilon Strategic & Analytic Consulting Group.
 
"This participation provides reassurance and intimacy, and many of the individuals who are highly engaged in social media feel better equipped to manage their health."

Many people have mixed feelings about how pharmaceutical companies should participate in websites and social media, but most are open to some level of participation as long as it is clearly disclosed.

Endorsements by government and non-profit organizations, such as the American Diabetes Association, the FDA and third-party watchdog groups adds credibility to social content.
 

"We want to increase understanding of the industry’s system for ensuring medicine safety," said Dr. Joseph M. Feczko, chief medical officer for Pfizer.

"Currently, information about drug safety is available through numerous, but fragmented channels, which can be challenging for healthcare professionals and patients as they discuss the risks and benefits of various treatments."

Pfizer says the Web site will feature illustrations and interactive tools to educate about medicine safety. Users will be able to find information and questions to prepare them for a doctor’s visit, along with interactive tools on topics like how to read a medicine label.

The site will also feature a link for reporting side effects from all medical products regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

 More than a third of Americans surveyed in an April 2007 Harris Pool indicated they did not take prescribed medicine because of safety concerns about risks and more than a quarter chose not to fill a prescription at all over safety concerns.

"With the population aging and medicine use increasing, information about medicine safety is more important than ever before," said Gretchen S. Dieck, Ph.D., senior vice president, Safety and Risk Management for Pfizer.

"Yet surveys of practicing physicians, health policy experts and the general public have revealed a lack of understanding of the fundamental safety science, processes and terminology."

Healthcare online ad spending could rise to $2.2 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer. That potential has plenty of companies interested in capturing the eyeballs and the revenue of the persistent demand for health information.

Healthline made the newest bid for the competitive marketplace, where major tech players like Microsoft and Google, and a host of startups all reach for the brass ring of healthcare ad revenue. The launch of HealthSTAT, or Healthline Semantic Taxonomy Ad Targeting, arrives with the promise of being able to better match concepts, not just keywords, when people search on a HealthSTAT-powered site.

Several major online destinations already serve Healthline’s ads: United Health, AARP, and Merriam-Webster among them. Healthline said a content page describing a given set of symptoms, for example, would generate ads matching suggested treatments for the root causes.

On the medical side, Healthline promised its ad network can work operate with the distinct requirements of given pharmaceutical campaigns. They cited the example of an anti-psychotic drug that should only be placed alongside content related to bipolar conditions, as opposed to general treatment of depression.

Such depth of information should prove useful to the many people who seek out data on medical conditions each day. If executed well, an accurate ad campaign could put people on track, with their physician’s valuable input, into finding the right solutions for their needs. That’s not a bad outcome for an ad.

Healthcare as an area of interest online has ramped up in recent months with entrants vying to earn the trust of people and become a destination for their medical interests, including networking with like-minded folks.

Healia Logo
(Photo Credit: Healia)

Consumers who may feel spoiled for choice between Healthline, HealthVault, RightHealth, TauMed, Revolution Health, WebMD, and others have another option to consider. Healia Communities opened today, with an emphasis on its community and on social networking.

Visitors to Healia Communities may join like-minded groups on the site, categorized by medical condition. This opens up the ability to discuss and learn from others about various ailments.

Answers don’t come from just the regular people in a community. Healia founder Tom Eng said in a statement that people with questions about an ailment can ask it on Healia, and see a response from physicians, nurses, and/or other health professionals within 48 hours.

Once those answers reach the community, users may rate them and the information they provide. People seeking communities have the option of searching for them based on criteria like health condition, age, location, or other factors.

Amid the rush to create these services, like Google’s efforts to catch up with its Health product, we wonder if there will be a consolidation in the future. The personal nature of healthcare information may make it likely people will want to stay with one provider.

An insurance provider like Aetna, which opted for Healthline for its members, could drive adoption of one or two of these services as the standard for sharing healthcare information within its membership. This makes us believe a shakedown of providers will happen over the next couple of years.

The real accomplishment health-oriented websites might make will be with the friends they keep. Though this may be to the dismay of Microsoft, which runs HealthVault, and Google, which has a pilot project with the Cleveland Clinic, the old adage of who you know will matter more to people looking for an option to manage their healthcare information online.

Healthline scored a big win in finding a friend in major health insurer Aetna, and that company

CMPI has concerns about those searches. They dropped a report into the inbox titled “Insta-Americans: The Empowered (and Imperiled) Health Care Consumer in the Age of Internet Medicine.”

The group presented a look at searches for Crestor, a cholesterol medication; Avandia, a diabetes drug; teen suicides and Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs; and autism and vaccines.

“The Web is home to many important sources of authoritative medical information including the National Institutes of Health, its related National Library of Medicine and medical specialty group web sites,” said CMRI. “However they are rarely the sites that show up or are seen first.”

Peter Pitts, a former FDA associate commissioner and contributor to the CMRI report, criticized the heavy presence of lawyers, attorney referral services, herbal alternative treatments, and information websites run by people and groups “ideologically opposed to pharmaceuticals.”

Interesting stuff, to be certain. But when this kind of report drops over the transom, so to speak, from a new source, we’re always curious about who’s passing these juicy tidbits along.

A search on Google for Pitts shows his associate commissioner position as being for external relations at FDA. In other words, a marketing position.

An odd choice to head up something called Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. We had the naïve expectation a doctor or similar professional would be running the show. Curiouser and curiouser, we decided to poke this soft underbelly a little more.

A link from Counterpunch proved interesting. Pitts and CMPI vice-president Robert Goldberg both worked for the FDA, as have other members of CMPI.

Counterpunch writer Evelyn Pringle, writing about the FDA and the scandal around Avandia’s potential for elevating the risk of heart attacks and death from cardiovascular episodes, discussed the attempts to discredit the Cleveland Clinic and its researcher who published the Avandia findings, Dr. Steven Nissen.

Pitts defended FDA spokesman Douglas Arbesfeld in June 2007, a month after Arbesfeld attempted to discredit Nissen and the Avandia study with the media. Arbesfeld was disciplined by the FDA for his actions under the role of FDA spokesperson.

Pringle called CMPI “a whole nest of ex-(pharmaceutical industry) moles who served the industry in one capacity or another in the Bush Administration’s FDA.” One current CMPI advisor, Daniel Troy, a former chief counsel for the FDA, helped get preemption in place for the drug companies.

“This “assertion of preemption” says that, as long as the FDA has approved a drug and its label, private citizens in state courts cannot sue the drug company for failing to warn about a product’s serious health risks, even in cases where it can be shown that the company concealed studies that revealed the risk from the public and the FDA,” wrote Pringle.

Now, we have our issues with Google, especially on the topic of privacy, the purchase of DoubleClick, and the potential for one company to be able to tap information on roughly 85 percent of the Internet-using public. We’re curious about CMPI’s motives in doing this study.

The issues CMPI raises regarding search results have been the kinds of topics Google continually tweaks its algorithm to rank appropriately. Our searches for Crestor and Avandia found links to side effects, warning/recalls, and other relevant topics atop the search results, but under the AdWords box which had a lawyer ad for Avandia and a third-party cholesterol remedy ad for Crestor.

While the safe option would be to say “ask a doctor for advice,” we have to note a couple of instances where Google’s search proved successful in helping someone with a medical condition when conventional approaches, including doctor’s visits, did not.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams suffered from a strange affliction that seemed to tie a throat affliction to a hand affliction. Through Google, Adams discovered a rare neurological condition called a spasmodic dysphonia that matched his symptoms.

A specialist confirmed what Google revealed to Adams, who was treated successfully. One has to give Google credit for pulling together the details Adams needed, when he needed them.

Similar cases have been noted elsewhere. Google isn’t an MD, and certainly isn’t perfect when it comes to clinical diagnoses. But throwing a blanket of mistrust over it for healthcare searches isn’t an appropriate course of action either.

Which isn’t much. I put that out there so others won’t have to.

I also make that disclaimer in advance of what is a grander, more important topic: To what extent is the so-called "Googlization of reality" affecting our understanding of the world around us? The answer may not be so available and everybody with a stake in it will give you different answers.

If you took the Internet’s word for everything, you might believe that Ron Paul is a Republican frontrunner or that the elephant population has tripled in the past six months (see Stephen Colbert’s "wikiality" social experiment).

Clearly, information on the Internet (even Google) isn’t perfect, and knowing your source is paramount, hence my opening disclaimer.

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI) is a medical industry thinktank, fronted by former Bush Administration FDA officials. CMPI released a study this week outlining the perils of relying on Google for prescription medication information.

“What we found was not only disturbing, but dangerous to public health,” said CMPI vice president Robert Goldberg. “For millions of Americans, Google has replaced the family physician. People trust, and make decisions, based on the information they find online. With few exceptions, the information we found appeared legitimate but had no medical authority whatsoever. In many cases, we found lawyers posing as medical experts.”   

For searches on keywords like "Crestor side effects" and "Avandia side effects" CMPI found:

• 65% of the first three pages of search results came from sites which were biased or contained unverified information.
• Almost half of the first three pages of search results belonged to lawyers and attorney referral services seeking plaintiffs for class action lawsuits.
• Zero official regulatory pages or professional medical organizations appeared in the inventory of results.

Crestor is a cholesterol medication made by AstraZeneca and Avandia is a type 2 diabetes drug produced by GlaxoSmithKline.

Many of the results also referred to "unmoderated" patient forums, sites selling or promoting "alternative medicines" or were sites run by, as CMPI describes them, "anti-pharmaceutical activists."

All of these concerns and findings are published in a 33-page paper entitled "Insta-Americans: The Empowered (and Imperiled) Health Care Consumer in the Age of Internet Medicine." Similar concerns were voiced about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and their (Internet) relationship to teen suicide rates and links between vaccinations and autism.

"Much like our email boxes are filled by ‘spam’ urging us to collect millions from Nigeria or confirm our banking information from phony Ebay or Bank of America security sites, a lot of the medical ‘information’ on the Web is designed to sell, deceive or frighten, rather than inform," said Goldberg.

Citing a Pew report, CMPI 113 million Americans search for health information, but three quarters rarely check the sources of the information.

According to Peter Pitts, CMPI President and former Associate Commissioner for External Affairs for the FDA, "it is important to remember that not everything online is true. The Internet has made it easier than ever before for charlatans and quacks to spread fear and misinformation. Mark Twain wrote: ?’Beware of health books. You might die of a misprint.’ The same can now be said of the Web."

And that can really affect pharmaceutical sales. Because doctors were afraid of lawsuits and patients were afraid of, you know, death, Avandia prescriptions had declined by 60 percent as September 2007.

Of course, it could also have something to do with the black box warning the FDA put on Avandia about increased heart problems. If you use a less targeted keyword, like simply "avandia," you’ll find that official government warning (and one for Crestor, too), along with official pharmaceutical company pages, scores of lawyer-sponsored AdWords links, pages from WebMD, the Mayo Clinic, the New York Times, USA Today, and a group called Public Citizen which runs a site called WorstPills.org.

Pitts and Goldberg aren’t especially fond of that last group, and single out Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who runs the site, as a source of misinformation about Avandia. Wolfe joins several others with lots of letters behind their names on the site’s About page. Maybe it’s because Wolfe has a close relationship with Ralph Nader, that CMPI labels them an anti-pharmaceutical activist group. Who knows?

But Wolfe’s opinion of Avandia match a Cleveland Clinic doctor named Stephen Nissen, whose May 2007 New England Journal of Medicine article about the drug CMPI cites as a "common source of misinformation." Dr. Nissen’s viewpoint however is echoed by a Toronto endocrinologist in this more recent (December 2007) USA Today article.

So why fixate on these drugs in particular? You could present a number of theories. CMPI is partially funded by the pharmaceutical industry, the Lilly Endowment (connected to Eli Lilly) being one of the largest contributors. Patients shying away from pharmaceuticals is bad for business.

A clue could be in reporter Evelyn Pringle’s article about Avandia, the FDA and CMPI. Pringle labels CMPI as "a home for industry hit men who served in the Bush Administration’s FDA." Pringle explains in detail Pitts’ and Goldberg’s association with Manning, Selvege & Lee, a PR firm representing many pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, and with FDA spokesman Douglas Arbesfeld, who has a close relationship with GSK.

But I’m sure that has nothing to do with their opinion on what is misinformation and what isn’t.

The extra-cynical of us might also notice CMPI’s definite stance against regulation of the health care industry and any type of universal health care. Those cynics might get really crazy and suggest that by advocating a greater reliance on your doctor and the drugs he or she prescribes rather than moonbat alternatives cuts down on the perception that there are flaws in the health care industry in its current privatized state. Plus, with obesity rates the way they are, diabetes medicines are big, big money.

But that’s just crazy right?

Well, anyway, CMPI says to check your sources, especially those sources found on Google, the nation’s most popular search engine, where most online health research begins. Sometimes people manipulate the information to suit them.   
 

But you might also conclude that a variety of sources is a good thing. I could be wrong. After all, I did all my research for this article on Google.

A statement from the WHIT Congress described Bosworth as Google’s former vice president of product management. Upon departing Google, Bosworth had been heading up the search advertising company’s Google Health project, now within the purview of Marissa Mayer.

It seems that Bosworth will recycle a speech he presented at Google’s New York operation in January 2007. He discussed why AJAX failed when first introduced in a speech titled ”Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn’t in Software and Why.”

Substitute “Healthcare” for “Software” and that’s the gist of Bosworth’s upcoming keynote.

”Adam is one of the most insightful, engaging and thought-provoking leaders in the technology field. We are all eager to have him share his unique perspective on improving healthcare before a healthcare technology audience,” Megan Antonelli, Executive Director of World Congress’s Technology Sector, said in the statement.

Bosworth does have an extensive techie pedigree, having worked on developing XML; the Microsoft database product known to Office users as Access; and BEA’s WebLogic. His blog posting has been far less active, with his last post appearing on October 5th.

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