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wellness

Perspectives on the Upcoming 5th Annual Healthcare Unbound Conference

 The Healthcare Unbound Conference is a highlight of my year and I always look forward to it!

What’s so special about this conference?

First, the caliber of the people attending.  It’s a stimulating mix of high-level clinical, technical and business types.  The energy is flowing and many people have told me how much they like to go just for the networking.

Second, the caliber of the conference organizer.  I’ve worked with many conference planners, and Satish Kavirajan is not your ordinary conference organizer.

Satish […]

Book Review: Good Health is Good Business

My colleague Dr. Dave Rearick asked me to review his recent book, Good Health is Good Business.  I’m pleased to recommend it enthusiastically.

While the book is targeted at small to medium size employers, the lessons go far beyond this audience.

By the end of the 3rd chapter, Dr. Rearick had convinced me of two conclusions that I’d describe as indisputable, but uncomfortable:

The only way employers are going to control their health care costs is to influence the health of their workforce.
You (the employer) need […]

UnitedHealth a First Mover for “PHRs for Life”. Way to go!

CONGRATULATIONS to UnitedHealth!  They’ve announced that they are making their personal health records (PHRs) transportable:

The OptumHealth and UnitedHealthcare units of Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth Group have made their personal health records service accessible for life.

That means an individual covered by UHC insurance or OptumHealth’s outsourced health and wellness services will be able to access their PHR–and continue to enter data into it–if they change jobs or insurance coverage.

Prediction:  over time, the market will force all employers, payers, and providers to provide interoperable and […]

Four Misconceptions About HealthVault and the Emerging Personal Health Information Ecosystem (PHI-Ecosystem)

by Vince Kuraitis and David C. Kibbe, MD MBA 

The health care and technology worlds are still trying to figure out what Microsoft’s HealthVault (HV) is all about.  We believe that there are a number of misconceptions out there about what HV is and isn’t:

Misconception #1: HealthVault is a personal health record (PHR).

Misconception #2: People don’t trust Microsoft, so they won’t sign up for and use HV.

Misconception #3: Patients don’t understand PHRs, don’t want them, and don’t know what they’d do with them.  […]

Connecting the Dots…Google Health Promises to Create AND Dominate Next Generation PHRs

Google Health (GH) could be the event of the decade in advancing health care reform — not just healthcare information technology (HIT) reform, but health care system reform. GH promises simultaneously to create AND dominate the market for next generation personal health records (PHRs). There is nothing else in our solar system or in the entire universe like it.

While Google has not “officially” announced the details of GH, they’ve left a lot of clues. In this essay I’m going to […]

Disease Management Going Mobile & Retail: QUALCOMM’s Health Care MVNO

An article in Wireless Week announces the creation of a new species: a health care MVNO named LifeComm. LifeComm promises to move disease management, wellness, and fitness into new territories.

What is a MVNO?

More acronyms!  What is a MVNO? A Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) is a mobile operator that does not own its own spectrum and usually does not have its own network infrastructure. Instead, MVNOs have business arrangements with traditional mobile operators to buy minutes of use (MOU) for sale to their […]

A Founding Father of DM Astonishingly Declares: “My Kid is Ugly”

Al Lewis, one of the founding fathers of DM, has shaped the face of the DM industry probably more than other any single individual. (This is all fine unless you happen to be the person whose face is being shaped by Al.)

Al has been unabashedly pro-DM.  Until now.  Al writes in a recent article in Managed Healthcare Executive:

Disease management as we now define it may be on its last legs, though no one knows it yet. The Disease Management Purchasing Consortium has noticed that the savings in all […]