HealthCamp San Diego 2011

 

Hot of the press! HealthCamp San Diego will be held in conjunction with the Health 2.0 Spring Fling on March 20th, 2011. Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente and the Rady School of Management.

For details, click here.

 

Who Should Manage Your Social Media Strategy [Accepted for publication in The Physician Executive]

By Kent Bottles, M.D., aka @kentbottles and Tom Sherlock aka @coloradohealth

Hospital and medical group leaders are facing the most challenging healthcare environment in recent memory. The need to decrease per-capita cost and increase quality to respond to federal healthcare reform and the global economy is a daunting task that requires two-way communication with a broad range of stakeholders. As reform unfolds, hospitals and medical groups of all sizes are embracing social media tools as soon as they realize that they’re no longer optional.

At least since the first quarter of 2010, analysts have been reporting that websites and search engines no longer dominate online communication.[i] Deloitte’s Social Networks in Health Care [ii] recently concluded that healthcare executives:

“who do not consider how to incorporate social networks into their future strategies risk being run over on the super-highway of health information sharing.”

Your social media strategy will work more smoothly when no one department has control, because it’s likely that before long employees in many of your departments will be using social media to do their jobs. It’s time for your Internet strategy to be managed by a qualified person — definitely one of your best-and-brightest — who reports directly to senior management and works with all department heads as an equal colleague.[iii]

You no longer have the opportunity to be an early adopter, but you can give yourself a big advantage by having people in every department who’ve been trained how to use social media intelligently, and who follow the lead of your social media manager. It’s essential that you understand that each of these tools is designed to nurture personal relationships and thereby strengthen loyalty to your institution:

• We use Twitter as our principal example because it’s a more important business tool for hospitals and medical groups than Facebook.
• If your organization isn’t already on Facebook, you should wait until you have a specific strategic reason for using it.
• Blogs can be particularly effective business tools if they let readers get to know and understand the blogger. Paul Levy’s “Running a Hospital” blog[iv] has shown how a CEO blog can be a powerful communication and branding tool.
• Many of your people should be listed on LinkedIn. Each person’s profile will be unique, but a certain amount of coordination is necessary to make sure your institution is identified accurately and consistently, for example.
• Your YouTube channel can present videos that let people get to know some of your key physicians and nurses, for example. Your social media manager can see to it that the content, style, and production values of your videos will send the right message about your organization.

You might conclude that you need to hire someone new to manage your website and your social media strategy. But don’t rush into a decision to bring in someone new to be your social media manager just because they have experience with these tools. It would be far better to find someone who is already thoroughly familiar with and personally committed to your institution.[v]

Note right away that social media is not something you use for advertising or marketing, and that it doesn’t duplicate or replace any of the functions of your website. When you reduce it to its fundamentals, social media strategy isn’t complicated. It’s social. It’s about establishing and nurturing authentic relationships in ways that will build loyalty to your institution. Your social media manager will:
Listen to what’s being said about you anywhere on the Internet, with special attention to your own social media channels.Respond by engaging those who are talking to or about your organization.Establish relationships by showing people respect, honesty, and enthusiasm, and then nurture those relationships by authentic personal interaction. Your social media manager will…..   (Read complete blog post, here).

To listen to Kent’s sage yet witty podcast, ‘Muddling Through The Week In Healthcare’, click here or on the BlogTalkRadio image.

Kent Bottles, M.D., is a former medical school professor, president and ceo, chief medical officer, and chief knowledge officer who is now an independent health care consultant, keynote speaker, and writer. kentbottles@gmail.com and http://twitter.com/KentBottles

Tom Sherlock is an Internet strategist, Website producer, and content developer who has worked with businesses and healthcare professionals since 1994. tom@aicolorado.com and http://twitter.com/ColoradoHealth

A Strategic Medical Group Algorithm To Assess ‘Social Media Readiness’

So what is social media really all about in terms of its relevance and application to medical groups, whether single or multi-specialty? Is it really about a better way to push an often boring, ‘look what I/we can do’ PR messaging? Or is it a genuine offer of a transformational opportunity to re-engineer health care operations and practices in service of quality, access, cost transparency and patient engagement? I say one way to get closer to an answer is to walk through this initial set of questioning recently developed for a client.

ACO Medical Group (ACOMG) Strategic Questions

Is there a perceived need among the partners for a formal planned marketing and communications function at the Group level? Yes/No?

If no, end of conversation and on to the ‘next prospect’.

If yes,

Is the web viewed as a material source (actual or potential) for patient acquisition, business development, and connectivity with key ACOMG constituents? Yes/no?

If no, end.

If yes, should ACOMG invest in a coordinated and comprehensive ‘web presence’ that builds, positions and maintains real-time, interactive capabilities via a coordinated yet distributed set of both ‘push’ and digital interactive properties.

If no, end.

If yes, is ACOMG presently enabled to perform as a content development, publishing and management company that feeds and curates these content, keyword, market and niche rich community management properties?

If yes, end.

If no, are these core skill sets presently domiciled at ACOMG staff (whether via professional or administrative staff, consultants, etc.)?

If yes, end.

If no, how will ACOMG acquire, develop or otherwise embed the needed skill sets and core competencies?

Build, buy or do nothing?

If build, or buy is there a budget benchmarked to a formal marketing and communications program consistent with published management company guidelines as a percent of revenue or expenses? If yes, game on. If no, end of conversation or need for additional education (good luck!).

And while you consider this ‘social media readiness assessment’ do bear in mind that the world continues to spin and has minimally surfaced the following things to consider:

Additional strategic considerations to throw into the mix as market conditions and environmental context:

On the future of community medicine in general, or your version of community medicine via your specific specialty:

1. What alliances and/or networking arrangements should your group be considering?

2. What vehicles (legal entities or other forms of organizations) should your group be considering, e.g., single specialty IPA, or ‘super IPA’ (re-purposed specialty GPO), MSO, super MSO, associating with a 3rd party PPMC (i.e., US Oncology), linking with an hospital system (which one, might there be more, or even a multi-hospital vehicle to be created?)

3. What formal strategic positioning thought is underway given the relatively short horizon for ACO participation? Have you evaluated the range and wisdom of various participation options, i.e., as single sites; as an integrated group; with hospital participation or not ( a very key question)?

Basically [medical group leadership], do you have previous experience in dealing with these strategic issues (many of which seem to be re-cycling prior themes albeit with ‘new and improved’ acronyms)? Is there ‘institutional memory’ from the HMO, IPA, MSO, or PHO days? Is the ‘wisdom’ of the senior members of the group being shared with the younger generation, who carry the longitudinal stake in the practice’s sustainability? Or is the default position just to do nothing and see what happens?

Bottom line is it’s all about choice… and there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here, only informed/uninformed choices and consequences; and inaction, denial or minimization is a firm choice, no doubt with inevitable consequences! Cheers!

HealthCamp San Diego Line-up Growing!

With San Diego County’s emergence as a global center of health care innovation and its recent recognition by the state as an official California Innovation Hub focusing on wireless health, you should consider coming out to San Diego a day before the mHealth Networking Conference to participate in grass-roots health care innovation at the HealthCamp “unconference”.

HealthCamp San Diego is Tuesday, September 7 at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center. Event sponsors are Kaiser Permanente San Diego, West Wireless Health Institute, Health 2.0, Pacific Oncology and several others.

The “unconference” begins with peers in health care and technology introducing topics and discussing innovations that will advance consumer-centric health care in the health 2.0 world.

Inspirational session leaders and participants include: Joe Smith, MD, Chief Medical and Science Officer of the West Wireless Health Institute; Vince Kuraitis of e-CareManagement; John Mattison, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Assistant Medical Director of Kaiser Permanente Southern California; Ted Chan, MD, Professor of Clinical Medicine, Medical Director, Department of Emergency Medicine, UC San Diego Medical Center, and leader of the San Diego Beacon Community initiative; Jeffrey Benabio, MD, (aka @DermDoc) a Kaiser Permanente dermatologist and leader in social media and patient care, and Michael Yada of Life Technologies.

Representatives will also be available to discuss the successful data exchange program in San Diego between Kaiser Permanente and the VA through the National Health Information Network (NHIN).

If this September 7th “unconference” event is of interest, please scroll down for more information.  We have only a handful of free spaces for journalists and bloggers, so if you are interested in attending, please let me know soon.

Join us! For more information or to register, click here.

Direct Provider Access Networks: DIY Healthcare Reform Now! – A SxSW Panel Picker Entry

Thanks to the initiative of Alex B. Fair, founder, CEO and chief evangelista of FairCareMD, the priceline for matching doctors to patients ‘one deal at a time’; an impressive roster of healthcare innovators have teamed up to carry the message on alternative forms of healthcare delivery and finance at SxSW 2011.

The program description reads:

Doctors, Employers, and most Americans are unclear on how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will work for them but a few million of us are not waiting to find out. With over 100 million Americans paying directly for a large portion of their care themselves, the need for a better way to Go Direct for care has never been greater.

In the past year over 2 million Americans and thousands of doctors have started using “Direct Provider Access” networks (DPAs) rather than traditional insurance-based medicine alone. This is because these new websites and physician practice models allow for DIY Healthcare Reform NOW and provide better care at reduced costs compared to insurance-based medicine.

Patients are taking charge of their own healthcare, paying directly, and using insurance for emergencies only. Doctors love DPAs too because being paid directly lets them put the Care back into Healthcare. Direct Pay medicine reduces overhead costs by up to 40% allowing them to spend more time on giving great care. This significant mindshift is changing the healthcare landscape.

In 2010 DPAs have been the fastest growing networks in America and they have even been written into the Healthcare Reform legislation. In a short, interactive play starring some of the leaders of the DIY Healthcare Reform/ Patient Empowerment movement we will show how DPAs are changing the ‘patient experience’ and improving care.

1. What are Direct Provider Access networks and what can they do for me?

2. How do/ will DPAs interact with the healthcare reform act of 2010?

3. Why did these not exist before? Isn’t this the same as old fashioned doctors? How does this tie in with Social Media?

4. Why can’t we have true pricing transparency in healthcare and what needs to change in order to get there?

5. What is the future of DPAs – will they just be swallowed up again by Insurance companies?

Confirmed panelists include:

• ePatientDave
• Garrison Bliss, MD, Qliance
• Jefferey Rice, MD, Healthcare Blue Book
• Howard J. Luks, MD, iMedExchange
• Alex B. Fair, FairCareMD

Please consider voting us into the first ever healthcare track at SxSW, here!

‘Direct Practice’ Medicine Gaining Increased National Visibility

A recent clip featuring Garrison Bliss, MD, founder of Qliance was profiled on NBC Nightly News under the title of ‘Flat-Rate Health Care A Viable Option?’

As this form of innovation is a niche, and largely unknown part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), I include it, here.

Kudos to Dr. Bliss and the Qliance crew!

w00t! Inaugural HealthCamp San Diego Scheduled For 9/7/10

I must say, after my first meeting with Mark Scrimshire, HealthCamp evangelista extraordinaire, at the ‘cocktail party’ for the World Health Congress held in Carlsbad, California, in February of 2009, I became an inspired ‘healthcamper’. My participation and experience with HealthCamp for the next several months was ‘virtually’ via Twitter, and the periodic live streaming of HealthCamps’ on uStream. I got to experience my first HealthCamp ‘in the flesh’ at HealthCamp SFBay in October on my way to the Health 2.0 in San Francisco. Since then, I have adopted the charge to seed a HealthCamp in the city of San Diego.

Only recently did the generosity of Kaiser Permanente permit this vision to be fully realized. At a ‘pre-Barcamp’ San Diego social hour of life sciences and bio-tech tweeps including Mary Canady, aka @marycanady, I met Dr. Jeff Benabio, aka @dermdoc on Twitter. We discussed the granular and un-conference nature of HealthCamp, which he immediately ‘got’, and embraced as a practitioner of the social media arts, and bang! HealthCamp San Diego was borne! Thank you Dr. Benabio! Thank You Kaiser, especially, Danielle Cass aka @daniellecass.

So San Diego Tweeps, the inaugural meeting of HealthCamp San Diego will be held at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center, in Mission Valley, on September 7th, prior to the 2nd Annual mHealth Inititative Conference on September 8th & 9th, 2010.

HealthCamp is a collaborative experience that typically tethers to how interactive digital or social media, open source and the best of the Internet, mobile (mHealth) web, and process innovation can enable better health(care) outcomes via more effective patient or consumer engagement, and incidentally further evolve developers in health technology applications and/or platforms.

HealthCamp is a user-organized ‘un–conference’ that brings together consumers (aka e-patients), health providers, payors, health industry experts and technology professionals for a one (1) day session to exchange ideas informally, locally, openly. Participants themselves provide the content, with break-out sessions they develop themselves and plug into a schedule grid on the day of the event. Anyone can present and host a session in nearly any format.

Past HealthCamp’s have been held in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Nashville, Oakland (the SF Bay area), Maryland, and the UK. For a brief overview of HealthCamp, click here.

HealthCamp San Diego is coordinating with the 2nd mHealth Networking Conference to be held at the same location following HealthCamp San Diego on September 8th and 9th, 2010.

Please consider joining us for this inaugural ‘un-conference’ experience. Among the many topics likely to be presented in the tech-enabled consumer empowerment conversation is emerging health information technology (HIT) capabilities, with an emphasis on new communication patterns enabled by mobile technologies for:

– patient communication by text and email
– clinician collaboration systems
– use of apps on mobile devices; and
– aspects of user-generated care

Fee: $25.00, $5.00 for full time students.

For more information, or to register, click here:

About HealthCamp

HealthCamp is a collaborative experience designed to create open space for peer-to-peer learning, group process collaboration and creative expression. As an ‘un-conference’ all session content is participant-generated, many of which tether either direct or indirectly to the promise of emerging interactive digital or social media, to improve health(care) outcomes via more effective patient and/or consumer engagement with their health. Particular focus is paid to the dynamic mHealth (mobile) market due to the exploding use of iPhone, Droid and other mobile devices.

7th Annual Healthcare Unbound Conference in San Diego – July 19th & 20th

A quick note to call your attention to the 7th Annual Healthcare Unbound conference which begins tomorrow, Monday, July 19th through Tuesday July 20th, in San Diego at the US Grant Hotel.

This is an impressive event that brings together many stakeholders in the consumer empowerment and evolving participatory medicine space from telehealth to the explosive mobile health aka mhealth markets.

Conference Keynotes by:

• Majd Alwan, PhD, Director, Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST)
• Michael J. Barrett, Managing Partner, Critical Mass Consulting
• Liz Boehm, Principal Analyst, Customer Experience for Healthcare & Life Sciences, Forrester Research
• Cindy Campbell, Assistant Director Operational Consulting, Fazzi Associates, Inc.
• Yan Chow, MD, MBA, Director of Innovation and Advanced Technology, Kaiser Permanente
• L. Miguel Encarnação, MS, PhD, Director, Emerging Technology Innovation, Humana Inc.
• Vince Kuraitis, JD, MBA, Principal, Better Health Technologies, LLC
• Michael Monson, Senior Vice President of Performance & Innovation, Visiting Nurse Service of New York
• Tracey Moorhead, President & CEO, DMAA: The Care Continuum Alliance
• Gordon K. Norman, MD, MBA, EVP, Chief Innovation Officer, Inverness Medical Innovations / Alere
• Charles (Chuck) Parker, Executive Director, Continua Health Alliance
• Ryan Sysko, CEO, WellDoc, Inc.

A hat tip to both Vince Kuraitis at the e-care management blog and Kristi Durazo aka @krash63, futurist at the American Heart Association.

I will be tweeting from the conference and will be using the hashtag #hcu10 for my posts.

‘Health Geek Radio’ is on the web!

Ok, this is definitely a report from the ‘lean and agile’ department, and a granular sign of the ‘interactive digital’ times we’re in.

This idea is about ten (10) days old. The genesis came from Susannah Fox, e-patient and Associate Director of Digital Strategy, of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Susannah apparently caught my broadcast of Adam Bosworth who was keynoting at the Alliance for Healthcare Foundation’s Innovation Initiative in San Diego. While acknowledging the visuals weren’t best in class, she noted the content Adam offered was worth a listen and bucketed the event in the ‘health geek radio‘ domain.

When I first heard the name ‘health geek radio’ I thought, how cool is that? And certainly there’s a lot of interest in emerging technologies all dialed into the patient or consumer empowerment cause. So, I queried the domain and also checked to see if that account ID was available at BlogTalkRadio; to my surprise, both were open, so I promptly grabbed them.

Today, I recorded a brief introduction as to the genesis and forward value of creating such a health geek community focus. Take a listen here.

The first official broadcast is yet to be confirmed, but I will invite thought leaders and change agents into the conversation. Several who I have spoken with already have indicated an interest in participating, including: Matthew Holt, Dave DeBronkart (e-patientDave), Phil Baumann, and Dr. Danny Sands, to name a few.

Bundled Payment? Lets Start with the ‘RAPERs’!

Some of the health reform conversation has focused on bundled payment as a ‘bite sized’ basis of implementing change in the ‘whack a mole’ resistent health care borg. In response to a question on a LinkedIn thread entitled ‘Changing the Health Care Payment System: First Step Toward Real Reform?’

Breaking the cycle of health care payments complexity and errors may be one way in which to stem the cost of moving to a consumer oriented health care system, which is one of the popular solutions discussed during the health care reform debate. This concept of consumerism in health care and payments for services may be provocative to many readers of this blog but the facts as they stand currently demonstrate clearly that we have to start reform somewhere and fast. The current legislative efforts have provided little in the way of support for what the American people have expressed they want in the way of a public option so perhaps as an industry we can begin to resolve some of the issues that will be explored in this discussion. It is a fact that when compared to other business sectors such as retail, health care revenue cycle management is difficult at best, fraught with paper and consists of very little standardization. This is clearly an area that is replete with opportunity to drive new business, create jobs, and leverage existing infrastructure investments all while creating better efficiencies and timelier payments for providers.

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The purpose of starting this discussion is not to position the arguments within as the only area of focus for the health care debate just a good start, and all efforts in other areas should continue in tandem. Consider that the health care industry supports bad debt in excess of 60 billion, spends more than $7,000 per person and almost 2.3 trillion dollars by some estimates. Certainly, this would point to an area ready for innovation and change. There will not be a “quick fix” to address these challenges nor is the author suggesting that it is the universal remedy not to mention that many readers will disagree with the points offered in this post. In essence that is the real point of this effort is to start an open, honest dialogue addressing the issues surrounding the payment system in the US Health Care system lest we continue to get more of the same, less individuals insured, spiraling costs and no hope of stemming the tide and effecting change.

…….

I opine below:

Excellent discussion! I will noodle some more after digesting the entire thread, plus comments. Yet, what comes up for me is the ‘C’ word. Underlying health reform whether from the bleeding edge of payment reform, or any other logical portal of entry, i.e., HIT, nothing succeeds absent the ‘cultural’ context to receive and embrace its adoption.

So why not start with ‘seeding’ the cultural antecedents to merge (both clinically and financially) all hospital based physicians (HBPs), less affectionately known in the health plan contracting domain as ‘RAPERs’, i.e., Radiology, Anesthesiology, Pathology, Emergency Room docs? This is a logical nexus for bundled payments and rather compelling from the patient’s perspective too.

The notion of bundled payment is potentially sexy. It encourages, if not drives, the consideration of collaboration (& the ostensible alignment of interests) to accept and administer global payment for professional medical services rendered; and theoretically is more efficient and cost effective. Yet, in 2010 there is neither the administrative capacity, nor (outside of IDNs of the Mayo variety) cultural capacity for HBPs to risk experimentation with the financial and clinical collaboration required to co-exist under a bundled payment paradigm. Yet, no where else in medicine is the argument so compelling for such integration, imj.

Clearly, the nature of the exclusive ‘franchise’ often afforded to HBPs in my view augurs in favor of such integration even absent the ‘quid pro quo’ group culture typically required for its successful implementation.