Game On! Enliven Content with Game Dynamics

Anyone remember eWorld?  It was Apple’s attempt to create a search engine that was visual and fun. It didn’t work out, but Apple was ahead of its time in the mid-1990s. Now the time may just be right for eWorld-like next-gen visual and fun business information services.

I spoke of the dual advantages of applying techniques from the online game segment to enhance the engagement level of content and to collect more data about audience at InfoCommerce Group’s Data Content11 conference earlier this month.  The full presentation with video can be found here (minutes 4:30-12:32).

The presentation includes parallels from healthcare where companies like PatientsLikeMe are matching members of their patient community sites with relevant clinical trials. This is just one example of an online publisher that is serving as a matchmaker between its audience and researchers and creating value to all stakeholders as a result.

I saw eyes light up during my talk when I introduced the topic of applying game dynamics[1] to B2B and consumer health content to increase the engagement level and make the audience more valuable to researchers.  A “game layer” for business and consumer health information may seem inappropriate at first glance, but I suggest that borrowing some of the best features of popular games to make content more engaging, easier to navigate, and more personalized can pay dividends. The secondary benefits of collecting more information about your audience and their preferences as they interact with more responsive content are significant, too. Again to use examples from healthcare, if your audience includes the leading experts in a specialty area or a large group of patients with a specific disease or set of symptoms, serving as a matchmaker between your audience and market research firms could represent a new revenue stream, especially if you have compiled data that can be used to segment the audience better than alternatives that currently exist.

I thought of eWorld when I saw HumanaVille, on online resource for seniors who are Humana members. As I mention in my presentation, I’m not sure that a fun visual online interface is the answer to getting seniors engaged online, but it’s worth a try, especially if the alternative is a typical online directory. 

[1] For a primer on game dynamics, see this post: http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/tag/scvngr-game-dynamics-playbook/

Using Data Content to Build a Patient-Centric Healthcare System

Every healthcare industry pundit seems to be talking about healthcare data: big data, data analytics, patient-generated data, population health data, predictive data, and more. Variations on the theme of: “data, data everywhere, but not a [fill in the blank]” are cropping up all over the place at healthcare conferences. We all agree that electronic medical records, large-scale medical research studies, and devices for recording health and wellness metrics are generating more data, but the expertise for managing the data is in short supply.

At InfoCommerce Group, we understand that data by themselves don’t solve problems, but well-managed data can be programmed to serve any number of purposes. We call it “data that can do stuff”.

Applying best practices for data management requires planning and effort. Quantity without quality will get us nowhere. Join us for the Healthcare Roundtable discussion at Data Content11 next week and participate in a lively conversation about how we can corral the expanding sources of health data, “leverage the liberated data” as I wrote in September, and create a collaborative learning system that establishes a robust base for the next generation of evidence-based medicine and shared decisionmaking between patients, providers and payers. 

Leveraging the Liberated Data

Todd Park, CTO of HHS, gave an inspiring keynote at the Rock Health Boot Camp yesterday that could turn the starkest pessimistic into an optimist about the future of healthcare in the US. From what I know, Park always gives inspiring keynotes, but I want to use his message to connect the key themes I extracted from the Rock Health event (#hcbc) and Health Camp SF Bay (#hcsfbay) on Friday.

My first observation: nearly every speaker referred to the plethora of new apps and technology companies in healthcare. We’re beginning to get inundated by new apps that often compete with dozens of similar apps to do nearly the same thing.

Second, it is a safe statement to say that health remains a siloed ecosystem. Collaboration is improving as a result of internal and external forces, with the HITECH Act and ACA (Affordable Care Act) among the most powerful forces promoting change. But we’re at early stages of figuring out how to share data and collaborate for the good of patient outcomes and overall population health.

Yet in this technology-rich environment, the level of awareness of existing data sources is poor. We can liberate all the data in the world and make it available on the Web, but if entrepreneurs are focused on sexy new gadgets that add to the data explosion but do nothing to help organize and normalize the massive datasets that already exist, we’ll fail to make use of the data in meaningful ways (yes, I used the term “meaningful” on purpose).

Park spent some time describing Healthcare.gov and HealthData.gov and how they can act as a resource for entrepreneurs. I loved his analogy between HealthData.gov and NOAA data. He told an anecdote of how someone once told him that NOAA is unnecessary because one can find the same data in a more user-friendly application on Weather.com.  What the commenter didn’t realize is that NOAA data form the backbone of Weather.com. The federal government provides the data gathering, normalizing, and updating functions and then makes the data available to others who can overlay, combine, segment, analyze, integrate and distribute the data in any variety of mashed-up and improved formats.

The tradition of building data businesses on the foundation of federal, state, and local government data is strong. Savvy data publishing entrepreneurs have been digging deeply into government sources of data and providing new applications based on the data for centuries and new data products and services continue to emerge. The opportunities for leveraging data aren’t restricted to using government data by any means. Just look at companies like IMS Health that compiles data on prescribing behavior from pharmacies.

Some healthcare IT companies understand the power of leveraging data. In fact, athenahealth, Todd Parks’ former company, is one of them. Thomson Reuters Healthcare (now Truven Healthcare Analytics) is another company that has built a big part of its portfolio around leveraging CMS data.

Bob Kocher, a partner at Venrock, also spoke at the Rock Health event. He stated that healthcare is the only industry where investments in IT haven’t led to labor-saving productivity improvements. I’m not surprised by this fact. We’ve had lots of new technologies in healthcare that help us do things we weren’t able to do before.  However, we haven’t been very good at building on our innovations to create a better healthcare system.  In today’s world, combining data with software to build tools that improve efficiency and productivity leads to much richer sets of products and services. Readers of this blog have heard this sentiment from me before and I’m known for defining “meaningful use” as the intelligent combination of IT and content.  It’s a theme worth repeating and I was pleased to hear it articulated so well by Todd Park, Bob Kocher and others yesterday.

Stay Tuned for Health 2.0 Coverage

This blog took a hiatus in August, but will be back in force for the remainder of September. I’ll be attending the annual Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week and look forward to some related events starting on Friday, September 23 (HealthCamp SF Bay), the Rock Health BootCamp on Saturday, and the pre-conference Patients 2.0 meeting on Sunday.

Health Content Advisors is a media sponsor of Health 2.0 this year, so watch for daily updates to this blog, along with my Twitter feed @janicemccallum that will post more frequent updates from the meetings.  Follow the conference hashtag #health2con for updates from the entire group of attendees.

On the topic of conferences, the InfoCommerce annual event, Data Content11, is coming up soon (November 2-4) in Philadelphia. As always, some healthcare companies will be represented on the program, but the focus is on the broader issue of how to build successful data publishing businesses. This year’s conference program theme is: Cloud, Crowd, and Curation.  Join us for B2B data publishing’s best networking event and to learn from our Models of Excellence companies how to create and sustain high value data businesses.

For those who want to know more about Data Content11, please contact me at jmccallum@infocommercegroup.com.  Or, drop me a line if you want to meet up in San Francisco.

Will Health IT Mergers Help Drive Productivity in Healthcare?

Healthcare insiders –and even casual observers—know that the health IT sector is overcrowded with too many vendors that have overlapping functionality. This fragmented and crowded health IT market confuses buyers and leads to costly and inefficient implementations of technology that is intended to improve efficiencies.  A recent blog post by John Lynn (@techguy) provides a useful illustration of how the fragmentation affects provider networks and alliances.  Personally, I wouldn’t want to be the CIO who had to deal with multiple IT vendors within a single institution, never mind dealing with the entire mosaic of vendors by function and across institutions in a formal or informal network of providers.

So, it is easy to predict consolidation between competing players that serve the same functions.  Just last week there were two acquisitions within the medical transcription sector that illustrate this trend: Nuance Communications acquired WebMedx and MedQuist acquired M*Modal.

IT won’t deliver true workflow efficiencies—and accompanying productivity gains—unless vendors  take a systems view of processes and focus on improving the workflow instead of simply digitizing existing paper-based processes.  I’m not saying anything new here. Anyone who has read Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Prescription or has lived through a disappointing EMR implementation project understands the problem.  We need a rationalization of vendors and solutions across the entire system. Vertical consolidation within each subsector reduces the confounding number of options for buyers, but doesn’t necessarily solve the larger problem of improving productivity (and by productivity I mean better outcomes and improved efficiency).

In a tangentially related event last week, the Society for Participatory Medicine (#S4PM) held a tweetchat that included some discussion of doctor-patient communication when the doctor is facing a computer screen. Unfortunately, existing EHR/EMR systems haven’t been optimized for the doctor-patient encounter. Voice input, touch screens, direct-from-device input, and even Kinect-style input all represent technologies that could vastly improve the data collection process during, before and after patient visits. Although it’s a small step, I am hopeful that the recent acquisitions in the medical transcription segment allow the consolidated companies more leeway to formulate a wider range of productivity-enhancing voice-data solutions and are representative of future merger activity to come.