Best of luck,
DH

you have my permission toput me on an email list.

Sure you’re not sending people to death camps, you are just supporting information that claims if they STARVE themselves they will be good thin people. Aside from perhaps learning to use terminology not so close to the leader of the Nazis. You should look at:

http://www.bigfatfacts.com

It’s more unhealthy to diet than it is, to accept your body for it’s natural pre-set genetic weight. That’s right, weight is a matter of genetics, not someone being a slothful pig. I’m very dissapointed you are planning to use people’s health information to further the Obesity Hysteria. Maybe if you stopped and thought about how, you are sending people to their own self-caused deaths en mass, you might realize that you aren’t helping people. You simply are trying to cull the undesirables from the populus.

I am a family nurse practitioner who works in a community health center in Crawfordsville, IN, about 40 miles west of Indianapolis. I have been working to help folks adopt healthier behaviors for almost 3 decades.

I was a neurosurgical ICU nurse for about 6 years when I had a revelation at the bedside of a patient who was injured in a motor vehicle crash of two drunken drivers who were both killed in the collision. My patient was the drunken passenger of one of those drivers. “Red” was a mid-50s married gentleman with two young adult sons, a factory supervisor who vigorously walked the aisles each day with a cigarette in his hand, who ate what he liked, and drank to excess regularly. He was in critical condition not because of a brain injury, fractured femur, tibia, fibula, and flail chest–he was in critical condition because we were fighting his years of heavy smoking, poor diet, and excessive alcohol consumption.

That evening 6 weeks following the initial collision, his wife confessed to me that she was exhausted by the ups and downs of his hospitalization, that she was also feeling incredible guilt that sometimes she wished that Red had died in the accident so that her life could have some normalcy, much like the normalcy the wives of the two drivers experienced. That evening, as I stood by his bed hanging yet another IV antibiotic to fight his pneumonia, I decided I needed to get on the “front end” of healthcare. I went back to earn a masters degree in community health nursing and then pursued certification as a family nurse practitioner.

I truly believe our nation will not be healthier until we overhaul our entire health care delivery system, followed by an overhaul in our health care payment system. We do not have enough primary care providers, as they are currently defined (physicians and nurse practitioners), to effectively promote health. I have lobbied for expansion of the roles of the registered nurse to encompass primary care, particularly health promotion and health protection. A seminal research study published two decades ago identified that 80% of patient visits to a doctor’s office/clinic could be resolved by a registered nurse–yet these visits continue to consume the efforts of health care professionals whose practice would better serve patients who are actually sick (or sicker) than those in their office.

RNs would be the best educated and most experienced resources to assist your company’s success. Their clinical expertise could be vital in the development of your company. I would be happy to talk further with you about these matters.

Its been a long time since our paths crossed at Analytica doing Reflex. You always were someone able to turn a “grand vision” into a very useful tool.

Good luck with this new venture!

- Bob E.

You’re already on your way down your road so maybe it’s too late for such a change. The human body has tremendous self-healing potential if the stressors such as negative emotion and relationships, pesticides, environmental toxins, vaccines, heavy metals, old resident bacteria and viruses, subtle and deep infections (such as in teeth, tooth sockets and bones), musculoskeletal lock-ups, impedence from scars and other interferences are removed. I myself am not an expert in this area. But I would be happy to help you any way I can in refining a vision of what causes illness.

It was very interesting reading your blog…. and I am even more impressed that you have started a company to address the “REAL” healthcare issues. We all know what a mess the system is already and it’s only going to get messier for all of us.

I have been in healthcare for the last 7 years building Physician Portals and Hospital Dashoards. AS you said the focus needs to shift to the end user – the Patient. Myself and couple of Engineers have built a beta product that will aid the end user (patient!)

All this talk about EHR and PHR and RHIO’s and interoperability. We also know that currently there is no front runner in this space…. the googles, the microsofts, the oracles have jumped into this. We will wait and see what they can come up with.

My prediction is a startup company, someone who will listen to the patients, and brilliantly (extremely simple yet superbly effective) develop a system wil be the front runner.

GO Adam and all the best. Hopefully when we get our product (a patient portal) developed, perhaps we can chat and see if there are any synergies. Jason (jan 25 blog) what is your contact number. I did love to chat with you.

Chat soon

Suresh\603-930-9451

First, and largely unrecognized by we who are determined to solve these problems is the enormous apathy patients have toward their health and health care. and their fear of their healthcare providers. Until these are overcome we can only create push-down solutions that patients are unwilling to receive-ie the PHR solution to a patient-perceived non-problem.

The apathy and fear stem from patient’s actual ignorance about medicine (correctable), a perceived, and sometimes real, personal and intellectual inferiority to their doctors (tough, but correctable), a fear of knowing too much about their actual state of health (inborn), and, in the setting of declining access to, and actual numbers of, doctors. a fear of offending their doctor and having to find another (tough one).

Another problem is the slowly disappearing ‘medical home’. Healthcare delivery as a point source is under pressure from Concierge Medicine (decreased access), Retail (Direct) Clinics-Minute Clinics, Take Care Health, etc.-no continuity of care, Urgent Care or Walk-in Clinics-no continuity of care, the Behind the Counter Drug movement where soon Zocor and antibiotics will be dispensed, and presumably managed, by the pharmacist, more PAs ans NPs- ‘mid-levels’ practicing as primaries, Chiropractic ‘Docoters’, and the steep, serious, and worrisome, decline of medical school graduates going into primary care.

Finally, another issue is the worsening state of inferior care, medical errors, down-right doctor ignorance, poor ethics, and the lack of any systems of oversight.

To address some of these issues I formed Like a Doctor in the Family, LLC here in Sarasota to review personal medical reports, medical records and produce PHRs. Very few takers as personal health apathy reigns high. The first review, however, revealed recurrent prostate carcnoma in an ill patient whose doctor told him his PSAs were in the normal range, which they were, except he had a prostatectomy ten years earlier and his PSA values should have been zero.

In closing I would like to say that the biggest socio-medico-economic problem we face, and the one I believe is the easiest to solve is diabetes, our little $132 billion dollar problem. For all of the reasons I gave above diabetics have no source for comprehensive, consistent, standardized, and organized care.

Chronic diseases, of which diabetes is the poster-child, require unique, brave, and revolutionary approaches.

I think we need to commoditize diabetes care by taking diabetes care out of the faltering traditional care-delivery systems and applying the technology we have, perhaps Keas has, (see the 2004 Congressional White Paper on Diabetes) to create a virtual Center for Advanced Diabetes Care wherein the ADA and ACCE Standards of Care are universally applied, all necessary specialist referrals are organized and structured to qualified local providers and follow-up is automated.

I wrote a program called DbxEZ (pronounced ‘diabetes easy’) that managed the diabetes visit and used it on patients quite successfully in my practice. I presented DbxEZ to the ADA at there headquarters in Alexandria where it was enthuisastically received and used on patients.

I’d be happy to talk further about my work and experience with Keas.

Good luck in your very worthwhile venture.

Louis Siegel, M.D., B.,S.E.E.

Thanks,
Radha.

It’s no big secret just how messed up the U.S. healthcare system is.

And it’s hard to imagine a world without WebMD. So many people now to turn to it so supplement limited formal health care resources.

There DEFINITELY is a need for even more credible, content rich tools and Web sites to help people stay healthy and battle chronic diseases.

Plus so many aging baby boomers are Web savvy now.

I remember taking a Health Economics class back in college in the early 90′s. It’s amazing how many of the professor’s scary predictions came true. (The World would be a better place if he were wrong.)

You’re definitely onto something.

Good luck!

I think you’ll find it a mind expanding experience. Such people don’t really have an interest in external (non medical) sources that want to help you be as healthy as you can be.

Surprisingly, the topics and ideas that draw the most attention are:
1. The eight hour day, a nurturing lifestyle attached to just one job. A healthy mindset that promotes satisfaction at 5:00 p.m. rather than 5:00 a.m.
2. Compassionate health care systems (as example, a MS clinic in Seattle that is designed to treat the illness knowing full well they will not profit from it).
3. Web 2.0 feeds that deliver specific information without the myriad problems of finding the needle in the haystack.
4. Hotspot research issues like stem cell research and AIDS. Not because it will make us better in our lifetime, but because people will be better off after our lifetime.
5. Society’s perception of illness. We have to live in this world too.

Just as shoppers at the grocery store determine the price of mayonaise, people with chronic disease find value at various points along their treatment path. Some are tangible, most are the intangibles.

Kudos, and congratulations on embarking on this bold adventure. I have faith in you guys, you’re going to make it rock. Let me know if you need any alpha/beta testers.

Dave

Good luck helping people avoid that eventual fate. If it work the insurnace companies will support you in that quest. The lawyers will only target you if there’s cash.

The Doctor are probably ready to address health care through more effective education and guidance since they are finding it hard to stay profitable tending to people with a lot of problems: no one will/can cover the costs.