The Biz of Healthcare
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Twitter founder Biz Stone gave the keynote presentation this week to kickoff the Healthcare Information & Management System Society’s HIMSS12 conference . As one of Time magazines “most influential people in the world” and a founding father of the social media movement, his presentation dealt with the changes the healthcare industry is facing in the Internet-age. He touched on a few concepts that we also hold very dear here at DoctorBase. So, we’d like comment on a few of the tasty nuggets of insight he shared with the crowd and the healthcare industry as a whole…
Uncertainty in Change.
Biz mentioned that the predictable nature of healthcare is gone, and along with it has gone the certainty of business & reimbursement models that have been the mainstay of the healthcare industry for decades. Whether you run your own private practice or are the CEO of a hospital group, these changes can be nerve-racking. When faced with this, you need to be able to change your outlook in order to avoid having to change your job!
Opportunity in Creativity.
When you change your outlook to embrace change, it leads to creative solutions to the issues we face in a rapidly changing healthcare industry. Along with this, Biz implored the attendees to also look outside of the industry for creative inspiration. He noted that (as is the case with most large industries) there’s often a mindset that healthcare is ‘unique’ and that models in others industries won’t apply – a sure waste of innovative ideas that have proved beneficial outside of healthcare.
Everybody Wins.
In order for creativity to thrive, we need to set aside the protectionist stance of defending the way healthcare has been delivered the past because “that’s how it’s always been.” It’s led the industry into the bad habit of distinguishing between what’s best for the doctor’s business versus what’s best for the patient’s health. Fortunately, accomplishing the best for both is not mutually exclusive. In the light of social media where the patients’ voices are amplified and transparency is key, the competitive edge is going to doctors who are more concerned with taking care of their patients than they are in simply driving a profitable business. When doctors do the right thing for their patients, doctors and patients can realize what Biz refers to as a true “win-win” situation where more patients get better care while reducing the financial burdens on doctors & patients.
The Internet & social media has already led to change in other large, historically slow-to-change spaces from the recording industry to political regimes. There’s no reason to believe it won’t do the same in the healthcare industry. It’s up to the doctors to embrace that change in order to guide it in a way that benefits patients and, ultimately, themselves.
Want to embrace online transparency? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and have the Panda provide a way for your patients to give you feedback & provide verified online referrals for your practice…
http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim
Yelp Moves Closer to Raising $100M from IPO
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Yelp filed additional paperwork with the SEC this week in advance of their upcoming IPO slated for March 2nd. The filing sets their IPO of over 7M million shares at a price of $12-$14 per share. This would give Yelp a valuation of around $800M and raise $100M for the company. While it’s no Facebook IPO, it will serve to greatly validate online reviews and give Yelp a lot more money to generate even more reviews of doctors & private practices.
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Google Gets Okay to Buy Motorola
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The U.S. Department of Justice just approved Google’s purchase of Motorola’s mobile division. This will allow Google to assume control of not only the U.S.’s 3rd largest mobile device manufacturer, but also their 17k patents. Google’s reasoning behind this $12.5B purchase is certainly driven by a defensive need to protect against patent lawsuits. There’s also a potential to make significant money off of these patents through licensing deals – which is why the DoJ approved the deal in spite of “significant concern” in the light of antitrust issues. But, there may be an additional motive behind this move by El Goog.
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5,000 Doctors Using DoctorBase
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Right on the heels of a half-million patients being referred to a doctor on DoctorBase last week, we’re proud to announce the 5,000th doctor using our Panda platform. Thanks to our 5,000th doctor – Maria Pesheva, MD – and to all of the 4,999 doctors before her who trust Panda to automate their patient communications and online outreach. We can’t wait to bring you a slew sleuth (panda joke!) of new features to improve the care & satisfaction of your patients in the months to come.
The first 5,000 onboard, the next 5,000 to go…
The (Un)truth & Nothing but the (Un)truth?
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A study published this week on doctors’ honesty with their patients brought to light an unsettling trend amongst healthcare providers. While the majority of doctors did adhere to telling their patients the unfiltered truth, there were varying degrees of “untruth” that many physicians did not feel violated doctor-patient trust.
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A Half-Million Patient Referrals on Facebook
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A big word of thanks to the patients & doctors using DoctorBase. You’ve just referred your doctors to the 500,000th friend on Facebook through DoctorBase. We couldn’t have become the largest patient referral network on Facebook without the doctors who use our services or the patients who trust us with making healthcare transparent – thank you!!!
The first half-million down, the next half-million to go…
Patient Use of Smartphones Increasing
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Along with all the money Google makes from the online advertising you see on your computer when searching for the video of your favorite Super Bowl ads, they also sell advertising for display on smartphones. This gives them access to some great data on smartphone usage. And that data shows that smartphone usage is growing.
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Facebook Finally Files for IPO
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In case you missed it earlier this week, Facebook has finally filed for their initial public offering. The company filed to raise $5B (as in billion-with-a-B) but optimistically hopes to raise as much as $10B when it IPOs in the next few months. This would dwarf the largest Internet-IPO of all time, which was the $1.9B Google raised in 2004. And, it would give the 7-year old company a value of as much as $100B. (Not bad for the 27-year old son of a dentist!)
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HIPAA with a Capital ‘P’
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When it comes to HIPAA rules and your patients’ information, most of the focus is on keeping this information private and secure from prying eyes. While this is a very important aspect to the law, we sometimes forget what HIPAA actually stands for – both in name and idea.
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Facebook Timeline Imminent
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Facebook announced plans to impose a mandatory upgrade to their new timeline theme to all users within the “next few weeks.” So, by the end of February, your profile will be updated to timeline whether you want it or not. The timeline theme has been available to users since late last year, but it has been an optional upgrade – until now.
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Google+ 90M Patients
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Google recently announced to investors in their quarterly earnings call that they had reached over 90M users on their Facebook-competitor, Google+. They went on to announce that Google+ users “are very engaged with [Google] products – over 60% of them engage daily.” But wait, before you do the math that would lead you believe there are 54M people a day using Google+, note that they stated this number with regard to their products.
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Social Applications for Your Practice
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Facebook just launched new social apps from 60+ companies that will allow users to share their activities with friends via the timeline on their personal Facebook profiles. Facebook had already given us a glimpse of this with the apps they released last year, but now they’ve gone full stream by integrating with sites like the Wall Street Journal, Living Social, and Ticketmaster. Now, by simply logging into to these sites with their Facebook ID, patients are able to automatically post their activities as they occur on other websites. For example, when you managed to score tickets to the NFC Championship game here in San Francisco earlier this week via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster’s social app would have made it possible to post that achievement directly to your Facebook profile without the need for you to manually submit this update via your profile at facebook.com. (As a bonus, it would also automatically create both widespread jealousy and a sudden influx of ‘friends’ trying to reconnect with you!)
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