Healthcare Notes

GE Healthcare Marketing Push

GE and Siemens, which has also made significant investments in healthcare, are currently lobbying Congress against the Obama administration efforts to reduce medical scanning costs in Medicare. Bloomberg News reported that Medicare imaging costs more than doubled to $14.1 billion from 2000 to 2006, according to a June 13 congressional report.

GE plans to rollout a new healthcare products marketing campaign based on its "Eco-magination" project, which GE told the Financial Times brought in $17bn in revenue last year from the sale of products ranging from jet engines to wind turbines. The new healthcare marketing initiative will "involve numerous parts of the sprawling conglomerate, ranging from its industrial divisions to the media unit, NBC Universal", according to FT. ("GE to pitch its vision on need for healthcare", Apr. 1, 2009) Watch for it on your local TV station.

Electronic Records

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine recently showed that few hospitals have electronic records systems in place. Only 1.5% of hospitals who responded to the authors' survey had electronic systems in all units, while 7.6% had electronic records in some units. Another article in the same journal noted that the current records' systems are proprietary software where the lack of a single standard makes integration with other software systems infeasible.

The Obama administration plans to infuse $19 billion into an effort to get electronic records in place, but the effort could cost up to $100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Which makes it an attractive business to enter. Wal-Mart is now joining Microsoft and Google and GE in offering digital records options. According to PC World, the retailer:

"plans to bring its low-cost, high-volume mentality to the healthcare industry by offering a deal that includes hardware, software, installation, maintenance and training to convert a doctor's office from using paper to digital medical records."

Walmart will coordinate the vendors to offer the $25,000 system. Doctors may get $40,000 - $65,000 federal tax write-off to install and use medical records systems.

Cancer Screening

A couple of weeks ago two studies came out showing that the prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test for prostate cancer, which allowed all men to be easily screened for the disease, may or may not be helpful. Screening may result in overdiagnosis and overtreatment in some men for whom the disease would never progress.

In a similar situation, last week, a kerfuffle in Britain motivated British health officials to promise to rewrite patient information that gave misleading information about the benefits of mammograms. A recent study also suggested that breast cancer screening also led to over-diagnosis. Part of the problem is that doctors have limited knowledge about which cancers will progress rapidly, and which won't progress.

Such uncertainty is common in medicine. Even if doctors can access all the technology in the world, should they run another test or save the money? How do they assess a patient's most simple claims -- "it hurts?" Is the cancer aggressive? Will the patient follow the treatment protocol?

"Real Age" Antics

According to a recent New York Times story, RealAge, an on-line health survey that people voluntarily sign-up for and receive health tips from, is actually a marketing tool for pharmaceutical companies:

"While few people would fill out a detailed questionnaire about their health and hand it over to a drug company looking for suggestions for new medications, that is essentially what RealAge is doing"

Apparently the company would email people pharmaceutical suggestions based on symptoms they listed. I had other qualms with the service, like that it rated people's health based on questions about lifestyle choices which were backed up with incomplete or controversial evidence, like -- how many servings of soy do you eat a day? Clearly the privacy issues put a whole new spin on the company's service.

Antidote

Should you need one. The New Yorker runs a Cartoon Caption contest every week, where readers (and potential subscribers) submit captions for a cartoon. The staff picks three of the best captions, then on-line readers vote on which of the three they like best. Sort of the New Yorker's "American Idol". This week's cartoon might be science related, a rare event.

The cartoon depicts a big hefty naked man striding out of the ocean onto the beach. He appears to be saying something and he looks excited. He's following a fish, which has leapt out of the water and is airbound, glancing behind, fish-eyes wide. Here are the three caption choices:

• "Now that I've met your family, I want you to meet mine"
• "Your in trouble when we get to the bicycles"
• "Hi there! Can I interest you in some promotional material about intelligent design?"

Vote here.