False alarm, I don’t need a medic but sometimes I have medical questions, like what is “Steakhouse Syndrome”, “Chronic Pain” or “Blurred Vision.” Of course you can check out Web MD or HealthLine but there are a few new medical searches that offe…

I agree with Case that American Health care is facing a crisis, that the crisis exists because market forces are not allowed to operate when consumers purchase health care. I also appreciate his personal commitment to this challenge.

There is infinitely more to the doctor patient relationship than can be conveyed online. Listening to a patient, examining them, gaining their trust, reviewing their test data, consulting the medical literature, understanding their deepest fears, providing comfort… not even EA could pull this off in a virtual environment.

You might not get the highest quality docs to work in those “Starbucks” clinics at Walmart, and I would lose the Starbucks analogy if I were Case.
You will still have to pay them substantially more than the guys making double Lattes.

Don’t give up on medical performance measurement, instead, please demand it. I was ashamed to make up answers to simple patient questions like “how many of these have you done” and “what’s your mortality rate for this operation”. And all of my colleagues do this every day. We now measure and report out outcomes in real time on our website, so that patients and referring physicians can make informed decisions. I hope all physicians adopt this practice in the near future. I am also working on putting our cost information online in the same manner. Several of you have shown how difficult this will be given the complexity of each individual health care event, but if you can price out a trip to Disney, you can price out an appendectomy.

The quote “myspace for hypocondriacs” is compelling. My wife, a nurse, gains reassurance from seeing that other people share her pain and frustration about a chronic problem, and there is value in that.

A final note, I think the real future opportunity for tech in medicine will not be a service oriented website, but a truly searchable EMR, the pagerank of medical records (which will not look anything like a pagerank because you won’t be looking for websites, but you get the idea), which will enable nationwide and ultimately worldwide datamining, and dramatically accelerate the development of medical knowledge.

Keep crunching, your freinds in healthcare need you.

Redmond

But I would also caution that there’s a balancing act to be done here, especially wrt information that, if enacted, could actually cause more harm than good. Health websites and healthcare isn’t just people randomly talking to one another, but a two-way conversation that has to be had. Not just amongst community members, but ultimately between a person and their doctor.

And I think you’ll see a lot of these websites that suddenly have an interest in helping people with their daily well-being or health also don’t always have the rich, experienced health background that differentiates a company that truly understands the complexities of health and individuals’ needs, versus those who just throw up anything and everything and hope it all works out in the end.

So, yes, welcome to the world of online self-help, of online health, and of support communities online! It’s good to see people and professionals having this conversation (even if many of them are doing so for their own vested interests more than anything).

There should be other health conditions for which a similar community could be built, and Revolution could be a good place to do that.

Maybe it can hook up with companies offering HSA’s and CDHP’s and it will be a big hit conceptually with those companies. However; anonymous users offering advice… um yeah…. Not everyone uses the internet to figure out if they are having a stroke or Bell’s Palsy, a headache or an intracranial bleed, a hemorrhoid or colon cancer.

Theoretically, this site sounds great – there’s only a few minor problems. People are more interested in the superbowl than in what statistics a hospital has, they are more willing to pay $1500.00 on muffler bearings for their Chevy or Harley than spend 20 minutes online looking at reasons to quit smoking let alone $20.00 for a copay. They are more likely to relate to advice from Dr Phil as opposed to an MD – in an office let alone someone who can easily say that they are an MD online.

It’s a great idea – the question is what is it’s value to the end user vs. the people peddling it?

That goal must explain this:

https://www.rev...ood-asthma/2290

“I have heard from two reliable sources in Latin America that using shark oil – not pills, but the actual oil from the fish – cures asthma in children. They say one teaspoon a day for 15 to 30 days does the trick. Has anyone heard this or had any experience with it?”

That doozy took me no time at all to track down. I’m sure a few more minutes would produce gallons more quackery, and your site is still in “preview”. With those kinds of stellar medical questions, no wonder you are proud to be an MD associated with Revolution Health.

A web site that promotes medical advice from anonymous idiots on-line is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Regarding the comment that it’s not good to allow users to interact with each other in the healthcare space — I guess we see it quite differently. We’ve gone out and licensed extraordinary clinical content (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic) that people trust and rely on. But I can tell you as a physician that consumers will also benefit from hearing the stories and experiences of other consumers like themselves, and from getting support and encouragement from others.

Our goal is to provide community interactions in a responsible way. This means helping consumers understand the clear limits of the information they glean from others, which we do. We always encourage consumers to put what they learn in the context of evidence-based data and give them lots of opportunities to do so, and of course to consult their physician first before taking any action. Our ultimate goal is to help consumers get as healthy as possible, to get as much value as possible from the healthcare system and to move toward making choices that are well informed and best suited for them.

Why isn’t if Revolution serves to aggregate data sources it’s a bad thing, but when other sites do it, it’s cool? Because it’s Steve Case doing it? From a health care insider’s opinion, I don’t think the site makes Revolution Health revolutionary. What DOES is the entire offering…the web site, the insurance and putting “doc in the boxes” in Wal-Mart’s and Target’s.

Some of you who play in this space and who posted your lamentations here are about to get your doors blown off by the size and scope of this. To you, I say this…it takes BIG money to play in the healthcare space…if you aint’ got it…you ain’t playing. Remember, healthcare is a 1.7 TRILLION dollar industry. The rest is just more suck and blow. (as in breathing..suck air in, blow it out.)

Pardon my candor: I’m surpirzed that none of you “insiders” have pointed this out…there’s been plenty of companies that have tried what Case is doing and most of them crashed and burned. I suspect some of you who posted here on behalf of your companies are some of the “walking dead”- companies margially funded in hopes of a merger or outright purchase by a company like Revolution. Time will tell if he can pull it off.

In contrast, Case has deep pockets and this is a LONG term play. He’s his OWN VC. How many of you in this space can say that? Not any of you who posted here, that’s for sure. If you can’t see that he’s going to take this company public and make it huge, you’re blind. Remember you read it here first…when you’re buying Revolution brand vitamins some day or taking your kid to the Revolution-affliated pediatricians office. You don’t think so…watch. This is SO not about a web site in infancy.

I remember reading about this in the Wall Street Journal about 2 years ago. Thought it was cool then, think it’s cool now. I better sell my WebMD stock before this really hits. I’m more interested than ever to see what Google has up its sleeve. This space is going to get very hot…wait and see.

Hey, Kurt@37. Thanks for pointing out vimo.com. Hadn’t heard of them. I get the potential value of price comparison for standard procedures (dental cleanings, physical, hearing, vision exams — all that preventative stuff that’s easy to pass up) and possibly diagnostic imaging, but once you hit the big ticket medical and surgical interventions it’s the same argument that Ipanema@18 made…

The diversity of related procedures, procedure complexity, and patient history would pretty much overwhelm your attempt to validate any “average” or “median” price that vimo.com might spit out. You would ruin UX if you tried to make a visitor input all the data needed to start making responsible assessments of pricing. (Imagine a 45-question poll for which many of the words have four or more syllables and sound Latin — or remind you of pus or puberty).

Also, once you add on (1) how private insurers negotiate with individual hospitals on procedure reimbursement, and (2) the nonsensical way hospitals approach their chargemasters, which list the prices they charge, you get a sense of why a HEALTH PROCEDURE PRICE COMPARISON tool is not an easy muffin to make.

QUALITY? Have you read the latest JAMA article talking about how “tried-and-true” quality measures for hospital performance in caring for heart failure patients (some of the most expensive) actually did a crappy job at predicting patient mortality. Read: hospitals and the medical profession are still trying to figure out what quality means.

Also, flip it to the patient perspective. I know patients who get pissed when their doctors’ hands are cold. At the same time, another study (I’m going to be irresponsible and not cite it) about litigious patients found that a surprising proportion of families of patients wronged medically speaking (i.e. their family member was probably killed, maimed, or disabled in a hospital) will pass on a lawsuit a decent amount of the time if the doctor says he or she is sorry.

Someone please tell me if they have a great solution for health procedure pricing and quality measures. I would love to here about it.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a CEO or SEO expert like some of you snarky folk. I’m just a content producer for the HEALTHCENTRAL NETWORK. I like my job enough to reply to this forum at 2:30 in the morning (Hi, Chris Schroeder). I focus on Cancer and Aging and have an excellent sense of why we have to develop community tools for people with health concerns. I hang out (online, of course) with the people you are calling hypochondriac MySpaceCadets (thank you, twr@29, that was quite funny). Why doesn’t Tech Crunch write about me and my sites? Seems like enough important people would be interested in my experience.

Congrats to the revolution team on finally going live and opening up the curtain. As most of the people on this thread know, no matter how many resources one has, it’s an important milestone (at least to the team involved). Obviously, it looks like they have a lot of work to do, but who hasn’t launched an alpha/beta/preview and not had that problem…good luck and we look forward to watching your progress.

Some questions/thoughts…

*Curious if perhaps Revolution has too many resources? Too many big wigs…Too big of a team…Too many options/opportunities for their own good? Wonder what the 37Signals folks would have to say…even though it’s built with Ruby on Rails.

*It’s nice to see coverage starting to take place about sectors/companies that affect the lives of so many of us in profound ways (i.e. this isn’t the gazillionth video or IM site). There are finally a bunch of companies/entrepreneurs working hard to help change a broken (health) system. Not that Revolution is the best example of this, but there finally seems to be a wave of innovation taking shape — many companies/entrepreneurs are borrowing and leveraging many of the best ideas and tech solutions figured out already in other sectors. Hopefully, the end result will be better health solutions for all of us…

*Shameless plug: We’re a start-up looking for critical feedback about OrganizedWisdom.com so we can keep improving. Tell us what’s wrong…or even what you like. We’re rolling out new features every couple of weeks…

I’ll bet sites like http://www.vimo.com that let you actually price procedures and shop health insurance plans against each other, apples-to-apples, will be much more disruptive and influential in the long run, precisely because Vimo is following the Web 2.0 ethos, and tranferring power from the traditional holders (providers, carriers) and placing it in the hands of consumers.

Health calculators and trackers are cool, but people don’t realize you can’t just throw up a couple tools and be done with it. We have built a whole business around it at The Daily Plate and we have a long way to go to complete the vision. It takes more than just a few simple calcs to service people well in this vertical.

Jeremy (Evil guy disclaimer: Co-founder of http://www.TheDailyPlate.com)