Sean Khozin, MD, MPH

The Hello Health doctors will be at the Apple store in Soho, NYC, on Monday November 3rd at 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm. Come by if you are in the area. We will be talking about our consumer-friendly healthcare delivery model and Mac-friendly online communication tools.

I recently submitted five health policy questions to the presidential candidates. These questions were drafted by the physician community on Sermo, which now has over 90,000 members. I promptly received both candidate’s official answers and posted them on Sermo 2 days ago, along with a survey to assess the reactions to the candidate’s responses. To my knowledge, this is the first time that physicians have a direct line of communication with major political figures, bypassing the distortions of biased mediators. Although I’m a strong supporter of reforming the healthcare system in a bottom-up manner, engaging the political establishment will ensure the development of sound policy initiatives that can encourage innovation and curtail the current paradigm of wasteful spending.

Here are the questions that I submitted to the candidates:

• The foundation of our healthcare system, the primary care doctor, is critically endangered. What would you do to ensure an adequate supply of primary care physicians to care for our growing and aging population?

• Driven by profit motives, third parties are increasingly dictating the practice of medicine by exercising undue authority over healthcare processes. What is your plan to prevent these entities from standing in the way of patient care and the doctor-patient relationship?

• Do you believe that physicians in general are fairly compensated? What steps would you take to ensure fair and adequate compensation of all physicians given the intense commitment and financial burden that it takes to become a physician?

• Do you believe that healthcare requires more regulation in this country? What are the main areas where you would want to see more regulatory control and oversight?

• The practice of defensive medicine is a substantial burden on our healthcare system and many physicians are distressed and financially strained by the current malpractice situation. What liability reform plans do you endorse to deal with this problem?

I just returned from the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where nearly 1,000 people representing a wide range of healthcare technology companies had gathered to showcase their products and seek out partnerships and potential investors.

Here’s a brief overview of the conference:

The Good: Hello Health definitely captured everyone’s attention but I’m not going to self promote. I’ll let experts such as Bill Crounse of Microsoft to make the compliments. I did a demonstration our platform and talked about the hello health consumer-centric experience on a panel that also included Cisco, American Well, Teladoc, and RelayHealth. We had a tent in the exhibition lounge that got a lot of traffic.

During the conference, Sermo, the largest online physician community, announced the formation of a strategic partnership with Bloomberg. This partnership will leverage the collective voices of physicians to influence investment decisions. This is a potentially powerful collaboration, given that front line practicing physicians are better positioned to predict healthcare trends than the small group of elite professionals that are currently making such decisions.

The Bad: A lot of people at Health 2.0 talked about giving consumers access to information. This all sounds good but it’s not information but knowledge that’s power and turning information into knowledge requires expertise. Technology created in a vacuum, at its best, has entertainment value. We need to connect healthcare providers to healthcare consumers, taking the middleman out of the equation. Flooding people with information can be a little frustrating for consumers if we don’t fix our current problem of uneven access to care.

Also present at Health 2.0 were companies whose technologies were neither designed for consumers nor providers. These companies are attempting to seduce the status quo into partnerships that add little value to the healthcare system as a whole but can save insurers a bundle of money. If we think of our current system as the next bubble to burst, these companies may soon have to rethink their strategy and start appealing to consumers and providers.

The Ugly: A top executive from Aetna proudly announced savings of $60 million (I think in the past year) mainly as a result of encouraging doctors to use email to communicate with patients. It would be difficult to envision physicains benefiting from any of these savings. As evident by Aetna’s rising premiums, these savings are clearly not being passed on to consumers either. Aetna’s stocks have taken a serious hit in the past year, leaving shareholders no reason to celebrate Aetna’s attempt to achieve greater efficiency. It’s unclear who’s exactly benefiting from Aetna’s savings. Maybe it’s their CEO, with his annual compensation of over $30 million and his aggressive campaign to make it a requirement for all Americans to buy his products.

Savings, Aetna style

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Health 2.0 conference being held next week October 22nd – 23rd at the San Francisco Marriott. Stop by if you’re in the area. This is a great conference featuring companies and thought leaders in the field of healthcare technology.

Insurance companies are doing whatever they can to reduce reimbursement to doctors, denying them payment for the hard work they do. Now, California has a new law that says “hospitals and physicians are barred from billing patients for the balance of emergency care not covered by insurers.”

I think doctors have been pushed beyond their limit.