Sean Khozin, MD, MPH

Hello Health has been an amazing journey that continues to make us all proud.

Left to Right: Sean Khozin, MD, MPH (i.e, me), Roni Zeiger, MD (Google Health), and Ted Eytan, MD (Kaiser Permanente) at the Health 2.0 Conference

I’m happy to announce that Google Health now has full integration with our platform. Google recently announced the news on their official blog. Now my patients can seamlessly and securely exchange their health information with Google Health and the Hello Health platform.

This is the “3 eyes” of practical health IT design in action.

Lots of new and exciting features implemented and many more to come…

In the last few weeks and especially after I was featured in the New York Times and Crain’s New York Business about how I use social media to communicate with patients, I’ve received a lot of inquiries from an intrigued group of colleagues and journalists about the issues surrounding the use of Twitter to communicate with patients. My thoughts on this topic are as follows:

• Twitter is a great tool for physicians to disseminate information and their expertise on relevant and timely medical topics
• Twitter is not a secure platform where patients’ protected health information (PHI) can be discussed freely. This seems obvious but based on some of the questions I’ve been asked lately it appears that some people think they may soon be able to interact with doctors on Twitter for their medical issues. This is not a realistic, or even legal, expectation. Doctor-patient interactions should ideally be confined to highly secure online platforms and the doctor’s office.

I use social media, as embedded into my practice’s secure EMR/PHR platform, for 2 main reasons:

1. Chronic disease management. I’m actively pursuing the use of secure email, video conferencing, and instant messaging to ensure continuity of care between office visits and help my patients better manage their chronic diseases. Getting patients engaged in the process of care can make them become active and empowered participants in their own care.
2. Care coordination. I’m exploring the uses of social media for care coordination. In this context, the patient is placed at the center with their care team around them. All members of the care team, being on the same platform, have access to the same information with seamless (and structured) streams of patient-to-provider and provider-to-provider health information exchange.

Jay and I will be speaking to the medical students at Mount Sinai in NYC about Hello Health and the future of our beloved profession, replete with beer and snacks! We often speak in these settings and it’s always a pleasure to connect with the curious doctors and leaders of tomorrow.

Here’s the official invitation:

THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE!

HELLO HEALTH is revolutionizing health care using our familiar procrastination technology.

Frustrated with the bureaucracy of health care, a group of Brooklyn physicians created Hello Health: a system of affordable, efficient, user-friendly health care using facebook, video g-chat, and text messaging. Hear them speak about their vision…

WHERE: Annenberg Student Lounge
WHEN: Thursday April 16th at 6pm
BEER AND SNACKS WILL BE SERVED!

Ultimately, says Khozin, the goal is for Hello Health to go nationwide, and hopefully impact proposals for reform. “The heath-care system cannot be fixed the way it is,” Khozin says. “Top-down mandates won’t work. The best kind of reform is grass-roots.”

The above segment is an excerpt from a recent New York Post article where I talk about Hello Health and clearly show my affinity for grassroots-driven transformation in healthcare.

I firmly believe that bottom-up innovation can be the most viable way of addressing many of the deficits of our healthcare system such as limited access to care and inefficiencies in care delivery.  I should point out, however, that there is certainly a need for top-down reform, which has the potential to spark innovation and lay the groundwork for more efficient practices. For example, tort reform to discourage predatory lawsuits against physicians is of crucial importance in reducing healthcare costs. The constant and ubiquitous fear of lawsuits drive physicians to order unnecessary tests and procedures that may trigger a trail of more expensive tests and procedures, all to meet the legal needs of documenting the physician’s thought process. Complications do sometimes arise as a result of these rather paranoid acts of self-defense. This practice is appropriately called defensive medicine and has made the act of doing too many unnecessary things an absolute legal necessity for physicians. Meaningful tort reform is the only solution and that comes from the top.

There are other examples of top-down initiatives that can have a positive and meaningful impact such as payment reform to reward physicians for the use of technology (e.g. email communication with patients) and delivering preventive care.

It’s been over a month since my last blog post. A lot has happened since then. Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, not once, but twice! Our medical practice was featured on CNN in a segment called “You won’t go in to see the doctor,” showcasing a video consultation I recently did with one of my patients. The Open Letter I organized on behalf of America’s physicians surpassed 12,000 signatures. A clinical trial that involving the world’s second best selling drug was stopped because the sponsor declared bankruptcy. The financial markets, of course, continue to fluctuate with uncertainty.

These are the signs of our times, signaling the need for, and emergence of, novel ways of thinking that can open new windows of opportunity to carry us forward into the next phase of prosperity.

This, my friends, is the time to innovate.

Ever wondered what truly empowered healthcare consumers look like? Take a look at the picture below. As part of our recent community outreach and marketing campaign, we are giving free flu shots at Hello Health all week.

“got my free flu shot today from hellohealth. yay!”

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 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