Managed Care - March 2008 - (Page 51) a major managed care organization. “On one hand, it’s a leap of faith,” Kruglyak says. “On the other, if you do this ahead of your competitors, you win by default.” Kruglyak moderates a prevention forum on ChangeNow4Health (www.changenow4health.com), a groundbreaking project from Humana. Intended as a public forum for generating and exchanging ideas, ChangeNow4Health seeks to spur immediate action in health care reform. “Our health care system is badly broken, but there are . . . pockets of progress around the country,” Humana President and CEO Michael McCallister said at the November launch of the site. “People are acting on ideas right now but [others] don’t always know about it.” Making connections As Chris Curran, director of corporate communication at Humana, puts it, “How do we connect person A to person B in order to accomplish C?” ChangeNow4Health has areas of interest for consumers, employers, providers, and health plans. It features three online forums, each moderated by a health care blogger. In addition to the prevention section under the purview of Kruglyak, Fard Johnmar, founder of the health care marketing company Envision Solutions, is moderating the “Helping Consumers Make Smarter Health Care Decisions” forum, while Clive Riddle, president of MCOL (originally Managed Care Online) leads discussion of “Simplifying the Business of Health Care.” “This is a massive brainstorming session,” Johnmar said at the November launch in New York City. “There are no rules. There are no hierarchies here. That’s what the social media concept is all about.” That can be scary from the perspective of a corporate boardroom, but Humana leadership seems to be embracing the idea. “We’re looking for ideas outside the walls of this Humana building,” says Tom Noland, senior vice president for corporate communication. “Traffic to the site is phenomenal,” Curran reports. Within a month of the launch, the site was getting 1,600 to 2,000 unique visitors a week, without any advertising or promotion in mainstream (non-health care) media. There has not been much marketing to date, though Curran says that Humana will start advertising online and in traditional media during the first quarter of 2008. “We’ve got a whole lot of outreach planned,” he says. Potential targets include health bloggers as well as the popular social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Humana will collect the best ideas from the site and publish an e-book in the second half of next year, with perhaps 50 ideas to provide to consumers, employers, and legislators, Curran says. Given the size of the U.S. health care sector, even a small improvement could save massive piles of cash. “If we could save 1 percent, that’s $2.2 billion,” he says. Early returns are interesting, though Kruglyak cautions that the site by itself is not intended to deliver care or insurance services, but to be a catalyst for change. “ChangeNow4Health submissions range from incremental innovations to big bold new ideas,” he says, “the early progress is encouraging and the potential for creating an impact is very real.” Humana views the experiment as positive to date, but, as we might expect with any innovation, “There are going to be some unanticipated side effects,” Subaiya says. Certainly, it is possible to lose control of the message. Take, for example, a small California company called CareSeek. In September 2007, CareSeek launched a site for professionals called NursesRateDoctors.com. Two months later, the name changed to NursesRecommendDoctors.com after a rash of negative publicity. “It got a lot of attention because it was controversial,” explains Careseek CEO Gale Wilson-Steele. A day after the launch on Sept. 18, San Francisco ER nurse Kim McAllister ripped the concept on Emergiblog (www.emergiblog.com), her own site. “This bothers me. I do not believe a doctor has a right to judge my competence and experience as a registered nurse; why should I be able to rate, anonymously, a physician?” McAllister wrote. “This is just a bad idea no matter how you look at it. In the final analysis, doctors are accountable to their patients, not nursing, just as nursing is not accountable to medicine, but to the patient.” Wilson-Steele does in fact report receiving more negative reviews of doctors from patients than from nurses, but the perception has lingered. “What people say and what people do are miles apart,” says Wilson-Steele. About 20 percent to 30 percent of the time, nurses are rating their personal doctors, not those they work with. “But they still have the perspective of a nurse,” says Wilson-Steele. MARCH 2008 / MANAGED CARE 51 http://www.changenow4health.com http://NursesRecommendDoctors.com http://NursesRecommendDoctors.com http://NursesRecommendDoctors.com http://www.emergiblog.com
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