Brailer implicitly supports Wygod's next big thing
WebMD Wants to Go Beyond Information
By Milt Freudenheim
The New York Times
February 23, 2006
Marty Wygod, the entrepreneurial deal maker who built WebMD Health into one of the most-visited medical information sites on the Internet, is promoting the site as the next big thing in health care.
By helping people enrolled in employer health plans compile personal health information online, Mr. Wygod wants to tap into the growing corporate trend of having employees pay more, if not all, of their own health costs.
WebMD says it has signed contracts with big health insurers and employers to operate private-access sites where employees can keep track of their medical records, look up information about diseases and compare costs and ratings for doctors and hospitals. Employers or their insurers pay licensing fees to WebMD, based on the services and number of health plan members.
… the company says it has signed multiyear licensing contracts with big health insurers that include Aetna, Cigna and the nation’s largest, Wellpoint, and with nearly three dozen of the nation’s biggest employers, including Bank of America, Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, I.B.M., Pfizer, Shell Oil and the state of North Carolina.
“Corporate America is looking for a way to educate its employees about health care costs, and hopefully to move a substantial amount of those costs off their books,” Mr. Wygod said in a telephone interview. But for investors in WebMD Health, which will post its quarterly results today after the stock market’s close, the big question is how much of the potential upside might be theirs to share.
Mr. Wygod, who sold his earlier venture, the pharmacy benefits manager Medco Containment Services, to Merck for $6 billion in 1993… took charge of Healtheon in 2000…
Under the personalized WebMD service, employees go to private Web sites to fill out health status questionnaires. At some employers, like Pfizer and Dell and North Carolina, employees use WebMD programs to combine the answers with medical payment data from doctor visits and hospital stays to create personal health histories.
WebMD is also holding talks with banks and financial giants like Fidelity. The banks view the trend to so-called consumer-directed health care as a huge opportunity to manage tax-sheltered health savings accounts that many workers are now being offered in tandem with low-premium, high-deductible health insurance.
When WebMD posts its financial results later today, analysts are expecting quarterly earnings of 9 cents per share. What they are waiting to hear is the company’s guidance on the business prospects for Mr. Wygod’s next big thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/business/23place.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
And…
Remarks by David Brailer, MD PhD, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
2005 Keynote
United States Department of Health and Human Services
The Certification Commission for Health IT (CCHIT) is on track to develop a standard for EHRs in ambulatory settings by summer 2005. This is a multi-stakeholder group that exemplifies the very best of private sector leadership - broadly supported, transparent and deliberative, yet urgent and narrowly focused. The work of the Certification Commission is critical to physician and hospital buyers who want to know what product to buy, to established vendors who want to grow their markets, to new technology innovators who want to offer a module within a broader solution, to investors who want to know where to put their capital, and to policy-makers who want to make sure that public funds are invested wisely. About the only people who don’t benefit from the Certification Commission’s work are pro-regulatory zealots who would rather have the government make new rules for the industry.
http://www.hhs.gov/healthit/BrailerSpch05.html
And…
Brailer opens HIMSS06
2006 Keynote
HIMSS Daily News
February 13, 2006
“Only the marketplace can ensure that we have sustained innovation,” (David Brailer) said. “A marketplace approach will result in faster and bigger change because it aligns the key drivers. We have ensured that the federal government will not build, own or operate the infrastructure of America’s health information.”
http://www.healthimaging.com/content/view/3839/85/
Comment: By Don McCanne, M.D.
Does this really need a comment? Perhaps a few obligatory words…
At 16.5 percent of our GDP, our health care system is a logical target for entrepreneurs. The primitive state of our health care information systems offers a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs to move in and gain control of as much of our $2.1 trillion health care budget as they possibly can. Their obligation to their investors is, above all, to design health care information systems that will move the maximum number of dollars possible to their own corporations. Marty Wygod no doubt welcomes this opportunity to at least fantasize about becoming a trillionaire.
Other nations and our own government are already far ahead of the U.S. private sector in developing such systems. Some believe that the Veterans Administration’s system has contributed to the significant improvement in quality at the VA. Government owned and operated systems are designed to serve patients and their health care providers, while using health care dollars as efficiently as possible. Government goals have little in common with entrepreneurial goals.
When affordability of health care is the number one health concern of most Americans, it is unfortunate that, by rejecting public administration of the health information infrastructure, Brailer is supporting the transfer of more dollars away from health care and into private, administrative enterprises. Worse, 60 percent of health care is funded through the tax system, yet Brailer does not want pro-regulatory zealots to set up rules for the industry. Handing tax dollars over to private enterprises without regulatory oversight is public policy malpractice.