Dreaming About A Killer Ap That Measures & Credits Social Media-Based Panel Size and Shared Decision Making

The Disease Management Care Blog announces its retirement from bloggery. It has decided to commit its considerable accumulated blogging cash flow and the DMCB spouse’s retirement fund to launch a novel, venture capital-backed and "killer" web application.

Well, not really, but read on. The DMCB can fantasize, right?

It’s called HealthyFacebookery. This novel and robust smart-phone, cloud-based and social-media technology package takes advantage of the evolution of provider-patient relationships away from "production line" face-to-face encounters. As patients and doctors will tell you, office visits have been hollowed out by the need to create medical record entries and health insurance claims. This application will leverage the growing preference of consumers for on-line relationships. As regular readers of the DMCB know, this new social media is now defining the virtual dimensions of physician care.

HealthyFacebookery offers several solutions.

First of all, it can be used by savvy buyers and insurers to assess providers' true productivity and risk-adjust provider payments. By using web crawlers that catalog and weigh the number and intensity of on-line “friending" and other interactions, Healthy Facebookery will add a unique level of granularity to insurer network management. This is paying for email visits Ver. 2.0.

In addition to gauging the quantity and quality of virtual doctor-patient relationships, Healthy Facebookery will also leverage patient centeredness by assisting users' access to unbiased and vetted information about nationally recognized and recommended care interventions. It relies on the key principle of shared decision making (SDM), in which the patient, after receipt of unbiased and trusted information and decision support, is ultimately empowered to trigger care based on his or her own preferences and values. HealthyFacebookery will seek consumer friending on behalf of providers and, if approved, will offer links to any on-line resource that provides facilitated decision-making. Modules that are free of any advertising and that are game-based will be favored. HealthyFacebookery will not create any content but will be happy to accept fees or profit sharing with those who do, assuming they also link the widely read and excellently written Disease Management Care Blog on their corporate web sites.

Finally, HealthyFacebookery's patented technology will also measure how often participants used on-line shared decision making. In other words, it will assess how many participants were not only informed, but how often they considered recommended care interventions. HealthyFacebookery patented online measurement protocols will help health insurers understand and support this independent decision making of their beneficiaries. It will recognize that patient-consumer-users have the right to make "informed refusals." What's more, this application will assure that providers are credited when their patients participate in shared decision making. Insurers will be able to use these twin measures of "considered" and "decided" as a state-of-the-art metric of patient centeredness. This makes HealthyFacebookery a classic disruptive measurement technology that makes standard denominator-numerator quality assessment methodologies destined for obsolescence.

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