Web 3.0 and Mental Illness: Content, Community And Commerce

Web 3.0 and Mental Illness: Content

The content needs of the domain are immense and range all the way from content related to various illnesses, their symptoms, medications, prognosis, and state of research, to the vast spectrum of discussions and insights on coping mechanisms and support resources for family and friends. >>>

Web 3.0 and Mental Illness: Context

First, we explore context. What brings users to the web?

It could be that a family member is in the middle of a first psychosis. However, the family has no experience of the phenomenon, and hence, they do not know what the symptoms mean. They come to the web for research. >>>

Web 3.0 and Mental Illness: Introduction

This holiday season, as we play with fun topic like music, food, and dance, I also want to tackle one heavy topic: mental illness.

There has always been a stigma around mental illness. Yet, 10 percent of the U.S. population is mentally ill. And if you extrapolate from that number, it is conceivable that worldwide, 700 million people are mentally ill. These illnesses can be varied, ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to chronic depression to various addictions to developmental disorders to post-traumatic stress disorder that is so common in war veterans these days. >>>

Athenahealth Takes Leading Role In Healthcare Administration Changes

A Frost and Sullivan report, U.S. Hospital EHR Market, 2009–2016: Charting the Course for Dramatic Change, published earlier last month, reveals that the electronic health records (EHR) market is on path to grow more than six times its 2009 revenues of under a billion dollars to $6.5 billion in 2012, a clear indication that the implementation of the HITECH Act resulted in increased spending by health care providers on IT infrastructure. The researcher believes that significant change has happened since 2009, when approximately 12% of hospitals were using basic or advanced EHR, and only 2% of those were using EHRs in a way that would qualify for meaningful use. HITECH Act laid out several parameters to identify providers using their inter-operable EHR system for meaningful use of delivery of healthcare services, and offered incentives to these providers with additional payments received through Medicare and Medicaid. To help healthcare providers to benefit from these financial incentives, EHR providers are expanding their offerings.

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Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many insurance companies are there in the United States?

Jason Beans: I don’t know. There are about 150 licensed insurance companies doing workers’ compensation. But that’s only in the States. A lot of the insurance companies are forming captives or off-shores in tax havens like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. There are lots of self-insured groups or individuals, or third-party administrators or managing general underwriters (MGUs), so I actually do not have a clean number on that. >>>

Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How many physicians do you have in your system right now?

Jason Beans: We have, according to our database, more than 500,000 physician locations. Now that’s inflated in my mind, because if a doctor treats at four different locations, each location will be registered. If she is an individual doctor in our group and also practices as a part of another group, both groups and locations will be registered. We partner with regional and national PPO networks, and, at times, directly contract. So, we probably have 40% to 50% of the facilities and physicians in the country in some sort of network relationship.  It’s a significant portion of the market, a good starting point for what we want to do.

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Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you look around in the healthcare IT space, what do you see in the landscape that is competitive to you, that you’re going to have to be aware of and counter?

Jason Beans: I see that it is very competitive. A lot of people trying to solve the same problems as I am. They’re trying to figure out how to get healthcare in the most cost-effective way or pay doctors based on outcomes. I’m watching for those ideas. I don’t want to give away my secret sauce until it launches, but what I do think they’re doing is they’re sticking with the same flawed models that people have been [using] forever. I’m trying to take a different tack and have it be something my grandmother could figure out – just very, very simple – and think in terms of the way people shop for everything else in life, not always treated like a complicated insurance product. We’re just taking a different path. But we have competitors everywhere. It’ll depend on our marketing and the execution of the product. >>>

Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I guess, what I’m trying to understand is – one of the case studies I know inside out is the Athenahealth story. Their business model is actually very simple. They work on behalf of the physicians, and they have all these rules engines for coding and everything, and they do collections on behalf of physicians. They service the physician constituency, and they take a percentage of payments.

Jason Beans: Right. We’re on the exact opposite side [from them], more often than not.

SM: Yes, it sounds like it. They are trying to represent the physicians. You’re trying to represent the insurance companies.

JB: More often than not, yes. Yes, that’s true. >>>