This year’s Health 2.0 brings another wave of big launches of “consumer healthcare” companies. ShareCare is probably the biggest healthcare web site launch in recent memory, covered by CNN, NYTimes, and Oprah. Castlight is another huge launch backed by $60M of VC money. Everyone seems to be expecting a billion dollar company coming out of consumer healthcare. It is certainly great to see so much commercial activities around Health 2.0. But how about the high profile consumer healthcare companies launched at last year’s Health 2.0?

Well … some of them are no longer in business (e.g., polka), and the remaining have, for most part re-focused on the “enterprise software” model (e.g. Keas, TheCarrot, and several others). The “enterprise model” is to white label the product to insurance carriers or employer payers as wellness modules. But that begs the question: if a product cannot get consumer traction on it’s own, why would payers want to white label it? The key to effective corporate wellness programs is a high level of employee participation. It is true that some carefully designed wellness programs saved money (like Safeway), but for most companies, it is just something that comes bundled with health insurance, which they have to buy. For a lot of payers / employers we talked to, wellness is just window dressing. In fact, only around 10% of employers even bother to measure the ROI of their existing wellness programs. So, why would they pay extra money to get another solution that probably would not work?

So, why are wellness programs largely ineffective? That is because they are tackling a very hard problem: Human Behavior Change.

Behavior change is the billion dollar question in healthcare, and is the basic value proposition for most consumer healthcare / wellness products. So far, no one has even come close to solve it. Last year’s health 2.0 companies were hot on ODL (Observation of Daily Living) and patient journals. But truth to be told, people who have the will power to keep a food journal probably already live pretty healthy. In Health 2.0, people like to talk that they want to be the mint.com of health information. Yet, mint.com has not demonstrated that it can change people’s behavior when it comes to financial decisions. It just happens to be a company that had a good exit. Information (user generated or provider generated) + analytics alone do not seem to provide the magic formula for changing consumer behavior in either health or financial sectors.

In this year’s Health 2.0, the hot approach is to drive change via social games and high definition video “coaching”. Again, most companies in those two spaces are looking to sell to “corporate wellness programs”. I actually do like the social game angle, and some preliminary research has shown that it might work. But the jury is still out. Ringful is innovating with other companies in this space. We will have a more definitely answer next year.

At Ringful, our approach is to work with existing healthcare providers to support better decision making on the parts of both patients and physicians. We incorporate evidence-based guidelines, and put the doctor inside the feedback loop. We believe that this is an effective approach (Well, Keas sort of experimented with this as well. But I do not believe they have gone far enough). Indeed, a recent PwC survey indicates 40% Americans are interested in paying for personal healthcare applications to communicate with their doctors. (Chilmark Research has an excellent writeup on this survey).

So, if you are a physician or hospital, we’d love to partner with you to make our personal healthcare apps work for your patients and for your practice!

We are pleased to announce the general availability of our award winning Pain Care app on iPhone / iPod and Android devices. The application recently won the Project HealthDesign challenge by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the California HealthCare Foundation.

We demonstrated the applications today at the Health 2.0 conference, and it was well received. Go download your FREE copy by searching “pain care” on the iOS App Store or Android Marketplace today!

Speaking of Health 2.0: Tim O’Reilly said in his opening keynote that Health 2.0 is about making sense of data, in particular, real time and personalized data to make better choices. That requires big picture thinking to collect data, connect data, and design new analytics / predictive algorithms. That is exactly what Ringful has been doing with our patient-centered and evidence-based solutions. Stay tuned!

Health 2.0 announced today that Ringful Health’s Pain Care application has won the “Project HealthDesign” developer challenge sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and California HealthCare Foundation. We are honored to win this national challenge!

The winning application is a collaborative effort between Ringful Health, Dr. Vishal Kancherla of the North Austin Medical Center, and the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. By having practicing pain management physician and patient safety experts on the team, we have developed an application that benefits patients and physicians alike.

An early version of the Pain Care application is already available on the iPhone App Store. An update and the Android version of the app will soon follow next week.

Pain Care is a consumer mobile application that helps chronic pain patients to better manage their symptoms, medications, and better communicate with their physicians. It is based on one of the video scenarios in Project HealthDesign. Building on the HealthDesign story board, we work with pain management specialist Dr. Vishal Kancherla to enhance the design to include decision support analytics that are integral to physician’s workflows.

So, why do we choose pain management? According to the National Institutes of Health, pain is one of our most important national health problems, costing the American public more than $100 billion each year in health care, compensation and litigation. Pain management is also plagued by substance abuse, overdosing, and medical errors. Yet, a recent study (1) shows that many patients receive insufficient pain management. There is clearly something wrong here, but what is it? Can technology help?

Well, as it turns out, pain management is one of the therapeutic areas that really need personalized medicine. According to a study (2), today’s prescription pain medications are only 80% effective. People have different lifestyles, environments, and even genetic makeups. The one-size-fit-all solution does not work well for pain treatments.

In our view, a key aspect of a better and more cost effective pain management solution is to provide better information for physicians and patients to help personalize the treatment options for the most efficacy. That is exactly what our Pain Care application does.

At its core, the Pain Care application is an electronic pain journal for patients. Pain journals are well established tools to help patients manage chronic pain. Many studies have shown that electronic journals far outperform paper journals in both response rate and accuracy (3). In the pain care application, the patient report pain episodes, triggers, and medications. It then correlates all those data to give the patient insight into exactly what causes the pain and what medication / therapy is effective.

With PHR integration, the patient can share data with physicians. Our application provides an automatic natural language summary of the patient history together with analytics charts — they are all designed to fit into pain specialists’ existing decision making workflow, and make it easier for the doctors to come up with personalized treatment options.

We look forward to your feedback. If you are a healthcare provider or insurer in the pain management space, we’d also love to explore opportunities for us to work together!

References

1. American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (2008, September 10). Many Cancer Patients Receive Insufficient Pain Management Therapy. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 9, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080909122753.htm

2. Brian B. Spear, Margo Heath-Chiozzi and Jeffrey Huff. Clinical application of pharmacogenetics. Trends in Molecular Medicine Volume 7, Issue 5, 1 May 2001, Pages 201-204

3. Tonya M Palermo, Duaré Valenzuela, Paul P Stork. A randomized trial of electronic versus paper pain diaries in children: impact on compliance, accuracy, and acceptability. Pain. Vol 107, Issue 3, Pages 213-219 (February 2004)

At Ringful Health, we build healthcare applications on smartphones that empower individuals to take control of their health at anytime anywhere. When we talk with established players in the healthcare field, the first question people always ask is this:

“This is very cool. But most of our patients are old and sick, will they use those hip smartphone apps?”

To answer this, our CMO Dr. Shaw and Texas State University professor Dr. Ju Long graciously helped us run a patient survey. The research survey is rather long, but here are some enlightening findings.

Of 163 patients we surveyed, the median age is 62 years old — yes, we specifically targeted a clinic with older patients in town, but that has made our findings all the more remarkable. A full 56% of those patients have smartphones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile)! The median age for those smartphone toting patients is 56.

77% of all patients see the need to keep personal health records. In fact, 56% already use some basic form of PHRs — most of them (53%) just keep the records in a paper folder, and only 4% currently use computerized records. This crowd is ready for some technology empowerment!

Among smartphone users, 54% of patients want to use their smartphones to keep track of medical records, and 5% are willing to pay for such services on a subscription basis.

As we identified at Ringful Health, a powerful use case for smartphone-based healthcare applications is for the patient to keep a daily journal of treatments and outcomes. Examples include Ringful Health’s Pain Manager, Healthy Heart, Asthma Journal, and Pollen Journal applications. So, we asked the patients whether they would keep a medical journal if their doctor asks for it. The answer is that 87% patients, both in the general population and among smartphone users, would at least try to keep the journals. That is great hope for mobile application providers in this field!

Not surprisingly, smartphone users are pretty internet savvy, with 81% of them have searched for healthcare / medical issues online. But at the same time, only about 10% engage in online forums or discussion boards for healthcare issues — highlighting the private nature of healthcare information.

In addition, we found that 74% of patients would like to consult with doctors on the phone. But the majority of them, 61%, would only do so if it is paid by their insurance company. This outlines the challenges of tele-health — a system wide change is needed for tele-health solutions to reach their full potentials in terms of cost saving and improved outcomes.