Aetna to Offer an Online Service That Helps Patients Link Records and Research

[Guest guest]

Aetna to Offer an Online Service That Helps Patients Link Records and

Research

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/business/12health.html?

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By Milt Fredenheim

In step toward personalized online medical information, Aetna plans

to announce Wednesday a new service that draws upon a patient's own

medical history to help answer questions about symptoms and

treatments.

The Aetna offering, called SmartSource, has been tested by the

company's 35,000 employees. It will be offered to employers that

provide worker health benefits through Aetna, in a gradual

introduction across the country that will begin in August.

The company, which has 16.8 million enrollees, plans to provide the

service free to its customers, saying it wants to help people manage

their own health care. Aetna hopes the service can help it recruit

and retain employer-customers worried about the costs of care.

With the online offering, Aetna will be entering an arena in which

WebMD is the leader for consumer medical information and where

medical providers like the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical School

are also players. The Web giants Google and Microsoft are also laying

plans to let consumers link electronic medical records and online

research.

But one of the biggest challenges in linking online research to

personal health data has been a widespread reluctance to share health

information that might fall into the wrong hands or be abused,

affecting job opportunities and insurance premiums.

" The underlying challenge is — `Do you trust the insurance

companies?' " said Mike , a health technology analyst with the

HIMSS Analytics consulting firm.

Addressing the trust issue, Meg McCabe, Aetna's vice president for

online programs, said, " We make sure the information is secured and

shared, based on the member's purposes. "

The information will not be used to raise or lower premiums or reject

membership applications. " That would not be a good business

decision, " Ms. McCabe said. " We need to develop a relationship with

our members based on trust. "

Using a medical search engine developed by Healthline, a medical

database software developer, Aetna is piecing together medical

profiles that are based on records of each insured member's illnesses

and diagnostic tests and that also make assumptions about their

health concerns as reflected in their search topics.

Rosenberg, a quality supervisor in an Aetna call center in

Phoenix, said she had used the system to conduct research about her 5-

year-old daughter Hayley's ear infections and her own allergy

symptoms.

Like the millions of working mothers — a segment who are major online

searchers for health information — Ms. Rosenberg said she had

searched other health Web sites but found that the Aetna site

provided information that was " more specific " to her situation. After

looking it over, she took Hayley to see the family pediatrician. As

for her allergies, she decided to stick with nonprescription

medicines from the drugstore.

Health plan members have been slow to add their information to

personal health records offered by many insurers, at least until a

family member gets sick. But Aetna and some other health insurers,

including UnitedHealth and WellPoint, have made an end run around

this obstacle by creating rudimentary health profiles based on

medical claims data.

Aetna says it has gone further by using the profile to help tailor

the SmartSource searches.

" I don't know of anybody else who is matching members' claims

information with a search engine to help them look for medical

content, " said Snyder, a technology and health care analyst at

Forrester Research.

But some industry experts say that medical claims data have limited

utility, providing only " an echo of the events that go on in your

care, " according to Wes Richel, a senior health care analyst at the

Gartner Group technology consulting firm. " Also, at any time, the

information is 15 to 45 days old. "

Dr. Richel said more useful data would eventually come directly from

the person's doctors and hospital visits. Google and Microsoft are

trying to get that information, although he predicts it will

take " about two years " to reach that goal.

Ms. McCabe said: " We are all angling to reach sort of the same goal —

to take all the information that we know about you as an individual

and link it to tools to make sure you are as engaged as possible in

managing your health care. "

[Guest guest]

A database so people know more about you?...I don't think I like it. Kinda scary

to me.

Geri Mn.