המידע באדיבות מדיקונטקסט
Last Updated: 2001-07-26 15:24:45 EDT (Reuters Health)

By Karen Pallarito

WESTPORT, CT (Reuters Health) – Online health information company Medscape is teaming up with roughly 550 physician users of its medical records software to create a massive clinical database.

Medscape said that the aggregated data would be used to tease out patterns of care and to establish standards for benchmarking physician performance.

The venture also opens up a new revenue stream for the company and its physician partners. With nearly 600,000 patients and more than 2 million office visits represented, the data pool is capable of yielding a treasure trove of reports that could be sold to payers, regulators, providers and pharmaceutical companies.

Medscape Chairman and founder Dr. Mark Leavitt acknowledged that the company has dual motivations for partnering with doctors. "We're trying to find revenues to help support digital health technologies that improve healthcare," he told Reuters Health.

Founding members of Medscape's Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC) will not have to collect additional data because the information already exists in digital format. The 550 physicians, who come from nine medical groups, all use the company's Logician software, Dr. Leavitt explained.

Before any data leave the doctor's office, it's stripped of information that could individually identify a patient to avoid breaching patient confidentiality. At that point, it can be pooled and analyzed, he said.

With primary care and specialty data going back as many as 5 years, the pool is considered a rich source of medical information.

"Outcomes researchers have never before had access to the type of clinical information available within an electronic clinical record," according to Dr. David Nash, a noted quality of care expert who is leading MQIC's advisory board. "This collaborative effort represents a milestone in the use of new technology to study old medical problems," he said.

Because the data can be sliced innumerable ways and represent a broad national sample of patients, founders believe that it will yield important observations and areas for health improvement. MQIC will begin by studying diabetes care.

But the data also could be massaged to show what percentage of men aged 50 have had a sigmoidoscopy, for example, or how many 50-year-old women have had their first mammogram, Dr. Leavitt said. Participating doctors could use that information to improve patient care in their own practices and to compare their performance with peers.

"At the same time you also can develop reports that are of tremendous marketing value, to say, pharmaceutical companies," he added. "We can give them a profile of what's happening clinically." A drugmaker could learn that physicians are prescribing the company's new drug for patients who had previously been on another medication, for example.

After covering the expense of producing the reports, MQIC will share any revenues with its participating physicians based on the number of medical records they provide, Dr. Leavitt said.

MQIC also could help drug companies identify potential clinical trial candidates by working with individual doctors and medical groups, he added.

An advisory board headed by Dr. Nash, professor of health policy and medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, will help find customers for the data and oversee patient privacy issues.

Medscape has not released revenue projections, nor will it discuss pricing of the reports. But Dr. Leavitt did say that the venture has "tremendous long-term potential value" and that pharmaceutical companies are "extremely excited" about the possibilities it offers.

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