Looking for companies positioned to weather the Great Economic Crisis of 2008? Pizaazz recently cited career networking sites like LinkedIn and Xing in this regard, but how about comScore, the Reston-based, publicly traded company that tracks consumer behavior on the Web?

comScore has created a large proprietary database by tracking the online behavior and monetary transactions of 2 million panelists. The panelists permit comScore to follow them around the Web in exchange for free Internet service or virus scans, and rights to participate in various contests. Panelists also participate in surveys which allow comScore to link information about attitudes and intentions to web search behavior. 

comScore then massages the data to create “insight” for several markets including automotive, financial services, pharmaceuticals and technology.

Its recent press releases convey the sorts of questions comScore can answer (and make money in so doing): “15 million people banked online in France in August,” “comScore ranks the top 50 US web properties for September,” “ More than half of Asia-Pacific internet users visited online gaming sites in August.”

The company’s reports have achieved sufficient cache to influence valuation exercises during M & A as was the case during the recent tie-up between Revolution Health and Waterfront Media. One time, they even affected the stock price of mighty Google. This occurred last February when comScore reported that paid search clicks, Google’s largest source of revenue, had tailed off around the Web. The search giant’s stock fell 5% on the news.

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Sermo, a Cambridge-based social networking site for physicians, has reached an agreement with Bloomberg that gives financial analysts real-time access to the opinions of Joe the Doctor and 90,000 of his colleagues who have joined Sermo’s community.

The deal was announced late last week. It calls for the formation of The Healthcare Exchange, a new service that will be offered exclusively to the 280,000 analysts and investors worldwide who pay a premium for access to the Bloomberg Professional service. The Healthcare Exchange allows analysts and investors to post questions about drug therapies, medical devices and health care trends directly to Sermo’s physician community.

As they do regularly on Sermo, physician members will provide raw, unfiltered, iconoclastic responses based on their own personal experiences. The new information source, the parties propose, should complement the more tightly scrubbed, buttoned-down information flow that currently emanates from the academic medical community, pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies, and government agencies.

“The Healthcare Exchange tears down the barriers between those who need information and those who have it,” said Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant, MD while announcing the initiative during last week’s Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. “No small group of opinion leaders can compete with the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’” 

The announcement follows by just over a week the IOM’s decision to honor John Wennberg for his pioneering work in the area of evidence-based medicine.

About half the US physicians polled in a recent survey regularly prescribe placebos and most believe the practice is ethical, according to a report in the British Medical Journal.

The placebo effect refers to perceived clinical improvement caused by an inert substance such as a sugar pill or salt water, or one that has no impact on the condition for which it is prescribed. Since the 1960s, many clinicians and ethicists have frowned on placebo therapy because it involves deception and thus disregards principles of informed consent and patient autonomy.  Others disagree, noting that placebos can be the most effective treatment for certain conditions, and they can be administered without deception.

In the BMJ study, scientists surveyed 600 internists and 600 rheumatologists they had randomly selected from the American Medical Association master files. 46-58% (depending upon how the question was worded) reported using placebos regularly. The most common placebos were over-the-counter analgesics (41%) and vitamins (38%). Thirteen percent used antibiotics and sedatives as placebos.

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For 8 years, the Bush administration has systematically dismantled America’s reputation. People see us as arrogant and out of touch, as the country that brought you Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Colin Powell had this in mind when he endorsed the Big O last week. An Obama election, he said, “will not only electrify our country…it’ll electrify the world.”

The global impact of next week’s election will be huge no matter who wins, because “cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges,” according to NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “You can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.”

Indeed. So what do people in other countries think about the two candidates running for president of the United States of America?

It could not be clearer. Respondents in all 22 countries polled by the BBC World Service indicated they prefer Obama. Among those who expressed a preference, the average margin was four to one: 49% want the Big O, 12% favor Top Gun. The rest are undecided.

The biggest Obama backers were Kenya (87%), Italy (76%), France (69%), Australia (67%), Canada (66%), and Germany (65%).

People in 17 of the 22 countries think Obama can improve America’s international relations, whereas those in 19 of 22 countries believe things will remain unchanged during a McCain administration.

With respect to Obama’s African-American heritage, a majority in 15 countries indicated that his ascent to the presidency would fundamentally change their perception of America. 

For lots of people, next Tuesday can’t come soon enough.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s long awaited National Network Day is today. The event will feature dozens of collaborative learning opportunities and will offer participants a chance to celebrate progress towards some laudable goals.

IHI describes the event as an interactive series of web-based virtual learning sessions that will highlight some of the best and most innovative quality improvement and patient safety work in extant. National leaders will share successful strategies to reduce patient falls, hospital infections, complications due to anticoagulant therapy and readmissions. There will also be sessions aimed at refining the business case for quality.

National Network Day runs from 11:30AM to 5:30PM EST. Pre-registration is not required. Interested parties can access the event through WebEx (found here).

The event is one of many initiatives spawned by the IHI’s 5 Million Lives Campaign, whose aim is to support the improvement of medical care in the US and in particular to reduce morbidity and mortality in US hospitals.

As part of the Campaign, the IHI challenged hospitals to prevent 5 million incidents of medical harm over a 2-year period. The IHI estimates there are 15 million such incidents each year.
 
The 5 Million Lives Campaign is an expansion of an earlier initiative, the 100,000 lives campaign. In that effort, the IHI and partner organizations worked with 3,100 facilities and saved, according to IHI, “an estimated 122,000 lives in 18 months.” 

It should be a great event. Good luck to the speakers!

Last week, the Institute of Medicine presented its 2008 Gustav O. Lienhard Award to John E. Wennberg for his contributions to evidence-based medicine, outcomes research and informed patient choice.

John Wennberg

Dr. Wennberg is the Peggy Y. Thomson Chair for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences and Founder and Director Emeritus of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

Wennberg became a household name in the 1980s when he and colleague Alan Gitlesohn began documenting marked variations in procedure rates from region to region, state to state and even physician to physician in the same locale. Wennberg was able to show that his findings were driven by physician preferences which were in turn based on their own anecdotal experiences rather than evidence from scientific trials. This research helped drive us toward evidence-based medicine and served as an impetus for legislation that created the Agency for Health Care Quality and Research.

Wennberg also founded, along with Al Mulley, the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, a non-profit organization that provides objective scientific information to patients so they can participate more effectively in their own care.

Wennberg is the 23rd recipient of the Lienhard Award, which includes a medal and a $25,000 prize. The Award program is funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Lienhard was chairman of the Foundation’s board for sixteen years beginning in 1971.

India’s $64 billion outsourcing industry has given rise to a host of new sub-cultures and lifestyles that have proven to be a rich source of subject matter for authors and moviemakers alike.

“Hello,” for example, is a recent Bollywood release about the bizarrely comic lives of 6 call center employees whose world gets turned upside down during a night’s work. The movie is based on the 2005 best-selling novel, One Night @ the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat. Both have clearly hit a nerve, and the Washington Post reports that “Hello” opened to laughs and cheers across India.

Indian call centers employ more than 2 million people, most of them well-educated, upwardly mobile young adults. “Hello” would have us believe their lives truly are a world apart. Workers sleep during the day and work all night. They adopt rust-belt sounding names and southern drawls, and track American holidays, football scores and hurricane forecasts as closely as events in their own country. All-night food delivery services spring up to meet their needs, while bars and movie theaters open at 7am to capture workers coming off the job.

We can only imagine the eye-rolling tales these call center reps must accumulate as they help exasperated American callers with jammed computers, insurance gobbledygook and so forth.

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After reporting a 28% decrease in Q3 net income, pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. announced it will cut 7,200 jobs over the next 3 years. This amounts to 12% of its workforce and it comes on top of 10,400 job cuts the company has made during the last 3 years.

Merck said workforce reductions will coincide with the shuttering of research facilities in Seattle, Italy and Japan. Executive positions will be reduced by 25%. 40% of the reductions will involve US-based employees.

CEO Richard Clark indicated the moves were part of the company’s plans to reengineer its R & D, manufacturing and sales processes. “New business models have to be put in place for our industry to survive,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Merck’s Q3 sales dropped 2% to $5.9 billion. The company attributed the fall to decreased revenue from three key drugs: Gardasil, a cervical cancer vaccine, Vytorin, a cholesterol-lowering drug whose effectiveness has been questioned, and Fosamax a bone mineralization drug that faces generic competition in the US. Merck also cited the economic downturn as a cause of its troubles. The Great Economic Crisis of 2008 has triggered a nearly unprecedented drop in US health care consumption.

Merck did report sales growth for its diabetes drugs, Januvia and Janumet. Sales of the former increased 250% to $379 million. Sales of the latter increased 500% to $101 million.

We have known for ages that exercise reduces the risk of stroke, but this risk is not eliminated altogether especially if other risk factors such as high blood pressure and cigarette smoking are not addressed.

A study published in this week’s Neurology adds a new twist to the story. In the new study, Lars-Henrik Krarup and colleagues at Copenhagen University Hospital found that in a cohort of elderly stroke patients, those who had exercised more vigorously before the event had a better prognosis than those who exercised less vigorously or not at all.

Krarup’s group stratified 295 patients that had recently sustained an ischemic stroke into quartiles based on their prestroke physical activity as determined by a questionnaire. They assessed initial stroke severity using the Scandinavian Stroke Scale and 2-year stroke outcomes using the Rankin Scale.

The scientists found a linear relationship such that for each successive increase in prestroke physical activity, initial stroke severity decreased. The most active group was 2.54 times more likely to incur a mild initial stroke than the least active group. These benefits were maintained after two years, in that the most active group was far less likely to experience marked disability.

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Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) has developed software that transforms cell phones into monitoring devices that identify audio streams from advertisements, TV shows or movies so that its customers can ascertain what you’re listening to and how it affects your behavior.

The souped-up cell phones can thus track the effectiveness of ad campaigns. For example, did you watch a movie after you saw its trailer on television?

The San Mateo-based IMMI is in start-up mode right now. It has enrolled 4,900 testing panelists in 6 markets. It pays each panelist $50 per month or offers free cell phone service in exchange for the panelists’ agreement to carry software-enabled phones wherever they go.

 IMMI’s technology can’t track the impact of Internet ads or print ads because they don’t involve audio. Still, IMMI has attracted attention from some big dogs. For example, GE’s NBC Universal uses IMMI to study how people watch sporting events like the Beijing Olympics and TV shows like Saturday Night Live.

Interestingly, IMMI recently reported that of the people who caught an SNL sketch featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, only one third watched the parody live on TV. The rest watched after the fact, either on a DVR or the Internet. 

By the way, IMMI assures you that your conversations are not being captured by their phones, since there isn’t a match in its coded data base for whatever it is you’re talking about. Matches only exist for audio from IMMI’s paying customers. Seriously.