You may have seen the article in yesterday’s New York Times about Keas (pronounced KEE-ahs), a startup company that offers health information and tools that are personalized to your individual needs.
Using information you provide about your medical history and health goals, Keas provides color-coded bands that indicate your health status and personalized care plans that help you move from red (poor health) to yellow (better health) to green (good health). Plans are tailored to a person’s age, gender, weight and health conditions.
Keas’ founder is Adam Bosworth, former head of the Google Health team, who the Times describes as “a voracious and eclectic reader and a globe-trotting traveler” with a longtime interest in using Internet technology to improve health care. “The name kea,” the Times reports, “refers to a species of alpine parrot, which he spotted on the South Island of New Zealand.”
Bosworth talks about his vision for Keas in a recent blog posting:
“If you are one of the many at risk of losing your health, Keas will help you keep healthy. If you’re recovering from an illness Keas will help you to recover and stay well. If you suffer from a chronic disease Keas will help you be as well as you can be. Today no one helps you. You can’t assemble your health data to get the best care possible. Even if you can, your doctors rarely help because the system doesn’t pay them to keep you healthy. You don’t have tools that work online to help in these situations, partly because insurance doesn’t pay for them. Because of these problems people suffer both personal hardship and fear and economic deprivation, sometimes irreversibly. What is more we all pay enormous medical costs for this, and there are costs to society and to the competitiveness of our companies in lost productivity. It is our mission at Keas to fix this for you. Clearly it isn’t an easy mission or a short-term one. While we think we have some great ideas about how to make this possible, we have a lot to learn in the course of this adventure.”
Keas has several impressive partners, Google Health, Microsoft Health Vault and Quest Diagnostics, the largest US clinical laboratory company. These partnerships enable Keas users to transfer their personalized health records from Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault to the Keas site. Users can also give permission to transfer selected or all of their laboratory test results to the site.
All personal health information is protected under HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Keas’ Privacy Policy clearly states that all personal information is “encrypted on computer servers with limited access that are located in controlled facilities.” While Keas does not sell user data even in an aggregated form, they do suggest that you check the privacy policies of their partners.
Health content is provided by Healthwise, a nonprofit that supplies online information to many sites, including those of Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, WebMD, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. Fifteen health plans have been created to date, including ones for high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, weight management and stress management.
As Bosworth implies in the statement above, Keas is a beta site. And for now is free.
Next time: why electronic health records are important and how to create one.
References & Resources
New York Times article, Adding Health Advice to Online Medical Records by Steve Lohr, 10/6/09. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/technology/06bosworth.html?_r=1&ref=business
Adam Bosworth’s Blog: http://adambosworth.net/2007/12/22/talking-about-keas/
No comments:
Post a Comment