3D Views of Healthcare Locations

Google Maps has just released a fascinating new capability. Their new 3D Area Explorer offers the ability to create immersive, interactive views of any point of interest. Like a 2D map, locations are pinned, and the view can be rotated on various axes to explore the locations. This would be useful in applications like "find a provider" apps that would be able now to show the user around an unfamiliar building or facility compound, making it easier to find their destination and building entrance.

Combined with data from CarePrecise, such as HealthGeo, which contains latitude and longitude for U.S. providers, these clinicians and facilities, or a cluster of them, such as medical offices around a hospital, can be viewed as an interactive 3D map.

Google's new 3D Area Explorer application. 

Using the Google Maps Platform API along with other tools from Google and CarePrecise datasets, such as CarePrecise Platinum extended healthcare provider data, it's possible to visualize information, such as:

• All of one doctor's practice locations and the hospitals they're affiliated with, and to zoom around and identify travel routes
• The locations of all medical facilities, or specific types of facilities, in a city or neighborhood
• All of the practice locations of physicians with particular specialties, or who perform particular procedures
• Locations of physicians who have opted out of Medicare, versus those who accept Medicare

We expect these tools to find uses in identifying areas that are underserved or overserved, offering improved revenue opportunities for providers. Overlaid with POI (Point of Interest) data from other vendors, heat maps can be created to indicate volumes of patients per location.  From retail to investment to insurance, innumerable scenarios scenarios make use of geospatial data. With 3D visualization, these complex data can be better understood and communicated with team members, stakeholders, and consumers.

Patients Resist Digital Doctoring

Modern Physician reports that "The pull-down menus, alerts and point-of-care information contained in computerized clinical decision-support systems [CDSS] can distract physicians from their face-to-face encounters and leave patients feeling ignored and dissatisfied with their care." This comes from a study at the University of Missouri at Columbia that evaluated patient perceptions of doctors using digital diagnostic tools.

"Get over it!" is the first thing that comes to mind. Would you begrudge your mechanic hooking up your car to the diagnostic computer and scrutinizing the bars and gauges and charts on the screen? The physician has to use tools, just like everyone else, to achieve peak performance in treating patients. Personally, I'd rather see the back of his head researching my complaint to take advantage of every inspiration and precaution, than to look at a smiling face telling me "Shucks, I don't know, let's try some drugs!"

The time has come for us as patients to embrace the new technology, just as we insist that our doctors do the best job possible in our behalf, and to get used to some changes in the doctor-patient relationship.

91 Charged With $295 Million Medicare Fraud

Ninety-one doctors, nurses and others were charged in a blockbuster sting operation, with arrests unfolding over three weeks and culminating in 70 arrests last week. In 2007, a strike force was set up between the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services to identify and build federal fraud cases to fight criminal abuse of federal healthcare programs. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that arrests were made in eight US cities involving more than $295 million in stolen funds.

Almost half of those charged were part of a Florida ring that recruited healthcare providers to refer patients to a mental health center, in some cases threatening residents of a halfway house with eviction if they refused the unnecessary care. Another case involved $3.4 million in unnecessary physical therapy by two Brooklyn physicians.

On September 1, officials in Detroit charged 18 physicians, nurses, clinic owners and other medical professionals for submitting $28 million in false claims to Medicare. Just one day earlier, the owner of a Houston, Texas durable medical equipment business was sentenced to 97 months in prison for his role in a Medicare fraud scheme.

In all, the strike force, known as Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), has charged 1,140 defendants who collectively have falsely billed the Medicare program for more than $2.9 billion.

When providers have been convicted of fraud and certain other infractions and delinquencies, their names are placed on the List of Excluded Individuals/Entities (LEIE) database. CarePrecise compiles this data into its comprehensive database of U.S. healthcare providers, identifying excluded providers' NPI numbers, phone and fax numbers.

Read the full story on the HHS website.

$727 Million to Health Centers

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration announced $742 million from HHS will go to community health centers nationwide to build new medical clinics and bring technology in older clinics up to speed. This is in addition to the more than $2 billion already allocated to health centers from stimulus funds.