Searching for the Possible Blue Button Market

I think the biggest impact in this, besides how it will be used in the real world and how it could be scaled up, is answering this question – is it likely that Blue Button will be used? Are we going to see up to 80 percent of Medicare patients enrolled in Blue Button? Are we going to see a significant percentage of United Healthcare patients enrolled in Blue Button? I have no doubt the government will continue to increase the breadth and depth of their coverage on Blue Button. It makes sense for insurance to broaden and deepen their programs. The question is: are patients going to use it and then share it? That’s what we were trying to get to with this challenge.  Even though this challenge didn’t go on for a long time, we looked for strong hints whether this would happen. The great news is we got incredibly strong hints that this is possible and this will happen.

Why Kinergy? What did they offer that others didn’t?

The reason why we awarded the challenge to Kinergy is that they provided a great story on how this is going to work. They treated for what this was, which was their first introduction into the acute care side of things. Most of these companies’ heritage is working with caregivers, patient advocates, and care transition people, and also marketing directly to patient.

What Kinergy Health did is they flew out staff to their host site Lynchburg, Va., to train physicians and get everything installed. They actually would approach patients in the waiting room, and talk to them about Blue Button and about their product. But that wasn’t the most effective way of enrolling patients. The most effective way was after they walked into the treatment room, and after their physician ran through their vitals, ran through their complaints and symptoms; they would end their visit by asking the patient if they had heard about Blue Button. The physician was in the position of doing so because of training from Kinergy Health. What Kinergy Health did in particular, is they showed physicians what data was available. They also provided success stories, in terms of what this could give patients. They didn’t try to get people to sign up right there. Instead, they got the patients to go home and sign up.

Patient education and broad marketing is a big part of this. However, in the early days, to get that 10 percent, I think physicians will be important. What we saw from Kinergy Health is that it’s pretty easy to make physicians understand how valuable this is and it’s pretty easy to give them the tools to show patients how to use this. That is, I think, how I see the system working.