Quality as a career - From The Editor - Editorial - Brief Article

Health Management Technology, Feb, 2002 by Robin Blair

This editorial began, surprisingly, with a press release. Last December, the Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA) announced results of its study measuring the effectiveness of a health reference book, What To Do When Your Child Gets Sick, written at third grade level for low-literate populations.

IHA disproved the premise that low-literate readers won't use a reference book for information. Its survey of 256 consumers found that over a six-month span, 48.4 percent referred to the book three or more times; 99 percent found the reference book easy to follow; and 91.4 percent said it answered completely any health questions they had.

That's a warm but unquantifiable fuzzy--until you read the line describing studies that reference $73 billion per year in unnecessary healthcare spending for consumers with low literacy levels. Then it becomes a fuzzy with industrial strength potential--and proof that quality information, packaged correctly, can positively influence behavior.

All that brought me back in time to 1993, when my then employer handed me--as part of my health benefits package--a copy of the Healthwise Handbook. I still have it (and use it) today, although it is dog-eared and yellowed from copiously more utilization than I generally admit to. It was terrific then, and even if some information has been expanded upon in nine years, it's still terrific today. The best part was that the Healthwise Handbook gave me straightforward facts with zero fluff and even less commercialism, and enabled me to determine when to seek medical help and when and how to handle it myself at home. Knowledge is power.

Today, I surf the Net even less than I did in 1993, so I was curious to visit www.healthwise.org and see what the 26-year old organization has been up to since we first made acquaintance. I was gratified to find a flourishing volume of activity tailored for today's point-and-click technology--but with the same dedication to standards, comprehensive and commercial-free presentation, and unbiased perspectives that I encountered nearly a decade ago.

I'm happy to say the Healthwise Handbook still lives, augmented by the Healthwise[R] Knowledge-base collection of software-based topics for consumers. The organization's longtime CEO Don Kemper, M.P.H., still chairs Hi-Ethics, authors books and articles, and speaks at HIMSS. The organization offers decision support for call centers, and a variety of customizable self-care materials for employers and health plans to use with employees or members. On Dec. 12, 2001, the Healthwise Knowledgebase received the URAC Health Web Site Accreditation seal.

It's all described on their website, but here's the telling part. The description of "product" components that financially fuel this organization accounts for, I would guess, 30 percent of the website's content. The rest is dedicated to issues of quality, standards, ethics, privacy, credentials of medical authors, judging quality of Internet-based information, and the significance of consumer empowerment. Just as I expected.

There's no substitute for quality. There never will be. Hyperbole and superlatives are no substitute for authenticated research and elbow grease, dutifully applied, to create a product of bona fide utility. While amateurs belly up in a year or two, quality survives and evolves from decade to decade, and jaded old editors still carry it around in their book collections.