Aetna to Offer an Online Service That Helps Patients Link Records and Research

By MILT FREUDENHEIM
In step toward personalized online medical information, Aetna plans to announce Wednesday a new service that draws upon a patient’s own medical history to help answer questions about symptoms and treatments.
The Aetna offering, called SmartSource, has been tested by the company’s 35,000 employees. It will be offered to employers that provide worker health benefits through Aetna, in a gradual introduction across the country that will begin in August.
The company, which has 16.8 million enrollees, plans to provide the service free to its customers, saying it wants to help people manage their own health care. Aetna hopes the service can help it recruit and retain employer-customers worried about the costs of care.
With the online offering, Aetna will be entering an arena in which WebMD is the leader for consumer medical information and where medical providers like the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical School are also players. The Web giants Google and Microsoft are also laying plans to let consumers link electronic medical records and online research.
But one of the biggest challenges in linking online research to personal health data has been a widespread reluctance to share health information that might fall into the wrong hands or be abused, affecting job opportunities and insurance premiums.
“The underlying challenge is — ‘Do you trust the insurance companies?’ ” said Mike Davis, a health technology analyst with the HIMSS Analytics consulting firm.
Addressing the trust issue, Meg McCabe, Aetna’s vice president for online programs, said, “We make sure the information is secured and shared, based on the member’s purposes.”
The information will not be used to raise or lower premiums or reject membership applications. “That would not be a good business decision,” Ms. McCabe said. “We need to develop a relationship with our members based on trust.”
Using a medical search engine developed by Healthline, a medical database software developer, Aetna is piecing together medical profiles that are based on records of each insured member’s illnesses and diagnostic tests and that also make assumptions about their health concerns as reflected in their search topics.
Andrea Rosenberg, a quality supervisor in an Aetna call center in Phoenix, said she had used the system to conduct research about her 5-year-old daughter Hayley’s ear infections and her own allergy symptoms.
Like the millions of working mothers — a segment who are major online searchers for health information — Ms. Rosenberg said she had searched other health Web sites but found that the Aetna site provided information that was “more specific” to her situation. After looking it over, she took Hayley to see the family pediatrician. As for her allergies, she decided to stick with nonprescription medicines from the drugstore.
Health plan members have been slow to add their information to personal health records offered by many insurers, at least until a family member gets sick. But Aetna and some other health insurers, including UnitedHealth and WellPoint, have made an end run around this obstacle by creating rudimentary health profiles based on medical claims data.
Aetna says it has gone further by using the profile to help tailor the SmartSource searches.
“I don’t know of anybody else who is matching members’ claims information with a search engine to help them look for medical content,” said Julie Snyder, a technology and health care analyst at Forrester Research.
But some industry experts say that medical claims data have limited utility, providing only “an echo of the events that go on in your care,” according to Wes Richel, a senior health care analyst at the Gartner Group technology consulting firm. “Also, at any time, the information is 15 to 45 days old.”
Dr. Richel said more useful data would eventually come directly from the person’s doctors and hospital visits. Google and Microsoft are trying to get that information, although he predicts it will take “about two years” to reach that goal.
Ms. McCabe said: “We are all angling to reach sort of the same goal — to take all the information that we know about you as an individual and link it to tools to make sure you are as engaged as possible in managing your health care.”