Company Mission:

The Company mission is accomplish two complementary objectives: First, 4Healing^sm is committed to collecting unbiased, relevant performance data on healthcare practitioners that can withstand rigorous scrutiny.  Secondly, 4Healing^sm is committed to leverage that data to provide services that bring substantial quantifiable value to its customers based on the “Science of Successful Outcomes^sm.”

The Science of Successful Outcomes^sm:
Partial Summary of Methodology and Conclusions

Methodology: The Company continuously collects and analyzes objective data on healthcare delivery, Health and Productivity Management (HPM) programs, that answer the following questions:

¨    What is necessary and sufficient to achieve a successful health outcome?

¨    What barriers exist to achieving a successful outcome?

►        What are solutions to overcoming barriers?

• Are there solutions that can be implemented in the current environment?

¨      What is the universe of scientifically validated therapies?

¨  Which practitioners have demonstrated success with each scientifically validated therapy?

Conclusions:

1. The Only Relevant Metric In Healthcare Is A Successful Treatment Outcome, with the exception of certain end-of-life issues. Providers and payers of healthcare: doctors, health plans, insurance companies etc. systematically ignore this critical metric.[1]  Patient outcomes are simply not measured in a meaningful way – except by 4Healing^sm.  "In all fairness, I don’t think most doctors and hospitals even have a clue as to what their results are.  It’s not been a normal part of American medicine to provide that type of performance measurement or profiling of providers." – Dr. Sam Ho, Chief Medical Officer, PacifiCare (NY Times television 2007) see video Practitioners do not know their own outcomes, much less the outcomes of other doctors to whom they refer patients. 4Healing^sm is the only source available that allows patients to choose an optimal practitioner for their specific problems based on the practitioners success working with their condition as reported by outcomes feedback. 

2. Collect Continuous Feedback.  Feedback provides the essential data upon which hypotheses can be tested and results can be verified.  Moreover, testing showed that practitioners who knew that their results would be tracked treated tracked patients differently than untracked patients in 92% of cases for the same presenting condition with the same financial remuneration structure. (n=312, p=.05)

3. Adjust financial incentives to reward successful outcomes.  This seemingly common-sense conclusion is continuously verified by 4Healing^sm data.  “Indeed, a doctor who botches a surgical procedure, diagnostic test or drug prescription and then has to follow up with corrective action actually profits from his mistake. He gets paid for the botch-up and then again for mitigating the mistake.”[2]

4. Successful outcomes are practitioner dependent.  Practitioners with the same credentials and experience have widely divergent outcomes for the same presenting conditions.

5. Practitioner Knowledge of the Patient and History are Critical. The successful health outcome directly correlates with the quantity and quality of the practitioner’s knowledge of the patients health and wellness history.  Because this element has been demonstrated to be so important, 4Healing^sm has developed the (patent pending) LifeChart^sm ,   an easy-to-use HIPAA-compliant online health record that captures the patient’s entire health and wellness history including physical, environmental, emotional, relationship, mental, and “spiritual” histories. 

6. Eliminate Co-Pays on the 4Healing^sm Benefit. [3]

7. Mitigate or Eliminate Conflicts of Interest i.e.

(a) Big Pharma Actually Penalizes Negative Outcomes Reporting on Their Drugs: “…drug companies try to cast their products in the best possible light. Some use a far less visible approach: contractual restrictions on what insurers, hospitals and other health facilities can tell doctors about certain drugs.  Some of the contracts go further, restricting insurers and medical organizations from making unflattering statements about the costs and risks of drugs when they communicate with health practitioners… restricted under the Cymbalta contract is "negative educational counterdetailing." … The Cymbalta discount contract offers large purchasers of antidepressants a 5% discount, but specifies that they could lose most of that discount if they engage in, among other things, "negative …correspondence to physicians." [4]

(b) "Scientists Often Mum About Ties To Industry[5]"
"In reviewing 61,134 scholarly articles published in 181 academic journals in 1997, researchers at Tufts University and the University of California at Los Angeles found that just one-half of 1 percent detailed personal financial interests, including consulting arrangements, honorariums, expert witness fees, company equity and stock, and patents."

(c) "Study Says Clinical Guides Often Hide Ties of Doctors"
"A survey of medical experts who write (“best practices”) guidelines for treating conditions like heart disease, depression and diabetes has found that nearly 9 out of 10 have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and the ties are almost never disclosed."[6]

8. Scientifically, The Evidence That ANY Practitioner Can Practice Medicine Well is Merely Anecdotal:

(a) “only 15% of what doctors did was backed by hard evidence[7].”  

(b) “Even today, with a high-tech health-care system that costs the nation $2 trillion a year, there is little or no evidence that many widely used treatments and procedures actually work better than various cheaper alternatives.” [8]

9. Credentials are poor predictors of successful outcomes.  

10. Practitioner Reputations Matched Outcomes only 16%. Years of outcomes data collected by 1-800-DOCTORS showed that medical outcomes matched physician reputation only 16% of the time. Fully 84% of patients experienced superior outcomes from lesser known, sometimes obscure physicians.  Except for 4Healing^sm there is no way to differentiate practitioner success for a patient’s specific concern.

11. “Reaching” the Patient – Compliance to Wellness: One Practitioner Can Succeed Where Many Have Failed.

12. Recognize Unreported Negative Health Impacts of Pharmaceuticals: The “Sensitivity to Initial Conditions” Principle:  Virtually all pharmaceuticals have a long-term impact on the overall health of a patient.  The idea of this principle is to show that the trajectory of a system is very sensitive to its initial conditions. 

For instance, a blood pressure medication may have a very minor unreported side effect of lethargy on a patient.  The lethargy could even slightly reduce the patient’s desire or willingness to move or exercise. The less the patient moves, the more reluctant the patient becomes to move or exercise.  Hence, the possibility of eliminating the need for the medication by using exercise is continuously and increasingly diminished.  Moreover, the patient, now more sedentary, can add weight and increase circulatory disease risks, requiring more medication, adding additional minor negative unreported side effects, which continues and accelerates the cascading descent of overall health.