Washington D.C. leads the nation with the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the country– 3% of all adults and adolescents in the District live with HIV/AIDS (any percentage over 1% is considered a severe epidemic by the World Health Organization).

Officials have created an innovative partnership with a number of organizations and celebrities to distribute female condoms in HIV hotspots — and if you want to try them yourself, they’re now on sale at all the CVS’s in the District.

Disruptive Women’s Wendy Grossman spoke for a few minutes with Mary Ann Leeper, senior strategic advisor for the Female Health Company — about the D.C. initiative that started this week.

Q: Tell me about the DC initiative.
A: The initiative is just the coming together of the five different
groups: The MAC Foundation, the CDC, the Department of Health, the Female Health Company and CVS — coming together to bring the female condom to women in the D.C. area.

DC has the highest rate of HIV and STI’s in the country. The Department of Health has initiated a strong prevention outreach program. They’re also tying in the some of the key, community based organizations into the programs.

Q: The FDA approved the female condom almost 20 years ago, right?
A: Yes. The FDA approved the first female condom in 1993. The second
FC2 female condom — this is what it’s all about. It’s the reintroduction of the female condom into the U.S. It was approved about a year ago. Late last summer, we brought it into the US. To the cities that have the highest rates of STI’s and HIV — to work with them and reintroduce the female condom.

Q: What’s different about the new condom?
A: It’s a new material. We switched from a polyurethane material to a synthetic latex material called Nitrile that allowed us to move from a welding process — very intensive, expensive process — to a dipping process that’s very similar to what’s used for male condoms.
So it allows us to reduce the cost of the product to make it. It increases the donors and these NGOs they can better afford it.

Q: They’re crazy expensive, right?
A: They’re at least 30 percent less. The higher the order, the lower the cost.

Q: What about over the counter?
A: It’s only available right now in CVS in the District of Columbia.

Q: Isn’t the argument against condoms for dudes partly because it ruins the spontaneity? How long would it take to put that in? Just looking at it makes me think it could take me an hour?

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By Lynn Shapiro Snyder. There is nothing like a cold, hard statistic to hang your hat on. What better way is there to drive home your point in the courtroom, the conference room, the Senate chamber? But as much as numbers illuminate, they also obfuscate. Take, for instance, a recent New York Times article announcing that women outnumber men on our  nation’s payrolls. We have reached an historic milestone.

But before you break out the champagne, take a closer look. You actually do not need to search very hard. In fact, all it will take is a glance—one brief, passing glance into any of the thousands of corporate board rooms across America.

As of 2009, a wan 15.2 percent of Fortune 500 board members were women.  That means, for the average 10-person corporate board, there aren’t even two women in the room.  Suddenly the numbers aren’t looking so good. With women making up more than half of America’s workforce, how can there be so few women at the highest level where business decision-making gets done – the corporate boardroom.  The board recruits and retains the CEO and sets company policy.

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By Rebecca Camp. AUSTIN, TX– Today’s SXSH conference (South By Social Health) saw many successful, multi-disciplinary approaches to weaving together new media and health care. I was bothered, however, by a theme that’s becoming increasingly common in the health care conversation: patients treated as consumers.

When a company follows capitalistic principles, the goal is to increase value by offering better services at a lower price. The company strives to improve their bottom line by offering more value than their competitor, in an effort to put their competitor out of business. Offering good customer service complements this strategy. In industries other than health care, the result is a benefit to the consumer: quality products and service at a lower price. Southwest Airlines, for example, employs a very effective social media presence. They respond to complaints tweeted by customers, which is has garnered the company praise in addition to a loyal customer base. But does this consumer-centered strategy translate to health care?

Mayo Clinic is held as a model for value in health care, but attributing their success to “consumerism” is off-base. The new media strategies being presented by health care institutions at SXSH essentially boiled down to damage control by tending to disgruntled Twitterers, and analysis of the types of complaints being registered. Though claiming to be influenced by social media mavens at Mayo’s Rochester flagship, the strategy is misguided and far removed. Mayo Clinic works because of a philosophy of care that puts the needs of the patients first—which does not equate to reactionary PR moves on social media sites. Absolutely nothing about their strategy distinguished it from other industries—and in the context of health care, replicating the strategy of Southwest Air and its ilk borders on insulting. Mayo Clinic avoids the noisy Twittersphere when addressing something as important as patient care; when a complaint is registered, that’s what their specialized center for patient service is for. Their Sharing Mayo Clinic blog allows a community of patients, staff, and families to form, which anticipates service problems before they even occur. This is the absolute obligation of companies in charge of delivering health care to a society.

My issue is also a philosophical one.

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By Stephanie Cohen. This month’s health insurance nightmare: You believe the cost of your policy is too high and the benefits too low.

The situation: Sara E. was looking at new insurance options because she was concerned that her current policy cost too much and covered too little. A case in point was a recent eye exam. She had to pay for the appointment because she hadn’t yet met the $1000 deductible on her current policy.

The solution: It was clear that Sara did not understand the details of the policy she had purchased. It’s not unusual, but can prove problematic. In fact, we recommend that all of our customers make a list of the medical services they will likely need throughout the year. Before buying anything, we tell them to read the fine print on the policy and ask questions until they are certain they understand what they are paying for – and what will be an additional charge.

Here’s why: The fine print on an insurance policy can be complex. The bottom line is that if you purchase a policy with a high deductible, there will be no coverage until the deductible is paid in full. Deductibles apply to all coverage if you purchase an HSA (Health Savings Account) compatible plan – except for preventative services.

And realize this:

1. Deductibles can also apply to specific services such as lab work and hospitalization.

2. They also apply to services differently depending on whether they are in or out of network.

3. It’s important to know that deductibles may be cumulative or shared, or based on the calendar year or contract year. Know how it works for the policy you purchase.

4. If the policy is a Health Savings Account (HSA) versus a high-deductible plan, you will be able to write off the amount placed in the HSA account up to the maximum allowable by the government. The minimum deductible for HSA plans start at $1200 for a single and $2400 for a family.

5. Do note that there are many after-tax expenditures such as those that are included in the FSA Section 213 of the tax code, which can be written off that are not covered under an insurance policy, which is the advantage of an HSA.

If we were the Health Insurance Ambassadors

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Editor’s note: The Disruptive Women in Health Care blog recently compiled an ebook exploring the issue of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) from a variety of viewpoints and perspective. We invite you to download the ebook or read the original posts.

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By Liz Scherer. Comparative effectiveness research (CER): it’s the buzzword of the new decade.  In fact, Congress recently passed legislation to provide more than $1B to support CER  in hopes of improving utilization of existing therapies while simultaneously holding down healthcare costs. The ultimate goal of CER goes even further and paints a rosy vision of patient-centered care and personalized medicine.

However, perhaps these goals are loftier than originally imagined.  Newly- published data appearing in this week’s JAMA show that the very research that is supposed to be forging the path for our nation’s health is filled with ills of its own.

An analysis of randomized and observational studies and meta-analyses published in six “high-impact” journals (i.e. NEJM, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ and Archives of Internal Medicine) demonstrated that there is a dearth of CER studies to guide policymaking or clinical decisions. Granted, this underscores the need to expand funding, preferably public funding to fill the gap. However, key findings also showed that only 32% of evaluable medication studies met the criteria for CER, efficacy outcomes were generally emphasized to a substantially greater extent than safety outcomes (only 19% of studies focused on safety), and that a critical element for promoting effective and efficient healthcare, i.e. cost-effective analyses, appeared in only 2% of the studies. Moreover, less than 50% of studies had active comparators and of these, less than a quarter used non-inferiority analyses, thereby obviating the ability to effectively evaluate and compare similar agents with different side effects profiles.

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