AAFP Announces Partnership With Revolution Health Group

AAFP elevated its commitment to the personal medical home, patient-centered care and health information technology on April 19 with the announcement of a new high-tech partner.

The Academy has joined with Revolution Health Group, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that has built a comprehensive online health and medical information site. The partnership was announced in an AAFP press release and an online press conference hosted by Revolution Health founder Steve Case.

Case, known to millions worldwide as the co-founder of America Online, launched Revolution Health in 2005 and currently serves as its chairman and CEO. The press event marked the relaunch of the Revolution Health Web site, which had been operating in a preview/testing mode for the past three months.

"The Academy is looking to the future, and this relationship is an opportunity to use technology to our advantage," said AAFP President Rick Kellerman, M.D., of Wichita, Kan.

"It's very clear that patients are, in increasingly large numbers, turning to the Internet for health information," said Kellerman. "If Revolution Health understands the role and the power of family medicine -- and if family physicians understand the consumer-driven health care environment -- then our partnership with Revolution Health can help deliver the Academy's message about the personal medical home to millions of consumers."

Kellerman said that the Academy and Revolution Health share a vision of a better, more efficient, patient-centered health care system. "Family physicians are the bricks and mortar -- indeed the foundation -- of America's health care system," said Kellerman. "Revolution Health brings a dynamic technological suite of services to the table."

Kellerman pointed out that currently, AAFP is the only professional medical organization with which Revolution Health has entered into a partnership. "By engaging Revolution Health and working with them, we're helping to set their agenda," said Kellerman. "We are participants rather than spectators on the sideline."

Revolution Health's Chief Medical Officer Jeff Gruen, M.D., said that the family medicine approach to health care delivery mirrors Revolution Health's strategic goals, which are that

"We believe that among the medical specialists, (the AAFP is) the group that most obviously emphasizes those attributes," said Gruen. "The medical home is not a mass focus right now, and one of the things Revolution Health is working toward is making the medical home concept mainstream."

Gruen, a Yale-trained pediatrician who served as director of pediatrics at a health center associated with Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, before becoming a health care executive nearly 25 years ago, said Revolution Health offers tools to aid physicians in tracking and assessing patient behavior that he wished he'd had access to when he was a practicing physician.

"As a physician, I just didn't have the ability to see what was happening outside the 15 minutes I spent with a patient," said Gruen.

He describes Revolution Health as a powerful resource that will help "decrease the amount of time physicians spend disabusing patients of erroneous information they find on the Internet."

"We see this as a collaborative effort with physicians," said Gruen. "Right now, it's not perfect, but it's a beginning."

"These are exciting and innovative times in the world of health information delivery," said Kellerman. However, "there will undoubtedly be some challenges to overcome as AAFP and Revolution Health venture down this path together."