Today, we learned that health reform took one step closer to its goal of expanding health insurance coverage to perhaps 30 million more Americans. Likely the politicians will agree to disagree. There is one thing we need more agreement on: personal responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to eat well, exercise, and get regular health check-ups? What about limiting children’s exposure to health risk factors like smoking, lead, and allergens?

While health reform is important, it is also essential to consider the major role individuals have to play in monitoring and managing their own health. If a person’s level of health insurance goes from none to some, or good to great, it wouldn’t change that person’s habits or alert them to lifestyle changes to improve their health. It also wouldn’t necessarily foster a closer, information-sharing relationship with their personal physician. And finally, it’s hard to see the positive correlation between greater health insurance and greater clinical research to fuel medical breakthroughs.

I guess I agree with the need for health reform, but fear the perception shared by many that this is all we need to improve public health. A segment of the public sector and private industry recognizes it will also take better drug surveillance methods and more effective health education. Unfortunately, those aren’t the focus of today’s health reform.

While Washington politicians duke it out over healthcare reform and what President Barack Obama called “health insurance” reform in his press conference on Wednesday night, ordinary consumers are cooking up a reform of their own. Young people who graduated this year without job prospects or health insurance and those workers who have lost their jobs and their health insurance, have found a way to change the game.  It’s called feelWellOnline.com. It’s a new site developed and operated by Frisco, Texas-based Ntrypoint Media now in its seventh month in beta that lets consumers, particularly those who are uninsured, earn “credits” to reduce or eliminate what they pay for healthcare by proactively getting involved in clinical research sponsored by academic institutions and big pharma.

Ntrypoint Media hopes legislators will pay more attention to this form of healthcare or health insurance reform that helps the uninsured by asking them to take personal responsibility for managing their health, rather than taxpayers. Hundreds of consumers have already signed up and earned over a million social credits to cover the cost of over-the-counter medications and preventive services from participating merchants. feelWellOnline.com, similar to sites like Inspire and PatientsLikeMe, is also one of the game-changing ways pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies are engaging directly with consumers to inform them about clinical trials, track adverse events and improve screening and retention of clinical trial patients. According to Newsweek, 80 percent are delayed at least a month because of low enrollment. feelWellOnline.com does not sign up consumers for clinical trials, but facilitates the pre-participation education process, post-trial nurturing phase and referrals from patients to people they know who would benefit from participating in a clinical trial.

What makes feelWellOnline.com so different from typical online research communities or other social media such as Facebook and Twitter is how the site addresses information security, regulatory compliance such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Good Clinical Practice (GCP), including informed consent. For example, HIPAA compliance requires adherence to specific data protection, intended use, auditing and disaster recovery policies. A basic review of most, if not all, social media would show they have a lot of work to do in these areas. Also, GCP requires that no clinical trial investigator involve a person who has not granted the legally effective informed consent or the person’s legally authorized representative.

Ntrypoint Media works with clinical sites, clinical research organizations and life sciences firms running trials in North America, and soon internationally.

Today, we got the results of an online poll we conducted on LinkedIn, a social networking site for professionals seeking to manage and further their careers. When we decided to make healthcare one of our social change focuses, we began brainstorming what type of people would be most interested in helping us further this cause.

One path we talked about was uninsured people, but we we assumed a lot of things about this group that discouraged us from reaching out to them. One assumption was that they were more likely to be unemployed and therefore hard to reach without a way to identify them through an employer or other trusted source. Instead, with further research on the matter, we found out that uninsured people are more likely to be employed than not, with over 80% of heads of households in this group holding a job according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project, covertheuninsured.org. Another assumption was that uninsured people were more likely to work for very small companies in fragmented markets, and again, difficult to identify or reach out to. In reality, 1 in 5 uninsured workers are employed by firms with 500 or more employees.

So back to our online poll. We figured if most uninsured people are employed, polling LinkedIn users could be interesting. The results were interesting, if not saddening. More and more people are unemployed and uninsured, or employed and yet uninsured. Some of this has to be accounted for by people simply opting out because they do not think they need it. But that cannot be all there is to blame. Here is what we think: most of these people cannot afford it, or their employer doesn’t offer a suitable option for them.

Here are some comments from the respondents of our poll:

I am employed and insured, but after having my baby my insurance per month went from around 60.00 for just me, to 360.00 for both of us. Ridiculous!

Although [I am] un-employed, but insured, my COBRA will run out in two months… 

I am self-employed and insured paying over $15,000 annually for “normal” health insurance to include my immediate family and step-children. This is not including office visits. I see the doctor about 2 or three times annually max, there has got to be a better solution!

Insured but not with a good policy, which is very much the story of most peoples lives. With the amount of money that I spend annually on insurance you might as well lump me in with the percentage of those who don’t have any at all.

Agreed! There has to be a better way. Ntrypoint Media is cooking up a different kind of solution by forging unique partnerships with businesses and the healthcare industry to share information in powerful ways that results in lower costs for everyone involved, and better quality care. Our first project is feelWell Online. Learn more here.