Posts Tagged ‘patient_access’

Now Reading: Adolescent Access to Online Health Services: Perils and Promise

February 3rd, 2009 | Popularity: 29%
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One of the authors of the article and former colleague from Group Health Cooperative, David Grossman, MD, tipped me off to its publication, and I’m glad he did.

This piece adds to a growing volume of work that doesn’t ask “why?” patients should have online access, but work that asks “why not?” for patient online access. Unfortunately, the peer reviewed literature lags significantly behind what is known in the world about patient online services – it points to some of the deficiencies of peer review in a Web 2.0 world that I an others have written about previously.

One disclosure is that I am an acknolwedgee and was one of the individuals interviewed by the author, although I was not involved in any significant way in the content or conclusions reached by the author.

The article covers online patient access for a vulnerable population, teens, and the author makes an astute observation about their vulnerability in today’s health system, which parallels their vulnerability in online health systems:

Adolescents, as a group, do not typically advocate on behalf of their own health care needs, and generally are not the primary subscribers on health insurance plans. As a result, teen needs may not be among a health care organization’s highest priorities.

From my experience, many of the online programs that exist for adolescents are there because of the support of a handful of dedicated pediatricians and family physicians as well as their nursing and allied health colleagues who care for this group. That’s changing, though, as parents who enjoy this access for themselves are asking how their entire family can participate.

There’s a very nice table in the article about what, specifically, leading edge organizations are doing to provide teen access. This table alone should serve as a guide to understand what conventional limitations are. However, I would stress the word “conventional,” because as the authors point out, much more should be possible in the care of adolescents, so organizations out there looking to implement teen access hopefully would use this information to provide even more service – this is the foundation of innovation after all!

In addition to the useful summaries of potential beneficial uses of teen access, the article includes a fairly good review of the benefits of personal health records in general.

The other thing I liked (and like in any article like this) falls into the category of what I call “myth explosion,” which is where a critical eye is applied to assumptions made about how things might work if some thing new is tried. (In my LEAN work, I used to say, “not everything has been tried before.”) This includes concerns about parents coercing teens to provide passwords to their online health information, which is successfully challenged as a concern, in my opinion. Beyond thoughtful analyses like this, I think patients and their families are the best at myth explosion and do it quite readily. With that in mind, a great follow-on to this article might be one written about the experiences of teens and parents involved in the adolescent access programs now underway.

The one other idea that comes to mind is the fact that the recent HIPAA guidance put out by the Department of Health and Human Services has no information in it regarding adolescent access. I think it might be useful for the next chapter of that guidance to include this group, to make something that seems difficult to so many not seem so.

Thanks to Megan Moreno, MD, for her work to change the question from “should we?” to “how and when?” Hopefully, soon. If there are any teens or parents out there using this access or want to use it, please feel free to comment on your experience as it is or as you would like it to be.

Now Reading: 25 Percent of Large Medical Groups Use Data from Patients to Improve Care

October 14th, 2008 | Popularity: 34%
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Only 10 percent reported that most of their physicians would strongly agree with statement that the group regularly incorporates feedback from patients in improving care and developing new services.

This is among the largest medical groups, the ones with the greatest infrastructure.

This figure comes from the attached article, published in Health Affairs , which is a survey of a sample of the largest medical groups in the United States (those with 20 or more physicians), with the exclusion of Independent Practice Associations (due to theoretically less infrastructure present), and via self-report of the CEO’s/Presidents/Medical Director. In other words, this is best case.

With regard to online access:

Thirty percent of medical groups use group visits for patients with chronic illnesses at a majority of their practice sites (data not shown). A similar proportion reported that most of their physicians communicate with patients via e-mail “occasionally,” although only 1 percent reported that physicians use e-mail with patients daily. Nine percent said that a majority of their patients could access some part of the group’s EMR online.

Unfortunately, the performance of the medical groups surveyed lessens as the size of the group does. I thought it might be possible that smaller practices in this group might employ greater efforts to incorporate patient feedback. That could still be the case, since groups with less than 20 physicians are not included here (and those are the overwhelming majority of places where Americans receive their ambulatory medical care).

What about measuring “Medical Home-ness”?

Although some argue that “ medical-homeness” is better evaluated from the patient’s perspective than from the physician’s, others balk at all attempts to measure aspects of the PCMH as overly reductionist. Regardless, the demand for clinical practice “ transparency” remains a reality of the current policy environment, and success of the model will depend in part on continued multistakeholder involvement in the development of standardized, comprehensive assessment tools.

How, in a Health 2.0 world, could we combine the significant expertise of NCQA and lighter weight solutions to support patient involvement in the measurement of medical home-ness? Would this approach also guide medical groups to select the right infrastructure improvement projects for themselves and implement them quickly? This fits in nicely with the LEAN concept of “seeing the impact of what you do,” by getting smaller bits of feedback soon, combined with more comprehensive feedback over time.

Maybe a parallel iPhone Medical Home measurement application will surface …. see what you think.

Sheraton Palace Picketing — Palace Hotel and Hall of Justice

August 20th, 2008 | Popularity: 25%
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  • Sheraton Palace Picketing — Palace Hotel and Hall of Justice – As I sit here working to design a pilot for connecting Californians with chronic illness to their personal health information. It's incredible to walk these halls and think about what happened here 44 years ago. Now, we're doing the same work, in the digital sphere. Every patient deserves to have online access to their care system, insured or not.

Patient Online Access in the Safety Net

August 19th, 2008 | Popularity: 46%
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I admit, that maybe, once or twice in my past, I may have used convening and convener in less than flattering terms, much like I used to use “process” in unflattering terms. I learned through LEAN, though, that process isn’t bad, bad process is bad. And so I have learned the same thing about convening, now that I have done it a couple times this summer, with the California Healthcare Foundation.

The most recent time was yesterday, when Veenu Aulakh, MPH, and I brought together Safety Net health care organizations, and national experts in patient online access and social impact of the Internet to talk about (you can guess…) “Patient Online Access in the Safety Net.”

These being the first convenings I have co-led, rather than participated in, I have learned a ton, and have gotten a good understanding of doing this for a purpose, which both situations have had. In the event we hosted yesterday, in Oakland, I put together an A3 document before we invited anyone, which included the background, the goals, and most importantly, the “why?” we were doing this in the first place. It was really helpful to have created agreement around the “why?” – I referred to this many times in the planning.

At the event itself, I got a new perspective that I had not had as a participant previously. It was one of listener/observer – even when I was doing the talking, I was interested to see reactions and learn what people and organizations are capable of. It made me think that when I have been a participant in convenings in the past, this is what my hosts were doing – learning what myself or my organization was capable of doing to solve a problem, as much as they might have tapped me as an expert. Interesting to have this happening in my brain.

Sharing information happened, too, courtesy of some of the most innovative organizations in the U.S., including Cambridge Health Alliance, University of California, San Francisco’s Positive Health Program , New York’s Primary Care Information Project, Institute for Family Health, and Kaiser Permanente.

In addition to all of this, there were a few nice moments of recognition for people’s work, such as when Jim Kahn, MD, thanked Kate Christensen, MD, and her team at Kaiser Permanente for their support and assistance in the launch of the myHERO patient portal for HIV patients cared for at San Francisco General Hospital.

…and a little something for me, a follow-up conversation with Hilary Worthen, MD, from Cambridge Health Alliance, about his study and pathway to discover and implement LEAN in primary care at CHA. He told me that for him, this is a transition from thinking about exam rooms and staff to “work that you need to get done, defined by doctor and patient.” I love hearing about how people apply their creativity and copy the thinking of LEAN to do exceptional things for their patients.

This being the second time I have done this, I don’t know if it was perfect. We tried a lot of things I’ve not done in meetings before, and I am still working to integrate social media before, during, and after. I am definitely sold on my philosophy of supporting any and all technology use (“if you need or want to use your device, use it”) - I have not, in my conveningness, come around to the “turn your devices off” philosophy, as I have written about previously.

Oh, and I learned that a 60″ table seats 8 people.

Here are a few images from yesterday. I’ll follow up with my slides in a separate post. Click on any to see larger size.

Now Reading: Pew Hispanic Center’s Hispanics and Health Care in the United States

August 17th, 2008 | Popularity: 40%
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Tomorrow I will be in Oakland, California, along with health care leaders from the California Heatlhcare Foundation, California Safety Net Organizations, National Leaders in Patient Online Access in the Safety Net, and other national leaders in the social aspect of the Internet for Americans to talk about patient online access in the health safety net. It promises to be a very interesting day, which I’ll post about here.

The referenced report is one of two recent studies on the impact of the Internet among Latinos in the United States, and among all Californians (next post). They are both timely and useful as we answer the question that I was asked many times while visiting Safety Net medical centers: “Are our patients online?”

Pew Hispanic Center Report: Hispanics and Health Care in the United States: Access, Information and Knowledge

This report describes research performed jointly by the Pew Hispanic Center and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and consisted of a bilingual telephone survey of a nationally represented samle of 4,013 Hispanic adults conducted from July – September, 2007.

Highlights from my review

  • 27 % of Latinos report having no usual care provider, the rate is 42 % for those without insurance.According to the CDC, the proportion among Hispanics is more than double that of non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks.
  • Language differences are significant: 24 % are English dominant, 35 % are bilingual, 41 % are Spanish-dominant. This has significance with regard to the Internet….only 17% of Spanish-dominant Latinos receive health information from the Internet, compared to 53 % of their English-dominant peers. Interestingly, those of South American descent report a 51 % figure, higher than the figure for Puerto Rican (49%) and Mexico (31%).
  • Fleshing the language issue a bit more: 40 percent of those who get health information from the television get it from Spanish-language stations. For those getting information from radio, 47 % rely on Spanish language radio stations
  • Youth is a factor: 42 % of those aged 18-29 get health information from the Internet.
  • Overall, 35% of Hispanics get their health information from the Internet, far behind television (68%), radio (40%), or a doctor (72%)
  • Also of interest to me is in the demographics of this population, younger than their non-Hispanic cohorts, and with lower rates of chronic disease today (20 % with high blood pressure, compared to 22.4 % Non-Hispanic White, 31.6 % Non-Hispanic Black)
  • And….in terms of health seeking, 41% said the reason they did not have a regular health provider was because they are seldom sick. The impact? Only 62 % of these individuals have had their blood pressure checked in the last 2 years.

What impressed me overall was the impact of language – it reinforces what I saw from my observations way back in November 2007:

Key health care leaders are saying the time for PHRs are now. Based on the Boston visit, I am saying the time for multilingual and culturally relevant PHRs is now.

Obviously, I still believe that, and this is why I am especially excited that one of the organizations presenting to us today is Cambridge Health Alliance (see information about my visits with CHA here), who have launched their personal health record to a population that is predominanly portuguese-speaking.

Without parity in access to quality health information, the concern is that the dependence on the in-person interaction with the health provider is greater for Spanish-dominant individuals than for English-dominant, and therefore the risk is greater that needed preventive care will not happen if they do not have a usual health care provider. The data appear to bear this out. It is worth thinking – if you did not have your blood pressure checked in the last 2 years, how would you be able to reassure your family about your ability to provide for them with a healthy heart? Should these individuals wait for their organs to be damaged, or should they have an equal chance at providing for themselves and their families with healthy hearts, brains, and kidneys? Thank you to the Pew Hispanic Center and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for informing these questions.


Stepping Through a Patient’s Experience with Hypertension: Setting Rates and Negotiating Benefits

August 14th, 2008 | Popularity: 38%
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This is fourth of a multi-part series on a patient’s experience managing a chronic condition, in this case hypertension. A diagnosis has been made, and our patient has hopefully followed up and has hopefully been maintained on appropriate therapy (there is a 1 in 3 chance that this is happening). Now it is time for our patient’s health care sponsor (such as his employer) to review the health care benefit.

Click on the image to see it larger size

setrates-htn-eytan

Patient Story (Frydman)

There is no patient story in this phase. At some point during the year, our patient’s employer will discuss provided health care coverage with a health plan or plan(s) who have set rates for coverage in the coming year. On the diagram, there’s no red dot indicating the presence of data because in many (most?) cases there is not a lot of data to guide this conversation. Many health plans have claims data, to show how many services and what types have been paid for throughout the year. They may not have data about the effectiveness of those services. For example, they may not know what percent of office visits for high blood pressure showed effective control. On the employers’ part, they may not have much data, either. If they are self-insured, they may have similar levels of claims data, but not measures of performance.

Even in health care organizations with advanced electronic medical records, the determination of “% patients with appropriate blood pressure control” may not be done in an automated fashion – a random selection of charts may be used to come up with this percentage. The electronic health record may facilitate the selection and review of charts, but nothing more. This is dependent on the health care environment being studied.

(If there are health plan and providers who would like to inform this part of the story, comments are open)

Clinical and Public Health pearls (Houston-Miller and Eytan)

  • High blood pressure is one of the most costly conditions for employers, more than cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and behavioral health conditions. This does not take into account that hypertension is responsible for a significant amount of morbidity among patients with heart disease and diabetes. This post shows the costs of each. The first graph shows the cost per person with the condition. When you average the costs across an entire employed population, the large numbers of patients with hypertension escalates the cost of this condition above all others. For those people interested in the cost profile of chronic conditions to employers, The Center for Studying Health System Change hosted a forum where expert Ron Goetzel, Ph.D. provided an updated look at the data. It is compelling.
  • Fewer than 10% of the cases of undetected or uncontrolled hypertension could be associated with lack of health care use. In other words, health plans and employers are already paying for this current state. It does not exist because patients are not getting enough health care.

Comment

Where is the data? and What’s Missing? In this case, there isn’t much data in the conversation. The conversation is around use of services, and in that setting, an assumption is typically made that more services is better. The result is that these stakeholders cannot engage at their potential to ensure that services are as effective as possible.

It is possible that a patient or provider may share data about the effectiveness of their blood pressure control services which are being purchased and paid for by employer and health plan respectively. Blood pressure control is already a HEDIS measure, and is a development Pay for Performance measure in California in 2009.

Next post, the yearly checkback, completing the cycle. Comments welcomed, of course

What Healthcare Could Learn from Amazon – ClickZ

August 13th, 2008 | Popularity: 22%
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  • What Healthcare Could Learn from Amazon – ClickZ – Article I was interviewed for. Sadly the experience described by the patient in the article is not uncommon. And more sadly, they probably didn't know how common it was until it happened to them. Nice commentary from my former boss, Matt Handley, MD, at Group Health Cooperative, nice to know they are still setting an example.

The problem for people who have no health insurance is…they're uninsured

August 7th, 2008 | Popularity: 14%
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Moving Closer to Patient Centered Care in Yountville, California

July 30th, 2008 | Popularity: 46%
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Yountville

I think word has gotten out that I am something of an urban dweller; Susan Edgman-Levitan was nice enough to ask me, “Ted, are you hanging in there?” as we spent several days in Yountville, California at the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation forum on Achieving Patient-Centered care.

I ended up doing just fine – it’s about the content, not the place, and a scenic jog through the vineyards of Yountville can’t be argued with.

And the content was right up my alley, with thanks to the ABIM Foundation for hosting this discussion. The discussions at the Forum are being compiled by the ABIM Foundation, so I will let them report on that rather than me, but I can share my perceptions of the event here.

First of all, patients and families were involved throughout, as faculty and equal participants. This continues an important precedent in helping health care leaders achieve comfort with this idea.

One of the most powerful moments was Margaret Murphy sharing the story of her son Kevin’s death (You can read more about it here) within the Irish health system. I really appreciated Mrs. Murphy’s use of images in her storytelling – in the future, a presentation without at least 50 % images and a video or two is going to be minimum bar to go in front of an audience. There was discussion about Kevin’s death being the result of diagnostic error. I think that’s true, and I also think that if the family had access to all of his medical information from the beginning, it might have changed the diagnostic approach or caught the fatal series of errors before they happened.

For my part, I presented the following slides in the 10 minutes I had alotted, around the topic of the use of health information technology to put patients, families, and communities in the center of care.

Enjoy (I hope) and thanks to the ABIM Foundation for hosting this discussion and follow-up.

Click on any image to see them larger

Think Before You Voicemail

July 22nd, 2008 | Popularity: 21%
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  • Think Before You Voicemail – Sentiment about older modes of messaging. If the general public doesn't like it, maybe we shouldn't force our patients to, either.

Now Reading: “Effectiveness of Home Blood Pressure Monitoring, Web Communication, and Pharmacist Care on Hypertension Control: A Randomized Controlled Trial

June 24th, 2008 | Popularity: 24%
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Green, Beverly B., Andrea J. Cook, James D. Ralston, Paul A. Fishman, Sheryl L. Catz, James Carlson, et al. “Effectiveness of Home Blood Pressure Monitoring, Web Communication, and Pharmacist Care on Hypertension Control: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” JAMA 299, no. 24 (June 25, 2008): 2857-2867.

Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of using home blood pressure monitoring combined with pharmacy care over the Web to improve BP control for patients with essential hypertension

This is a significant study in the world of health care and e-health – the first randomized controlled trial to test the use of care management over the Web. It was performed at Group Health Cooperative, using the Web services that I helped implement as part of our electronic health record system.

Looking at the data, it appears that patients with uncontrolled hypertension without access to supportive pharmacists over the Web were much less likely to have their blood pressure controlled compared to patients that did. In other words, patients were not able to achieve as sufficient control through doctor visits alone.

This study further supports the idea that we have a great opportunity to support non-visit-based, participatory health care as a modality to manage chronic illness.

For a health system already paying for physician visits that have less than a 1 out of 2 chance at recording a controlled blood pressure in them, maybe there’s an opportunity to change the way high blood pressure is managed, for example, in California.


Businessweek's Cutting Edge of Health Care includes After Visit Summaries

June 23rd, 2008 | Popularity: 21%
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Now Reading: Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care — A National Survey of Physicians

June 19th, 2008 | Popularity: 23%
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Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care

DesRoches, Catherine M., Eric G. Campbell, Sowmya R. Rao, Karen Donelan, Timothy G. Ferris, Ashish Jha, et al. “Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care — A National Survey of Physicians.” N Engl J Med (June 18, 2008). Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care — A National Survey of Physicians.

This is an informative study of electronic health record penetration by the group at Massachusetts General Hospital, funded by the Office of the National Coordinator.

The news? Not very good. Only 4 % of physicians have “fully functional electronic record systems.” The numbers are even more concerning if you look at small practices, where the overwhelming majority of Americans receive care: 2 % in practices with 1-3 physicians. In other words, most American physicians use paper based medical records.

There are a few (among several) very good things that this research group has done:

  1. They have defined what is meant by “electronic health record” so we can track this over time
  2. They have found that there was NOT a difference in rates of adoption among providers serving minority patients, uninsured patients, or patients on Medicaid

With that in mind, here’s the hope that this brings:

  1. If we’re able to define what physician access to an electronic medical record is, let’s now define what patient access to that same electronic medical record is.
  2. Let’s begin to use that metric as a complement to, or instead of the physician access metric. In other words, the EHR is not really implemented unless the patients can access the data in it to manage their health and participate in their care.
  3. Let’s be excited about the fact that with adoption on par among providers serving the uninsured, minority, and patients on Medicaid, that patient access to the data can become as standard for these patients, as they may become for commercially insured patients.

On the topic of the “patient access” metric – I don’t think we currently have a good definition. One organization might say, “We have x-thousand patients accessing their clinical information through a portal.” Another might say, “We have x-percent penetration of our patient base accessing a portal with their clinical information.” Yet another might say, “X-percent of chronically ill patients are accessing a PHR that contains their claim data.”

Not to bring up the “c”-word (crowdsourcing), but maybe we should get together to figure out what patients consider “access to data that allows them to fully participate in their care.”

In the meantime, thanks to the team at Mass General and ONC for tracking the physician side of things – great work as always.

An e-Conversation With the Team behind DCHealthCare4U.org

June 5th, 2008 | Popularity: 18%
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The following is an exchange with Kathleen Newbould, from One Economy Corporation, a global non-profit organization that works to maximize the potential of technology for low income people.

I was sent an informational piece about a new initiative in health care, DCHealthCare4U.org, was intrigued, and Kathleen kindly did some research on some questions I had, to fill in the “why” as well as the “what.”

My comment is that there’s a great potential for an organization involved in enabling technology use to expand their role into health care. I think it would be great in the future if DCHealthCare4U.org pointed out which health care providers did have secure patient access and could communicate with patients online. My work to date shows that this patient population is ready, willing, and able to do this, and maybe an organization like One Economy can help make it happen.

Take a look – What do you think?

Thanks to Kathleen and her team for entertaining my return query.


Ted,
Thank you for your response and your interest. I am glad to see that you have some good questions for us! I took some time to speak with one of the men heading up the DC Health Care for You project, Brian Reichart. With his help, I have these answers to your questions:

Why did One Economy decide to get involved in health care?

One Economy’s mission is to maximize the potential of technology to help low-income people improve their lives and enter the economic mainstream. We know that low-income people have higher rates of many chronics diseases and believe that technology can play a role in helping to alleviate some of these disparities. From the start, One Economy has connected people to helpful information and resources in vital areas including health through our website, The Beehive (www.thebeehive.org). We are unique in that our content is always intentionally focused on low-income people who may not have the same literacy level as other audiences. With that in mind, our content is always at a 6th grade reading level or below and we utilize multimedia to the greatest extent possible. DC Health Care for You is way to connect DC residents to on-the-ground programs in their cities. In short, working to improve the ability of low-income people to health resources aligns with our mission.

Is DC Health Care a test site for other cities?

Health Care for You will be expanded to Atlanta and Chicago in the coming months.

How is this connected to our other IT initiatives?

DC Health Care for You links to The Beehive which has helpful, non local, information on disease management such as our diabetes coach. We have not taken formal positions on the ideas you described, but generally speaking we do encourage our audience to become more engaged in their own health care. Information is power.

Please let me know if you have any further questions! Thanks again,
Kathleen

Here’s the information about DCHealthCare4U.org:

Dear Dr. Eytan,

I am reaching out to you to inform you about One Economy’s new website called DC Health Care for You (www.DCHealthCare4U.org). We are now launching a campaign to spread the word about this new self-help website which focuses on health care in DC.

We would welcome any thoughts you may have on the website itself. In addition, we feel that since much of your readership consists of people in the DC health care field, you might be able to offer some assistance.

We are hoping to get the word out to DC residents concerned with health care in the area and believe that many of your readers fit this description. If it would not be too much trouble, we would like you to mention our website or include a link to www.DCHealthCare4U.org somewhere in your blog.

Please feel free to check us out online at www.one-economy.com and see the DC Health Care for You site at www.DCHealthCare4U.org.

We feel that this website could really help DC residents and would sincerely appreciate your cooperation. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact me. Thank you for your time.

My best, Kathleen

Questions Are the Answer – AHRQ

May 28th, 2008 | Popularity: 23%
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  • Questions Are the Answer – AHRQ – Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality – supporting reduction of medical errors and accuracy – through patient involvement. Now the health system can meet patients half way by providing this information as part of every encounter.

AMA on NPR; Patients judge quality by presence of an EHR; CCHIT Expansion Plans for 2009

April 5th, 2008 | Popularity: 82%
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