Archive for April, 2008
Revolution Health Marks One Year
April 30, 2008
I had the opportunity to be on a conference call with Steve Case last week on the one year anniversary of Revolution Health. In his usual smooth presentation, he presented some of the features which have made the site a success:
- Anchored with trusted content, link it to consumers personal health concerns
- The limitation of search engine in finding health information (aka, Google?)
- Consumer-centricity
- Use technology as an integrating force
- More interested in what people do with a personal health record, not just an electronic filing cabinet
- Providing actionable information
- A goal of eventually reducing cost of healthcare
One new initiative he discussed was Maternal Health -“Mom Advocacy” – will be launched soon.
You have to give them credit for providing a unique model of providing content and an expanding list of health tools and channels. Acquisitions have helped like Care Pages but the key has been their ability to integrate these features into a good user experience.
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PHRs Make Medicine Less Efficient?
April 29, 2008
A posting on the Wall Street Journal Health blog quotes Steve Lieber of HIMSS as saying that PHRs may be less trusted by doctors and therefore slow down care, such as emergency or urgent care. The example given is having a PHR on a thumb drive – how does the physician know that the information, some of which could be life-threatening such as allergies, is reliable.
This is another argument for some kind of certification of PHRs and also providing a way to show the source of information in a PHR – is it from a provider, entered by the patient, claims information or something else.
Share this:Web 2.0 Conferences
April 22, 2008
Two upcoming conferences worthy of note:
- Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare – October 21st – 23rd at the Marriott San Francisco. The agenda looks like a good one: Future of Health 2.0, Wellness 2.0, consumer genomics, business models, and more. Check out the full agenda. Very limited registration spots this time.
- Cleveland 2.0 – an initiative begun by Case Western Reserve University to apply Web 2.0 to all kinds of non-profit initiatives in Cleveland. In addition to the seminar including Anthony D. Williams, coauthor of Wikinomics, the conference will be simulcasted on Second Life.
The Top 100 Open Source Software Tools for Medical Professionals
April 17, 2008
100 sounds like an exhaustive list but it also demonstrates the extent of tools available to health care. While some of these are definitely healthcare specific, others are general software tools – everything from antivirus to open office. Surprisingly, the category of “storing patient information” includes many open database models which most healthcare providers would not see as secure enough by HIPAA standards. There are patient-specific tools as well. Worth a review and perhaps a selective trial for some of these.
Share this:Newly Announced Employer Wellness website
April 16, 2008
Limeaid is a new service for employer health and wellness with many of the features you would expect – Health Risk Assessment and wellness tools, but promises a more fun approach to the topic. The primarily green graphics are engaging and have a slightly different twist (sic) such as assessing energy level and giving tips to improve this. It includes such tools as behavioral coaching, biometric screen and offers these online, onsite and via mobile devices.
Looks to be a pretty complete offering in an attractive package. Will have competition from many others including the big players like Revolution Health.
Share this:Complaint about Social Networking – Health 2.0
April 15, 2008
In response to the NY Times Magazine article on Health 2.0, one person with MS wrote in that, “More than anything, I found it to be a hypochondriac’s virtual theme park.” This person also did not appreciate the label “patient”. While many people benefit from Health 2.0 style social networking, another writer questioned whether an anonymous user could create an account and then post an amazing recovery based on a specific drug. These are valid concerns which need to be addressed within Health 2.0 to maintain trust with these sites and avoid abuse.
Share this:Open Source for eHealth
April 11, 2008
Open Health Tools is a relatively new site which is sponsoring projects related to health care. There are so far a small number of projects uploaded to their project list. They also have a collaboration area called OpenCollabnet.
A related initiative is Open eHealth described as “Open Source for Electronic Health – Open eHealth Foundation to Provide Solid Basis for Interoperability.” This group appears to be more focused on interoperability including SOA and has some important partners include Sun Microsystems. They note that, “The healthcare oriented components will initially include services for patient consent management, virtual patient records, patient information management and services for a standardized users, roles and relations management.” This is obviously in its early stages which may mean it is advantageous to join.
Open source has strong possibilities in health care if it can gain the trust of major players over proprietary systems. It will be important to see how IBM with its open source emphasis will work in this space.
Share this:eHealth Marketing by the CDC
April 9, 2008
Who would expect that the CDC would get into marketing. They actually have a whole website devoted to this with email updates and data briefs on a range of topics including social networking and texting. Disease monitoring and education has gone Web 2.0.
Also, listen to the podcast about this concept on iHealthbeat.
Share this:State Survey on eHealth
April 8, 2008
A new report on 2007 eHealth activities by state has been released by the National Governor’s Association and the Commonwealth Fund. Some of the findings include:
- All states now place a high priority on e-health activities
- priorities over the next two years were the development of electronic HIEs
- State HIT initiatives span a broad range of activities including telehealth and eprescribing
- E-health applications are enabling states to implement quality and transparency initiatives
- Privacy and security remain key concerns
- States have formed public-private consortiums to develop standardized measures of utilization and performance
- Public health has extensive experience operating registries, which will be foundational to other e-health activities
The report includes a 84-page PDF of the complete report as well as chart packs in PDF and PPT formats. I agree with the conclusions that it is hoped that this report will stimulate ideas for advancing eHealth initiatives within and between states.
Share this:Microsoft’s Vision for Healthcare
April 4, 2008
A cool video I found at Chris Paton’s Health Informatics Blog from Microsoft. This futuristic view of healthcare from the consumer and provider perspectives shows a variety of thin hand-helds, screen -walls which are touch screens and countertop smart screens which provide a range of health care solutions.
How far are we from this? Most of the technology exists today – the main barriers are cost, interoperability and the vision to communicate at these levels between patient and provider.
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