Archive for March, 2010
Remote Health TelePresence Demo
March 30, 2010
At the Gigabit Breakfast Club at Case Western Reserve University, there was a demo by a professor of medicine. How does Telepresence differ from traditional telehealth? Watch and see.
Other presentations included:
- The Transformation Potential of Fiber for Smart and Connected Communities
- Remote Demonstration STEM class and Lab on campus
- video of endoscopic hydrocephalus surgery
Upcoming Conferences/Speaking
March 29, 2010
I will be speaking at the TAHSN Education Day for Healthcare Communicators – April 30, 2010 (Toronto Academic Health Science Network). Looking forward to visiting Toronto again and having time to learn more about the Innovation Cell as well.
There is a nice video on a conference I am presenting at in May in Philadelphia. The J. Boye Conference – see the embedded video. Some great keynoters, Eric Karjaluoto, Mary Jo Foley and Peter Kim and the promise of a pitch-free presentations.
Share this:New Profiles and Blog Exposure
March 26, 2010
Some new exposure for my blog is on MedicExchange.com which puts me in good company withJane Sarasohn-Kahn and others. The site has a broad range of information including blogs, news, white papers, webinars, etc.
Also, my profile is now on the J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia. This includes some introduction to my presentation and my twitter feed.
My profile is now up as an advisor for Within3.com, the social networking app for physicians and advisory boards.
As you may know, my blog is also fed to Medpedia in the health technology section.
Share this:eHealth Conference in May in Philadelphia
March 17, 2010
I feel fortunate to be participating in the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia this May. Unlike the Health 2.0 conferences which focus on startups, this conference covers Higher education, Intranet, Online communication, Online health, Online strategy, User experience, Web content management, Web project management.
My session will be on “Social media in health care – humble beginnings to patient engagement.” Here is a blog post introducing the talk. How to get to true patient engagement, participatory medicine? It takes more than a strategy. My hope is that the conference will help to get at some answers.
Share this:Google Public Data Explorer for Healthcare
March 16, 2010
Google recently released its public data explorer which combines the Google visualization tools with public datasets include population data and health data. For healthcare, the initial launch includes Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the U.S. and Cancer cases in the U.S. The charts allow selection by state and time options. For these two charts, CDC data sources are used.
So could this data explorer be used more broadly with other health data sets. For starters, those at Data.gov (although most of the health data sets are Medicare cost data). But could major disease registries open themselves up to this API so that medical researchers could visualize more data sources and generate more research questions more quickly. This could be one solution for the for the lethal lag time. The CDC has additional data sets available. But what about opening closed data sets, such as, those from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons or other disease-specific registries. Then there is the growing volume of patient reported data from sites like PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether.
The limitation of this approach is having researchers capable of interpreting these data visualizations to make meaningful interpretations. The peer review process would prevent publication of misinterpretations of the data. An additional control would be combining the data explorer with social networking tools for users to discuss visualizations and research observations of the data. Perhaps this could be accomplished through Google Wave.
Comments and data sets welcome.
Share this:Leveraging EMR Data to Develop Disease-Based Registries
March 6, 2010
This is my other presentation at HIMSS 2010. One of the real values of EMRs is the secondary use of the data for research. While respecting patient privacy, this kind of research can be rapidly developed from EMR data. We recommend the following steps:
- define the cohort of patients you want to study/monitor
- define the data elements you want included
- review and verify data elements with subject matter experts
- set up a regular interval to extract the data
- generate some test queries to verify the process
- monitor to use of the data (ongoing governance)
Our initial experience with a Chronic Kidney Disease registry has been a success. We recommend that research issues be considered in any purchase and implementation of an EMR.
Share this:Social Media at HIMSS 2010
March 5, 2010
Social Media at the Annual Conference of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society has come a long way. A few years ago, the bloggers meetup was a dozen or so of us meeting in a bar near the conference site. This year, for the second time, there was a social media center and three panels of Meet the Bloggers. I was glad to be a part of it. Participatory Medicine was represented by ePatientDave discussing his new involvement with Kaiser. A busy twitter stream kept many informed of the concurrent activities. My round table with Deborah Kohn on Social Networking: Are You Listening, was well received. Another version of the slides are below. Some of the recommendations out of the session include:
- be prepared for dealing with complaints via social media by monitoring and having a plan on how to respond
- listen – monitor what people are saying about you
- consider social media in job recruitment
- support for launching social media in health care organizations must be endorsed from the top
- educating employees about social media can prevent abuse of the tools at work
