Archive for 2011
Health Apps and Real Time Consults
July 19, 2011
There was more on the FDAs decision about health apps today. According to an informative blog post by Brian Dolan on MobileHealth News, the FDA will not regulate most apps. Some specific use cases for apps that won’t be regulated include:
- “that are electronic “copies” of medical textbooks, teaching aids or reference materials
- “that are solely used to log, record, track, evaluate, or make decisions or suggestions related to developing or maintaining general health and wellness.
- “that only automate general office operations with functionalities that include billing, inventory, appointments, or insurance transactions.
- “that are generic aids that assist users but are not commercially marketed for a specific medical indication”
As always with the FDA, the concern is how the app influences treatment.
Also announced was the real time iConsult where physician users can “consult” in real time with specialist and others and include photos and xrays in the request. Sounds like twitter consult but more secure.
In a 2010 post by @Berci Mesko, he notes doing consults via Twitter:
| What would I do if | in 2000 | Now |
| I need clinical answer | Try to find a collegue who knows it | Post a question on Twitter |
| I want to hear patient story about a specific condition | Try to find a patient in my town | Read blogs, watch Youtube |
| I want to be up-to-date | Go to the library once a week | Use RSS and follow hundreds of journals |
| I want to work on a manuscript with my team | We gather around the table | Use Google Docs without geographical limits |
My take is that most physicians are concerned about doing this but early adopters can share their successes and issues for the others.
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Health App Development and Innovation
July 13, 2011
Two quick notes:
HHS kicks off $5M ‘i2′ Health IT app development program – contracts awarded for this, more innovation opportunities looking to:
- Allow an individual to securely and effectively share health information with members of his or her social network.
- Provide patients, caregivers and/or clinicians access to rigorous and relevant information that can support real needs and immediate decisions.
- Allow individuals to connect during natural disasters and other periods of emergency.
- Facilitate exchange of health information while allowing individuals to customize the privacy allowances for their personal health records.
Also announced, the Cleveland Clinic Medical Pavilion on Innocentive and the first challenge posted.
Share this:Google Health Ending – Not Having Broad Impact Expected
June 24, 2011
Google announced today on its official blog that it is retiring or phasing out Google Health. Stating that it’s original goal was to “our goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information” using their focus on the consumer, they found a lack of the broad adoption they expected. I was there at HIMSS in 2008 when Google Health was announced by Eric Schmit and Roni Zeiger doing a demo.
They admit that “There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts.” But not enough adoption to make it worthwhile to keep the shop open. They are provide means for users to export their data by January 1, 2012.
Already bloggers are busy speculating on why Google Health failed to gain traction.
- Not understanding the healthcare market, especially the challenges of working with payers
- Lack of partnerships with physicians
- Not partnering with device companies as early as Microsoft did
- Lack of incentives to use it
- Lack of a means to securely communicate with providers
- Not being tethered to EMRs with a few exceptions like Cleveland Clinic.
The reasons can go on and on. But overall, how widely have PHRs been adopted. Seen initially as a disruptive technology, but lack of trust and understand of its value by consumers has led to sluggish adoption overall. How successful is Microsoft HealthVault, Dossia and others? How about PHRs sponsored by payers? It appears that healthcare consumers are stronger adopters of social media and wellness tools and not PHRs.
So where do we go from here? Even the ePatient movement and Quantified Self are not generally strong adopters. If Google Health is worth saving, how about asking Google to hand it over to an open source community to maintain and enhance. In some cases, open source projects can gain more traction that productions by large Silicon Valley companies.
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Can Social Media Save Lives?
June 23, 2011
This provocative title of a webinar to be held next week is part of the growing optimism about the potential for social media in the process of health care. Some recent examples come to mind:
- Report from the Change Foundation in Toronto on Using social media to improve the quality of patient experience (I was on the advisory board for this report)
- An App that Looks for Signs of Sickness – Mobile-phone activity can provide a warning of disease flare-ups.
- Community Health Data Initiative – more on this later
- Case Study: Radboud Hospital Supports Young Cancer Patients With An Online Community
We are witnessing a shift from social media for pure marketing toward engagement and beyond, to changing the care process.
Share this:Innovation Opportunities Abound
June 16, 2011
A new conference has been announced by the NIH: Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation. Speakers incude Tim O’Reilly and ” will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific problem across disciplines.”
Another open innovation opportunity has been recently announced called Merit Awards which is offering $50,000 on the topics of citizen engagement, defense, emergency response, entitlement reform, work force management and motivation, back office operations, results achievement and waste.
Another opportunity is a developer community called TopCoder “revolutionizing the software design and development process by tapping in to our unlimited global community.”
Will open innovation become the primary source for new ideas and products/apps in the future?
Share this:The Healthcare Social Media Landscape
June 2, 2011
Here is a slide show I created reflecting on the different communities developing in this space. Although each emerged on its own, there is certainly collaborative projects and people across these communities and a sense of mutual support. I myself attended the first Health 2.0 conference, then Medicine 2.0 and also part of the e-Patient community. More conferences occur each year both in the US and Europe; two recent examples are TEDx Maastricht which had a health focus and Doctors 2.0 taking place later this month in Paris. Also, the Quantified Self movement is coming to health care as well.
I’d be interested in other’s opinions on this.
More on Innovation – The Need for Actionable Ideas
May 25, 2011
An excellent post on Venture Valkyrie discusses why Innovation is not enough in healthcare. The author views that “there is no doubt that innovation is necessary to respond to the challenges of our current healthcare system” while “over-breeding of ideas that are innovative but not actionable.” It is important to consider innovation not just a good in itself, especially in healthcare where we are trying to impact personal health, as only good if it leads to real change. Some innovation will always fail, so the encouragement toward innovation should not have barriers that are too high, but realistic evaluation of these ideas, testing their viability, needs to occur.
Another note on innovation comes from the site udemy, a site which enables the creation of courses. Check out Ideas Come From Everywhere, a course by Marissa Mayer of Google, Inc. which she gave to Stanford Technology Ventures Program in 2006. It is certainly not dated and presents some of basic concepts of success through innovation that have made Google a success. Worth watching this short clips.
See this article from Forbes on Gladwell on Innovation: Truths & Confusions which tells a brief history of innovation but also distinguishes between innovators and creators but ends on a positive note that creators (who may come up with ideas but not successfully implement them) can become innovators.
Also posted at WikEhealth.
Share this:Book Review: Reading In the Brain
May 20, 2011
Although not my usual focus, this book is a fascinating look on how the brain enables us to read. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene, is a detailed study taking the latest of brain science to understand how the brain processes letters into words, phonemes, sentences and meaning. Much of the book centers around the letterbox area of the brain which decodes letters into meaning. The author cites hundreds of experiments and as many brain studies using PET and MRI to dissect the detailed mechanisms of how letters are processed. He goes from anthropological studies of different cultures and languages pointing out the differences in similarities of language acquisition between different European languages and those based on characters, like Chinese. He notes that Italian is a language which allows for earlier competency in life while English with its quirks and Asian languages which require masterly of thousands of characters are more of a challenge.
The book looks at the evolution of language from its earliest origins to the beginning of written language. The author also looks at how to understand learning to read and problems in reading in a significant chapter on dyslexia. He notes that, “A new approach to reading instruction could be achieved through the introduction of experimental classrooms and research laboratories in schools.” (p. 326). I would tend to agree based on the wealth of evidence about the brain which is now coming to bear.
This book makes brain science approachable but also requires concentration. Worth the read for the reward.
Promoting Healthcare Innovation through Challenges
May 18, 2011
Innovation in healthcare is now pervasive. To continue the wave of innovation, hospitals can now earn new incentives based on competitions. These are government-sponsored, industry-sponsored challenges, and even have the potential for becoming business ventures. Here are some competitions hospitals can enter to help expand industry innovation:
- Health Challenges at Challenge.gov – These include video challenges, National Library of Medicine apps, Flu apps and more. Many offer monetary rewards.
- Health 2.0 Developer Challenge – Developed by the Health 2.0 Conference folks, this includes online challenges and live competitions including a Code-a-Thon which most recently occurred in February A Code-a-Thon is a day long competition to build an application. Winners included a meta-analysis engine, Healthy people 2020 tracker, and an epidemic finder.
- Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) – This includes everything from equipment sterilization, blue button technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation. It encourages submissions from its own employees, as well as healthcare industry leaders.
A new player in this arena is Innocentive, an online business built around challenge-driven innovation. While not specifically focused on healthcare, it does have a Global Health Pavilion, featuring challenges from cell biology to caregiver communities. These challegnes promote the idea of an Open Innovation Marketplace, which is the topic of its new book.
For each of these healthcare challenge websites, the basic concept is open innovation. By utilizing competition for a financial reward, the government, an NGO, a private sector company and healthcare providers can generate low cost solutions. But the inventor/innovator needs to keep in mind their intellectual property rights if these are not spelled out clearly up front.
Nonetheless , the potential for healthcare innovation and problem solving are yet to be measured. Perhaps someone will some develop a site or app which aggregates these challenges and their successful solutions. Aggregation of healthcare innovation challenges would help inventors find opportunities which are sprouting up from government, conferences and corporations.
This post was originally published on Hospital Impact on May 18, 2011.
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Social Media Moving into Healthcare’s Mainstream
May 2, 2011
TuDiabetes Study
Two articles today demonstrate the growth of influence in social media in the healthcare arena.
The first is a research article about TuDiabetes.org 15,000 members on PLosONE permitting data donation to measure H1c in diabetics to demonstrate a model for cohort and translational science and for use as a complementary surveillance approach. This research combined with a recent study of PatientsLikeMe demonstrate the potential power of utilizing patient reported results and outcomes as a research tool.
The second article appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “Professionalism in the Digital Age.” Get a copy of the full version if you can. It represents a positive approach to social media for physicians and other healthcare providers while noting some cautions, such as, the difficulty of separating personal from professional in social media. The article does not recommend social media as a means of communicating with patients but unlike some recent articles, does not discourage its use.
“The development of a “dual-citizenship” approach to online social media that separates public and private personae would allow physicians to both leverage networks for professional connections and maintain privacy in other aspects. Although social media posts by physicians enable direct communication with readers, all posts should be considered public and special consideration for patient privacy is necessary.”
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