eHealth

Today's Healthcare CIO - C. Martin Harris, MD, MBA

2008-07-02T17:34:33Z

Dr. Harris is on the cover of Health Management Technology, the July Issue. The article is an interview on being a CIO in a health care organization. Who better to explain the role that someone leading a key organization into the future of EMRs, PHRs (including a Google Health partnership), eResearch, and online consults. Certainly a leader and an innovator.

Technorati: Healthcare IT

Shameless Self Promotion

2008-07-02T16:49:05Z

Once in a while you have to promote yourself. Well, in this case HIMSS has done it for me. I am please to receive the Spirit of HIMSS Award. Nice article about mean appears today in their HIMSS Weekly Insider.
Not often does one get such acknowledgement for volunteer work but HIMSS finds ways to do this on a regular basis as they are dependent on many devoted volunteers to make the organization a success. I am pleased to be part of that process. I am in good company for this award.

Technorati: PHRs

Web 2.0 in Health Care - slides available

2008-07-01T15:46:41Z

I recently presented a webinar on this topic. Since slides from a previous version of this presentation were already on SlideShare, I decided to add the new one there as well.

If you search onHealth 2.0, you find some interesting stuff including a review of Google Health by Matthew Holt and some presentations by Gunther Eysenbach.

Technorati: Health 2.0

Healthcare 100

2008-06-30T22:00:33Z

Looks like I am still listed in the Healthcare 100 blogsbut not in the first 100, but number 200. Interesting mix at the top: Bad Medicine, Medgadget, WSJ Health blog, Kevin MD and the Healthcare blog. Worth reviewing the list from time to time to see what rises to the top. If I had time, I would work on the algorithm.

Technorati: Health 2.0

More Than a Reminder to take your Pills

2008-06-26T22:07:28Z

From the Boston xconomy is a story about a start up which does more than remind people to take their medication. Nonadherence with medication is a real problem. InnovationRx first does a 20 minute interview to determine the best strategy to get past the roadblocks to medication compliance. They use text messages and emails to encourage adherence and send reminders. The cost is $7.99 per month, or $96 per year and may be something that health plans will be willing to pay for.

Technorati: Health 2.0

New Oncology Website

2008-06-25T22:39:16Z

OncologyStat is a relatively new website with loads of information on cancer. Oriented toward the medical professional, the site boasts of 12,000 users since launching in September 2007. It has a depth of content including journal scans, drug and treatment info, news, blogs and a tab specifically for ASCO 2008. Looks like a worthwhile offering. Registration is required to view most content but there is no fee. The site is produced by Elsevier.

Technorati: Health 2.0

Presentation Tomorrow on Web 2.0 in Health Care

2008-06-24T22:41:33Z

The Health Management Congress invited me to give this talk as a webinar tomorrow at 2pm EST. The full title is: "Emerging Trends & Opportunities for Healthcare Organizations to Leverage Web 2.0".
Details from the website:
The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends. At the same time, traditional Web sites that once offered cumbersome pages of static data are developing blogs, podcasts, and customized search engines to deliver the most relevant and timely information on health topics.

What you will learn by attending:

• Improve care self-management using Web 2.0 strategies & resources
• Analyze the impact of Web 2.0 on healthcare stakeholders
• Leverage Web 2.0 content to drive traffic to your site and customers to your facility
• Explore the return on investment for these technologies

Technorati: Health 2.0

Our Pen-and-Paper Doctors

2008-06-24T22:36:56Z

The New York Times has an editorial today on the need for physicians to adopt EMRs. It is in reaction to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The slow pace of fast change is happening in healthcare IT. Not devoting enough resources to health IT continues the short sited path of the past. The advantages are clear - get on board and devote the resources. Improved government incentives will help.

Technorati: EMR

The Petabyte Age

2008-06-24T09:34:56Z

The latest issue of Wired magazine includes a series of articles lead by the editor Chris Anderson's article, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." In Wired's usually controversial approach to topics, he leads off with the quote, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." In the petabyte age, we move from local storage to storage in the cloud and "information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics."
He sites one medical example, he cites Craig Vetner who "went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems." He proposes that "We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show."

Do these rash statements have relevance to health care? Much of health care information of interest to researchers are in secure databases such as EMRs. However, these are moving to the Cloud via RHIOs and initiatives like Google Health. Some research centers have placed data online and invited others to analyze. I think that there are huge amounts of data in health care that will come available for researchers in the next few years but it may not replace traditional randomized clinical trials.

Technorati: Cloud Computing

Updated Health 2.0 definition

2008-06-23T17:44:45Z

From Ted Eytan, MD, who invited commentors to suggest edits to a previous definition. As always, Health 2.0 is person-centric:

"Health 2.0 is participatory health care. The combination of content and community enables the patient to be an active partner in their own health care and the citizen to be an equal partner in improving the health system."

I like the "combination of content and community" - it speaks to the importance of reliable content in health care and the importance of mutual support. Also, the definition avoids the overused term empowerment and focuses on partnership with the provider and system.

Good job.

Technorati: Health 2.0

PHR Task Force Appointed

2008-06-12T22:27:36Z

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology has established a new task force focused on PHRs. It is an interesting mix of members - Paul Tang (AMIA and PAMF), Missy Krasner (Google Health), Holly Miller (HIMSS and University Hospitals Cleveland ),some significant appointments from consumer groups and government agencies including the VA. It is interesting to review the Introduction slides on the site which include the methods for reviewing products on criteria such as, functionality, security and interoperability.
Will look forward to the progress of this group.

Technorati: PHRs

Top Web Programmer Receives His Due in Time Magazine

2008-06-11T23:17:30Z

It is not often that the guys and gals working behind the scenes doing the hard core programming on PHRs and other healthcare applications get their due. This time Bob Lemon, my friend and long time programmer at the Cleveland Clinic gets first paragraph mention in an article in Time Magazine titled, "Medical Mouse Practice." Bob is responsible for much of the custom programming behind the eCleveland Clinic websites including MyChart. The article on EHRs talks about the 700 people like Bob who support the infrastructure which makes the EHR, PHR and ehealth tools possible. Bob also can take credit for the Google Walk For Good gadget.

Technorati: Google Health

Health 2.0 for Complementary and Alternative Medicine

2008-06-10T22:02:17Z

A relatively new site called rVita provides what looks like a fair evaluation of CAM. Subtitled "trusted information, natural healing", the site offers information on a broad range of topics organized by symptoms and treatments and rates the medical evidence for each. For instance, the page on green tea, the ever popular treatment with many claims to its name, reports that for everything from reducing cholesterol and treating diabetes that the evidence is unclear or conflicting. For each such treatment there are comments from blogs, reviews and links.
Most importantly, there is a page on How the scientific evidence is derived which includes ratings from strong evidence (randomized controlled clinical trials) to no evidence.
The site is well designed and also offers a trusted practitioner network and a sign up to be a blogger.

Technorati: Health 2.0

Moment of Complexity

2008-06-09T23:09:46Z

On the World Healthcare Blog, there is a discussion of a new book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, an its application to health care. The bottom line is this quote: "the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of relations."
Is Health 2.0 helping to achieve this moment?

Technorati: Health 2.0

Federal Health IT Strategic Plan Published

2008-06-03T22:00:28Z

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Healthcare Technology has issued their strategic plan for 2008-2012. Subtitled "Using the Power of Information Technology to Transform Health and Care", the report details plans in the areas of privacy and security, interoperability, adoption, and collaborative governance. It includes goals the areas of patient-focused healthcare and population health.
The measures of success are clearly spelled out:
•Health IT becomes common and expected in health care delivery nationwide for all communities, including those caring for underserved or disadvantaged populations;
•Your health information is available to you and those caring for you so that you receive safe, high quality, and efficient care;
•You will be able to use information to better determine what choices are right for you with respect to your health and care; and
•You trust your health information can be used, in a secure environment, without compromising your privacy, to assess and improve the health in your community, measure and make available the quality of care being provided, and support advances in medical knowledge through research.

This is one of the best strategy statements I have seen. The obvious question is: will congress and a new president pay sufficient attention to it and fund it appropriately so that Health IT can be transformative?

I recommend reading the synopsis if you time is limited.

Technorati: Health IT

Healthcare and Emerging Rich Web Technologies

2008-05-28T22:35:55Z

In this post on the European site, OBBeC, subtitled, "The WEB 2.0/Semantic Web Challenge and Opportunity"
gives a good overview of Web 2.0 in health care. It describes both how social networking and semantic technologies are an opportunity and a caution for health care. He notes that adoption of these web technologies is slower than in other industries because "the care process is fundamentally more complex" in health care. There are the usual concerns about privacy but also health care's dependence on a face-to-face process. The driving forces of Web 2.0 in health care are seen as the need to aggregate the volumes of information physicians must wade through and the "power patients" becoming more commonplace.
Three specific semantic technologies are noted:

semantic wikis
semantic blogs
semantic desktop

While there isn't time to describe these here, it does show the potential for moving into the complex world of Web 3.0 to simplify our knowledge gathering and distribution.
The author cautions that these technologies could lead to "over reliance on external information, a process of disintermediation between patients and healthcare professionals and erosion of the patient-physician relationship."

Technorati: Health 2.0

Privacy 2.0

2008-05-26T20:54:27Z

Fred Frotin on the World Healthcare Blog has introduced the concept of Privacy 2.0. Privacy and confidentiality have been growing concerns for Web 2.0 in health care. The post, titled, "Coming to Health Care: The Challenge of Privacy 2.0" He notes that "confidential information predominately resides today in slow moving, conservative institutions that dominate health care delivery." Privacy 1.0 was focused on, "how to impose rules and sanctions regarding things like disclosure, notice, encryption etc."
He asks, "Do we have to accept a diminished private space to gain the benefits of social media?"
Will the technology of control enable a Privacy 2.0 or will a backlash by consumers overreach and squelch Health 2.0, Google Health and others?

Technorati: Health 2.0

Google Health and More

2008-05-19T21:59:52Z

Today in a webcast from the Googleplex, Google Health was opened to the public. All the features are now available to the U.S. at least. I participated in the pilot for the Cleveland Clinic as a participant in MyChart and found it easy to use, to import information and add more specifics. Now I can import my Google Health profile back into MyChart. Pretty cool. Also added the Walk for Good widget to my iGoogle home page. 100 users have signed up already.
This has already hit the tech and mainstream news outlets already with discussions about privacy, questions about Google's motivation and benefits for consumers.
I think Google is adding some value here. There are making an effort to protect privacy while promoting health. And their partnerships indicate a desire to make this a broad umbrella for addressing health care issues.
I encourage you to try Google Health before making a quick judgement.

Technorati: Google Health

Presentation by Anthony Williams, Co-Author of Wikinomics.

2008-05-18T23:25:08Z

At a meeting earlier this month at Case Western Reserve University, I heard Williams speak at a conferenced called, Collaboration Technology and Campus Engagement. Much of his presentation on "Wikinomics and the future of education" was similar to what was presented in the book but additionally, he presented information about other projects his company has been involved in.
Worth watching - drink the Web 2.0 kool aid.

Technorati: Web 2.0

Health 2.0 - Clinical Trials

2008-05-14T22:34:39Z

A new way to search for clinical trials is now available through Emerging Med. Wrapping clinical trials information from the NIH with a set of tools and services, this new site offers a range of services. You can create a profile to be notified of clinical trials and utilize the matching system to get a referral for treatment. Phone support is also available. There are some good suggestions on when to search, for instance,

Just before a biopsy (to study tissue from a tumor)
Just before the first surgery or radiation treatment (neo-adjuvant studies)
Just after surgery or radiation treatment (adjuvant studies)

To protect privacy, they suggest that "Create a Patient Profile form can also be filled out anonymously".
The service is now integrated into Revolution Health%sq243%s cancer pages. There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal as well. Perhaps utilizing this tool within the context of a broader set of tools such as Rev Health is a better route to go. But the set of services appear unique.

Technorati: Health 2.0