Adam Bosworth Leaving Google?
September 12, 2007
According to Blogoscoped. No reason yet and how will this affect Google Health which he has led up to this point?
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Intelligent EHRs – What are they?
September 12, 2007
In an article on Government Health IT, the Intelligent EHR is discussed by a Mayo Clinic physician. Is is something more that an EHR with decision support tools? One quote says, “information becomes [directly] available and usable to a computer so one can repurpose that information for secondary uses such as quality monitoring and research and education.” The article also cites this as “minimally invasive informatics” which avoids disruptive changes in medical practice. But what does it really look like?
Is it simply decision support like alerts? This can result in alert fatigue. It may include quality monitoring, research, pay for performance, biosurveillance – all items which add value to the EMR. Yet there are “some barriers, particularly the increasingly complex ethical, political, technical and social issues surrounding secondary uses of personal information.”
Maybe the real future of an intelligent EHR with be something similar to the sematic web – intelligent agents bringing just the right amount of information to the point of care.
Eye Movement and EHRs
September 11, 2007
In this report from the Boston Globe, titled “Eyes shift from patient to keyboard, the writers bring to light an important issue in implementation of an EMR – its affect on the physician-patient relationship. One study quoted in the articled noted that “about a quarter of patients felt as though computers reduced the amount of time their doctors spent talking with, looking at, and examining them. But just 8 percent felt that the computer actually interfered with the doctor-patient relationship.” On suggested approach is to “apologizing to her patients for turning away from them.” It also notes that using an EMR can add time to the visit. Part of this can be the tendency to review old notes (although one must wonder the amount of time it took to review paper records, especially for patients with chronic illnesses, or did the doctor just not bother because the information was too difficult to extract?). Is the trade-off here, less personal but perhaps safer medical care? Or at least better documented?
Related to this is a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association titled, “Electronic Health Records in Specialty Care: A Time-Motion Study”. This study of 15 physicians and 157 patients concluded that, “Following EHR implementation, the average adjusted total time spent per patient across all specialties increased slightly but not significantly.”
Both of these reports contribute to the ongoing attention needed to the social impacts of EMRs on provider-patient relationships.
Share this:Revolution Health Lauches College Health website
September 10, 2007
Last week, Revolution Health launched a unique offering targeted to the college age demographic. The site includes information on mental health, STDs, birthcontrol, and healthy eating and sleeping. There is even a section for parents who may worry about their child’s health more than the student.
Special features seem to have an emphasis on mental health, such as, a mental health fair and crisis hotline. There is also an email newsletter on romance which appears to focus on young women and a safe drinking calculator.
The site covers the major concerns of college students. In the past, most surveys showed an older demographic using health information websites. But Revolution Health, with its Web 2.0 interface, may successfully attract this hard to reach group.
Share this:eHealth Initiative’s Fourth Annual Conference
September 10, 2007
This conference combines looking a current ehealth trends with a congressional panel. Some of the sessions include:
- Aligning Financial and Other Incentives
- Transforming Care Delivery
- Improving Population Health
- eHI’s Value and Sustainability Model for Health Information Exchange- Insights From America’s Most Advanced Stage Communities
- Interoperability
and include speaker from the AARP to Microsoft.
Looks like a broad-ranging conference which would be well worth the time.
Hope to see some podcasts come out of the live sessions.
Share this:Two PHR Announcements
September 7, 2007
Both University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Health Plan and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina announced the launch of PHRs. UPMC offer, MyHealthRecord provides access to health records which includes claims data but also the ability to add personal information and get health reminders. With 500,000 covered lives, there is potential for a large pool of users.
BCBS is providing claims data but also a partnership with ParadigmHealth which has extensive chronic and acute disease management tools. “The Integrated Care Management platform will enable BlueCross to fully integrate case management, disease management, maternity management, and high acuity complex care management data and dashboards on a single IT platform.”
Its good to see more large health plans getting in to the PHR business. As I have stated before, there is little data on adoption by plan members and will they trust their health plan to provide this service?
There needs to be a way to integrate one’s personal health information from all sources including real-time provider data and not just delayed claims data, particularly in emergency situations.
Share this:AMIA Podcasts
September 2, 2007
The American Medical Informatics Association has a growing selection of podcasts based, some of which are free, on a variety of informatics topics and conference presentations. The Pharmacy Informatics working group has monthly podcasts, others are less frequent but there are worthwhile ones on patient empowerment and personalize medicine. The podcasts are MP3 format and have RSS subscription and iTunes listing.
The Patient Empowerment podcast includes Gunther Eysenbach.
Share this:Gartner Podcast – Web Innovation
August 30, 2007
A short but worthwhile podcast by Gartner on Web 2.0 in the enterprise to promote an upcoming conference. They admit that it may be difficult to find the right balance of implementing Web 2.0. Too much control can kill the initiatives. I agree. A gradual start in deploying blogs and wikis while not trying to replace enterprise applications or trying to create enterprise data stores that are more appropriately in more secure systems. Although they don’t address this, anonymous postings should not be allow within a business on blogs and wikis because it opens the door to abuse. IMHO.
Share this:HL7 PHR Functional Model Released for Comment
August 30, 2007
The Electronic Medical Record Committee of HL7 has produced this model for comment until the middle of September. It is encouraging to see this technical standard released. It’s interesting that even consumers have had input on this. The proposed standards include sections to: Manage Historical Clinical Data And Current State Data, Wellness, Preventive Medicine, and Self Care, Manage Health Education, Account Holder Decision Support, Personal Health, Manage Encounters with Providers.
Share this:Healthcare Senario Planning
August 30, 2007
Found an blog focused on Healthcare IT with this unique title for two posts. It looks at the exponential and disruptive growth of health care information on the internet and how it is a trusted source for most consumers. He also points to this Senario Thinking portal with much broader ideas than healthcare. Looks like senario thinking can be compared to futurist thinking but on a shorter time horizon.
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