Consumer Health Informatics Conference
August 29, 2007
This Canadian conference in October has some interesting topics. Choice quotes and titles:
- “opportunities for ICTs [information and communication technologies] not only to empower consumers, but also to re-vitalize their relationship with health professionals and to meet needs that go beyond those that could be addressed through face-to-face interactions.”
- Using Web Based Tools to Help Patients Achieve Optimal Clinical Outcomes
- “The greatest opportunities for improving health and health care lie in enabling information exchange between the three dimensions (patient care, population health, and personal health)
of the national health information infrastructure. The full potential of PHR systems will not be realized until they are capable of widespread exchange of information with EHRs and other sources of personal and other health data.” - The Chronic Need for Connectivity: Helping today’s aging healthcare consumers help themselves
I don’t think I’ll be able to attend, but I hope some podcasts or papers will come out of this meeting which will further the discussion on consumer health from a perspective other than consumer-directed healthcare.
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Payor Based PHRs – A Good Idea?
August 28, 2007
In an article in Health Data Management, the question is asked, “Should Payers Push PHRs?” The answer is yes and no. While a given patient may have many providers, they often have one payer, so a payer-based PHR gives the advantage, using claims data, to consolidate pre-populated health information in a PHR from many providers. Disadvantages include the fact that in some families, each spouse may have their own payer and the family may have information in two places. Claims data may also be delayed in posting compared to provider EHRs. Also, an employer may change payors or the employee may change jobs and payors. Would most people be more likely to stay faithful to a provider therefore making provider-based PHRs more advantageous? Certainly the surveys show that consumers prefer the PHRs in the provider’s hands. Another criticism from the article is that payor records lack detail. Could over-coding by providers and hospitals also make claims data look more alarming to the patient prompting more phone calls to the provider rather than having the records and secure messaging integrated with the provider?
Opinions welcomed.
Share this:New Cancer Resource – MyBiopsy.org
August 28, 2007
Came across this new website which explains in lay language the meaning of cancer biopsy reports by cancer type. Presented by the College of American Pathologists, the site covers 22 cell types with microscope photos, how the diagnosis is made and treatments for each. This fills a gap in the cancer information available on the internet which is extensive. I hope many sites will now link to this resource.
Perhaps in the future the information could be RSS or web service enabled so that it could be incorporated into provider websites more easily.
Share this:Semantic Web for Healthcare?
August 23, 2007
Is the semantic web or Web 3.0 coming to health care? In this blog on Government Health IT, there is a good explanation of the semantic web and some of the potential uses for healthcare.
“The equivalent Semantic Web technology is Resource Description Framework (RDF). Whereas HTML defines the location of data, RDF describes what that data is. Along with other technologies such as Web Ontology Language, RDF can be used to ascribe meaning to data depending on the context in which it is used.”
The potential uses are having intelligent agents find information in an increasingly dense and complex store of health information on the web for:
- Physician decision support
- bring condition-specific information to consumers
- support health science research and finding medical images
This certainly makes sense for healthcare where complex ontologies and taxonomies exist and transforming the technical into lay language is essential.
Share this:The Future of Ideas
August 22, 2007
On Dr. Dobbs there is a 3 part podcast on the Future of Ideas with Lawrence Lessig with Carl Malamud, Tim O’Reilly, and David P. Reed. Interesting listening on architecture and design of the Internet, policy, devices and more. Quote: “What wins is the innovation on the edges of the network, not from the center of the network.”
Share this:Virtual Healthcare – Future Clinic Visit
August 21, 2007
Just a quick note about a post on The Patient Advocate on a futuristic vision of virtual reality to visit doctors and specialist about a health condition. He suggests using: Semacodes, MyVu goggles, d’fusion (3-D viewing). All of this could potentially enable a Second Life visit to multiple providers. Interesting concept.
Share this:Medical Journal Podcasting Growth
August 21, 2007
Thanks to Clinical Cases author Ves Dimov for pointing out the growing number of podcasts for major medical journals. New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine. In addition he notes the capability of putting these on your cell phone, no just iPod, MP3 player. He also reminds us of text-to-speech tools which can potentially make any journal article or blog a podcast.
My next project is to test this out. Watch for the results in a future post.
Share this:HIMSS PHR Definition Released
August 17, 2007
This 13 page document attempts to comprehensively lay out what an ePHR can be and should be. Specifically, it outlines what the ideal PHR would look like. For instance, “The ideal ePHR would receive data from all constituents that participate in the individual’s healthcare; allow patients or proxies to enter their own data (such as journals and diaries); and designate read-only access to the ePHR.”
Other key terms in the definition include, “lay person comprehensible” and “lifelong tool for managing health information”.
It is true that most PHRs can’t begin to make these kinds of promises much less the high premium the document puts on security, confidentiality, and trust, a word rarely used in discussing PHRs but essential in the patient-physician relationship. But I can’t agree more that to be successful, PHRs must be understandable and highly user friendly. They must be available on the long term because we manage our health on the long term, not by quarters or even years. And our information is currently in various sources and needs to be consolidated in one place we have control over.
The full PDF version is here.
Everything is Miscellaneous
August 16, 2007
Just read the review of this interesting book on Forbes. The title of the review is equally provocative: “Chaos is the new world order.” The book itself is revolutionary with a primary theme of throwing out the old Aristotilian categories which gave us the Dewey Decimal System and other categorizations of knowledge. Today is a search engine, self-tagging world where information is placed somewhere and then the knowledge seeker creates a path to it and an organization around it. Messiness is OK and organization can be on-the-fly.
I also just finished reading the book myself. Implications for health care to follow in a future post.
Check out the blog by the author of the book.
Share this:Google and Microsoft Health
August 15, 2007
In the New York Times today there is a major article on the health initiatives of these two tech monsters. Titled “Google and Microsoft Look to Change Health care”, the article quotes Adam Bosworth(Google), John D. Halamka (Harvard Medical School) and Steve Shihadeh (Microsoft) on the initiatives.
For Google’s part the author notes seeing screen shots of Google Health with its extensive health profile pages. These are now posted on an unofficial Google site. Microsoft is less forthcoming but the purchases like Medstory, and their “Knowledge Driven Health care” give a pretty good glimpse.
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