The Bank as Health ‘Infomediary’
April 11, 2007
An interesting article on iHealthbeat discusses how banks are getting into health IT. This is potentially good news because banks know security and how to process payments efficiently. But can banks handle personal health information? Do you want your bank handling your health information? “From the eHealth Lockbox, a bank can progress to offer a specialized portal for provider health plan businesses that are clients of a bank. On the other side of the connection, there’s an opportunity to create an increasingly specialized online banking portal for the consumer.” It could also support provider-patient secure messaging.
Read more at the Medical Banking Project.
Share this:
eHealth Wiki Launched
April 10, 2007
I came across this new wiki sponsored by the Journal of Medical Interenet Research and the Centre for Global eHealth Research. The wiki proposes to be a location for collaborative writing of journal articles and research proposals and grant applications. A very collaborative venture if the research community gets on board. There are also events which will list conferences (only one listed so far). Unfortunately, it looks like they have had some pornographic spamming already in the ehealth dictionary section. Wikis take a fair amount of monitoring or control in terms of who can be a contributor.
Share this:Upcoming Presentation at Research Day at Case Western Reserve University
April 6, 2007
I will be copresenting a poster titled, “Web-based Collaboration for Clinical Care, Research and Education at an Academic Hospitalist Group” at the Research ShowCase. Coauthors are all physicians – Ves Dimov (Clinical Cases and Images blog), Ashish Atreja, a medical informaticist, Neil Mehta of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and others. Collaboration on the web has new meaning in the Web 2.0 age. One could debate whether Windows Sharepoint Services is really Web 2.0 since it runs on a proprietary system but once up and running it is low cost, easy to establish a personal or team site and ready for user-contributed content.
Check out some of the other presentations which are innovative and a colorful variety of work. The authors of AskDrWiki will be there and Ves Dimov is also presenting on his blog.
Share this:Doctor–patient relationship as motivation and outcome
April 5, 2007
This article from the University of Wisconsin Madison was recently published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics and featured in the Washington Post. This paper by Brent Shaw and others from the Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research, concludes that, “use of the Information services was associated with having a more positive appraisal of the doctor–patient relationship at post-test”. He further states that, “high-quality information on the Internet can serve to improve patients’ satisfaction with their doctor.”
Some additional findings:
- patients with a more negative appraisal about the doctor–patient relationship used the Ask an Expert service more frequently
- a more positive appraisal of the doctor–patient relationship predicting higher use of the Discussion Group service
Two PHR Stories today
April 4, 2007
At the Fourth Information Technology Summit, the Interim National Coordinator of Health Information Technology Robert Kolodner stated that we are close to a tipping point in Health IT which will be helped along by consumer demand for PHRs. His main caution was that the public must be able to trust online medical records.
The second story has to do with the National Governor’s Association State Alliance for eHealth met on March 30 to discuss progress on ehealth including PHRs and RHIOs. An archive of the webcast is available including testimony by Holly Miller, MD. Liability issues in ehealth are addressed and recommendations for limiting liability were presented.
Share this:AskDrWiki.com in the News and Blogs
April 2, 2007
This wiki which I referred to previously, is now receiving much attention both in the press since a story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and in health care blogs. The best summary of all of this press in on Clincal Case and Images blog which points to the best blog responses to this innovative wiki and views this as a future disruptive competitor for major, subscription-based online reference tools.
Share this:Quoted on Government Health IT
April 2, 2007
On the Government Health IT blog, GHIT Notebook, in a post entitled “Bridging the (Disruptive) Divide“, my opinion about Web 2.0 on being disruptive in health care is noted. Specifically, I see Web 2.0 as a real issue for health care organizations which are policy driven and rely on medical authority as in direct conflict with the open-ended, flexible and non-authoritative nature of Web 2.0. At the same time, Web 2.0 is based on collaboration, the central focus of medical practice at least in group practice settings.
Share this:Getting the Best Care – Adam Bosworth
March 30, 2007
In the Official Google Blog yesterday, Adam Bosworth, CEO of Google, wrote at length about “How do you know you are getting the best care possible.” He addresses several important questions and admits to some of the limitations of Google’s current search results:
- How do I know if the information is trustworthy and reliable?
- Am I getting the best standard of care?
- Who is the best doctor or institution for you?
On the first point, he states, “we can do better at making this kind of labeling noticeable and your ideas on how we could make it clear to you that a site is medically reliable or trustworthy.”
The best standard of care issue is his real passion – he notes that even finding guidelines for treating a specific condition is a challenge but is essential to good care.
Address the best doctor question, he admits that rating physicians is not the same a rating food, perhaps a reference to the growing number of provider rating sites.
His posting is a good summary of the limitations of the current status of internet health information. I would welcome Google’s willingness to “do better” and help find solutions beyond the intial Google Coop effort.
Disruptive Technology in Healthcare IT – Major Vendors Back Off?
March 28, 2007
In a response to a letter regarding the lack of major vendors at the HIMSS Venture Capital fair, Christensen and Raynor’s in The Innovator’s Solution is cited regarding how established companies often view disruptive technology as a threat. They suggest, “The proven solution is to have senior managers make a solid commitment to address and allocate resources to the disruption and then place the responsibility to
commercialize it in an independent organizational unit.”
Is Web 2.0 one of those disruptive technologies being ignored or seen as a threat? For instance, why purchase an extensive knowledge management system if an open source Wiki can catalog your business knowledge across the enterprise.
Perhaps companies like PracticeFusion free EHR will challenge some major players to rethink strategy.
Share this:The Growing Impact of Social Media
March 27, 2007
Today I attended the meeting of the Web Association in Cleveland to hear some of the local bloggers talk about Web 2.0 trends. The speakers were George Nemeth of Brewed Fresh Daily, John Ettorre of Working With Words and Dan Hanson of Great Lakes Geek and other ventures, many of which now include podcasts. One of them brought up the Long Tail concept and made me wonder, has this been applied to health care? Is much of web marketing in health care focused on the big money procedures like heart disease while the long tail of many diseases and conditions may hold a wealth of opportunities?
Three value propositions were cited for blogs in business: education (how tos, etc.), communication and marketing/brand awareness including improved search engine position.
Share this: