John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Posts Tagged ‘eHealth’
Predicting Health IT Five Years Out
August 30, 2010
In an article in xConomy Seattle, there is a report from a meeting of the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association, reporting on the future of Health IT. Some key predictions:
- “As we near 2015, many in the industry predict healthcare will see an integration of social media, cloud computing, and collaborative commons—creating resources that allow consumers to more actively engage with their health through information technology.”
- “primary care facilities and hospitals are not capitalizing on the existence of electronic resources to provide better care for patients and improve efficiency for healthcare providers”
- “Healthcare is the last bastion of mom and pop stores,” ?The first step in healthcare is to make everything digital,” “The next step is to takes what’s digital, and make sense of it—to make some intelligence out of the information you already have.”
- “Arguably healthcare is a data problem, and we’re trying “Scientists are not thinking of their data as an ingredient to the solution. They’re thinking of it as an ingredient to their next paper,”
- “researchers will have to amend not only what they do, but how they go about doing it—the emphasis will become less about research and clinical data, and more about how that data is stored, accessed, and used”
- “models could also use the power of social networks to give patients access to information and resources provided by other patients with similar conditionals—data that could help patients research and decide on a treatment plan, as well as help physicians make recommendations.”
- “One example would be using personalized data from electronic medical records, combined with data from available studies, to create individualized predictive care models.”
All great ideas held back by cottage industry attitudes and slow adoption of EHRs and PHRs. My only question is, why can we have this sooner than 5 years?
Open Notes Project – Right Thing or Wrong Question
August 18, 2010
The discussion of having doctors notes on one’s care readily available electronically was stimulated by a recent New York Times article titled, Should Patients Read the Doctor’s Notes? Roni Zeiger of Google Health challenges whether this is the right question. For e-Patients, it is both the wrong question or obviously the right thing to do. Transparency of medical records, now written into health care reform, is the obvious right thing to do but will take time for physicians to catch up to the idea. Granted that few patients even have access to a PHR tethered to and EMR, but at least those that do should have access to notes in the long run. If patients are to be full participants in their health care and treatment, they should know their doctors observations and treatment plans. As Roni Zeiger says this is one of ”the best ways for the patient to understand and remember the doctor’s guidance.”
IBM Initiative to Improve Healthcare Quality and Costs
August 6, 2010
Recently IBM announced a major initiative to address significant data problems in healthcare. Acknowledging the fact that data is in structured and unstructured format and from various sources, the task of integrating these data points into a individual dashboard format can enable better medical decision making. One tool to enable this kind of data integration is their text analytics tools LanguageWare™ (LW) and Cognos Content Analyzer (CCA). Both of these were acquisitions by IBM in the past few years and it appears that they are now integrated enough to be used with large data sets in health care. Analyzing unstructured information can benefit insurance companies as well. The tool looks like it combines natural language search and semantic technologies. The video illustrations the typical international approach of Big Blue.
What’s New with PHRs – evidence and interoperability
July 16, 2010
A new study from Kaiser documents some clear clinical benefits for the use of PHRs. The study, which was published in the July issue of Health Affairs, observed 35,423 patients with diabetes, hypertension, or both. Researchers found that the use of secure patient-physician messaging in any two-month period was associated with statistically significant improvements in HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) care measurements. Results included 2 to 6.5 percentage point improvements in glycemic, cholesterol and blood pressure screening and control.
Also, there is a good video on PHR/eHealth application interoperability which also promotes the Health 2.0 Accelerator. The future of patient centric care must be interoperable. Watch the video.
Part of the video is a demo of SurveyorHealth for managing medications which includes an interesting tool Simulate Alternatives. Check out one of the demo patients.
Technology and the Future of Chronic Care
May 24, 2010
Accenture has published a report on “Connected How Technology Will Transform the Future of Chronic Care.” From the Accenture Innovation Center for Health, a good source for research white papers. The paper reports that “a broad range of consumer health electronics at home, a two-way, direct-to-consumer infrastructure” and smart devices which set the stage for health care connectivity. Analytics and predictive modeling provide a second layer and visualization, decision support and collaboration provide the third. Connect health examples include the HealthVault and Cleveland Clinic home monitoring pilot and a remote monitoring trial by the VA system.
There is no doubt that the convergence of technologies have the potential for revolutionizing chronic care, however, we must go past the pilot stage and initial startups to broader change. Partnerships between consumer electronics, startups, providers and insurers need to come together with government support. Perhaps after the first wave of meaningful use EHRs, this new level of innovation can flourish.
The Quantified Self in Healthcare – Part 2
May 10, 2010
More evidence of this movement continues to emerge. For instance, I came across the Philips DirectLife device today which can record a number of activity parameters to quantify one’s life. In an article in the Linux Journal, of all places, there is an article title, Now Data Gets. Personal. The author cites Alexandra Carmichael of CureTogether and the Quantified Self Community as a prime example. The article points back to an earlier one in the same journal called The Patient as the Platform. The author proposes that through the use of PHRs controlled by patients, such as, Google Health, the patient could be center of health information rather than the provider or payer. This article from 2008 essentially proposes a solution for health information exchange without costly state or national initiatives.
The combination of the quantified self and the patient as the platform can potentially create a future where rich information is controlled by the patient and shared with providers to enhance personal wellness and treat conditions. Adding social networking with like patients creates a powerful trio of technology for the e-patient.
Trends in Social Media in Health Care
May 7, 2010
Yesterday I had two content successes. My article Social Media in Health Care: Barriers and Future Trends was published in the Perspectives section of this online newsletter. In it I propose 3 trends to watch for:
- Managing a conversation;
- Engaging e-patients;
- Convergence with personal health records; and
- Social media for providers
I will be interested in your comments on this blog or via Twitter (@JohnSharp).
Yesterday I also spoke at the J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia on Social Media in Health Care: Humble Beginnings to Patient Engagement. This conference is more intimate and interactive than most with specific tracks for each day. I spent the first day in the Higher Education track and found many similarities with the struggles we in health care experience. The second day had an eHealth track that included Jane Sarasohn-Kahn who had just returned from a Senate Hearing on Mobile Health.
Check out my slides below.
Social Media in Health Care – Engagement
View more presentations from John Sharp.
Social Media for Canadian Health Care
May 2, 2010
On Friday, April 30, I had the opportunity to speak at the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network Education Day for Healthcare Communicators or TAHSN. This well organized meeting provided some great interaction with health care communicators from Toronto hospitals and got me thinking about the use of social media in a country with socialized medicine. While the focus of much of US hospitals in social media is to attract new patients, in Canada, the purposes would be different. However, one common interest is fund raising. Canadian hospitals have Foundations as a fund raising arm of the hospital and social media provides a useful outreach to potential donors. Following the success of fund raising via text messaging and social media for Haiti, there may be an opportunity for Canadian hospitals to focus their energies here. As with US hospitals, there are opportunities for using social media, such as blogs and private social networks with personal profiles to enhance service and productivity. Engaging with patients, such as, the example of the Bloom Blog from Bloorview Children’s Rehab Hospital in Toronto is a great example engaging parents of children with disabilities.
More soon the the exiting New York Times magazine article on the Quantified Self which is the next trend in health and social media.
Below are my slides from the presentation. I follow Lee Aase from Mayo Clinic who joined the conference via webex.
Social Media in Health Care, Toronto 2010
View more presentations from John Sharp.
New PHR Report from California Healthcare Foundation
April 13, 2010
Titled “Consumers and Health Information Technology: A National Survey“, the survey shows some promising progress:
- users cite taking steps to improve their own health, knowing more about their health care, and asking their doctors questions
- lower-income adults, those with chronic conditions, and those without a college degree are more likely to experience positive effects of having their information accessible online
- Two-thirds remain concerned about the privacy and security
- should not let privacy concerns stop us from learning how health IT can improve health care
- almost half are interested in medical devices that can be connected to the Internet.
- Of those who do not have a PHR, 40% express interest in using one.
Also just released is a major report from Price Waterhouse Coopers, The customization of diagnosis, care and cure. A key part of this report is patient touchpoints inlcuding:
- coordinated care teams
- fluent navigators
- patient experience benchmarks
- medical proving grounds
- care anywhere networks (aka, mHealth).
The common theme here is participatory medicine, which as it turns out, appeared in a post by Roni Zeiger of Google Health in Huffinton Post. His key quote is, “Data on its own is useless. It’s all about conversations.” Health data whether in personal health records or social networking sites or other tools is essential in creating a conversation about how to improve and maintain health.
Hospital as Software Service Providers
April 3, 2010
In an article on HealthLeaders, how health systems can provide an EMR via Software as a Service (SaaS) is presented. Five requirements are noted:
Cleveland Clinic is noted as an example. Dr. C. Martin Harris says, “”Success to me is that we are not just installing technology in an office to replace paper, but we are putting in technology that enables interoperability,”
Of course, Cleveland Clinic provides other software to help hospitals and providers:
- explorys to utilize EMRs for research and discovery
- Intellis - business intelligence
- A PHR which connects to Google Health
- Home Monitoring which utilizes Microsoft HealthVault to connect with the PHR and EMR
- Risk calculators for Prostate Cancer and heart surgery
What are other hospitals doing? How about an award program for the hospital or health system which produces the most useful software?
