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 ‘Health Care IT’
Group on Information Resources (GIR) Leadership Institute
April 6, 2010
I have been invited to attend this leadership institute of the American Association of Medical Colleges. This “provides IT leaders the information and tools to understand how to excel at the nexus of academic, research, and clinical systems to support organizations as they move to more integrated and data driven models.” The five day institute in July is limited to 30 through a competitive process; I was nominated by my department chairman. I am looking forward to this interactive program. If anyone has participated or will be attending this summer, I’d like to hear from you.
New Profiles and Blog Exposure
March 26, 2010
Some new exposure for my blog is on MedicExchange.com which puts me in good company withJane Sarasohn-Kahn and others. The site has a broad range of information including blogs, news, white papers, webinars, etc.
Also, my profile is now on the J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia. This includes some introduction to my presentation and my twitter feed.
My profile is now up as an advisor for Within3.com, the social networking app for physicians and advisory boards.
As you may know, my blog is also fed to Medpedia in the health technology section.
Medicine: Cottage Industry or Post-Industrial Care Process?
January 21, 2010
In the New England Journal of Medicine this week there is a health care reform piece titled, “Cottage Industry to Postindustrial Care — The Revolution in Health Care Delivery.” The article, by leaders in health care quality, raises significant questions about the problems in health care delivery and a path to a solution through “standardization of value-generating processes, performance measurement, and transparent reporting of quality.”
The authors address concerns about “cookbook medicine” but rightly describe medicine as a cottage industry: “Services are often highly variable, performance is largely unmeasured, care is customized to individual patients, and standardized processes are regarded skeptically. Autonomy is hardwired into the system, because most physicians practice in small groups with limited oversight or coordination.”
How do we move to post-industrial care or even better, 21st century, technology-enabled, patient-focused care. Does that mean that small practices should join large practices, academic medical centers? The authors don’t propose that solution, but do propose following clinical practice guidelines which are flexible enough to manage individual differences in presentation. If medicine is trending toward broad implementation of clinical practice guidelines and a stronger focus on outcomes (value-based medicine), technology-centered particularly around the electronic medical record and a focus on efficiency, can small practices survive? Are will moving toward industry consolidation much like what has been experienced in banking?
The cottage industry of medicine with fee-for-service as a funding model, continues to drive up cost without adding value. While I am no economist, I believe medicine is changing and models of practice which focus on efficiency, technology and patient experience are taking the lead.
One final quote from the article: the authors characterize this cottage industry as chaos – “Chaos confounds constructive action, whereas wise standardization is a foundation for effective variation, efficiency, reliability, and rapid innovation.” Let’s hope that wise standardization through guidelines can promote the kind of rapid innovation needed to transform healthcare and that policy and funding decisions follow this direction.
Health Care Summit Conversations
January 28, 2009
A major summit begins tomorrow in Florida on health care reform. With Donna Shalala moderating, this summit. There will be a dedicated topic on Health Information Technology with one of the key speakers C. Martin Harris of the Cleveland Clinic. The conference website notes the recent Rand Corporation study stating,
“that properly implemented and widely adopted, HIT would save money and significantly improve health care quality. Annual savings from efficiency alone could be $77 billion or more, and health and safety benefits could double savings while reducing illness and prolonging life.”
Will this conference result in a general consensus on health care reform which can be implemented by the new administration?
A webcast will be available at 630pm EST.
What is the Golden Rule of Health IT?
December 10, 2008
The post on ZDNet calls for healthcare standards to improve adoption in health IT. One argument is that “vendors lose control of customers when they adhere to standards. This makes them reluctant to adopt standards” and therefore oppose standards or at least drag their feet. He also argues that “Hospitals and insurers gain bottom line benefits, while doctors do not.”
But the most important statement is “So long as hospital computing systems remain proprietary islands of
information, with proprietary drivers and minimum interoperability, the big winners here are going to be vendors, no one else.”
So what is the golden rule: build for standardization and interoperability or “He who has the gold must make the rules.”
Best method to rate Wired Hospitals
July 22, 2008
What is the best method to rate how wired or wireless a hospital is. There has been some criticism of reports about Most Wired. Some “might mistakenly believe that the simple installation of healthcare IT would lift quality in a hospital.”While the most wired competition has some discrete standards, not all hospitals participate and some major players are missing. But is a good opportunity for some hospitals to show major improvements. HIMSS Analytics has an alternative: The EMR Adoption model which is an 8 stage model including benchmarks such as CPOE and closed loop medication administration. Neither model is perfect, each have their own value.
Today’s Healthcare CIO – C. Martin Harris, MD, MBA
July 2, 2008
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.
Federal Health IT Strategic Plan Published
June 4, 2008
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 your time is limited.
Future of Medical Imaging: Podcast & Video
January 15, 2008
Mayo Clinic and IBM are teaming up in a new center for medical imaging. A video and podcast are available here on the Healthnex blog. More information is available in the IBM Press Room including a white paper (“Real-Time Mutual-Information-Based Linear Registration on the Cell Broadband Engine Processor”) and PowerPoint presentations.
What is the future of medical imaging? With lower cost storage, more robust networks in hospitals and faster processors, many of the previous barriers are being broken down. This is confirmed by the growth of remote radiology. But the Mayo Clinic/IBM initiative demonstrates an innovation at another level with future real-time imaging which may benefit transplant or interoperative interventions.
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.
