eHealth » Innovation

2012 Predictions for Health IT

John Sharp — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:13:33 +0000

Like others (see Daniel Kraft) , I have my own opinions about what trends will be most influential for health IT in 2012.

Big Data and real-time analytics and decision support – IBM Watson and Explorys are in this space, others will follow and adoption will grow enabled by cloud computing, NOSQL/Hadoop and natural language processing
Continued focus on EMR adoption as more health systems pursue meaningful use. This will again be the main focus at HIMSS as well as other conferences
Social media in health care will continue to grow among patients as the e-Patient movement continues to gain in strength and public awareness and as advocates like the Reshape Innovation Center find creative uses to influence the future of health
Mobile health and apps usage will expand but what is needed is a way to integrate personal health information, such as, PHRs and apps that promote wellness and disease management. For health care professionals, apps and mobile devices need to be integrated into clinical workflow rather than being an adjunct or distraction
Research will be further enabled by EMR data as more academic medical centers develop data warehouses for research and quality studies and as initiatives like QueryHealth make it possible to combine data across systems and states using health information exchange and other tools

There are many more but these are the primary one’s I will be following.

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2012 Predictions – Analytics

John Sharp — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:14:21 +0000

There are many top 10 predictions for 2012 out there. I could probably add my own for eHealth and mHealth.
These 10 Business Intelligence Trends for 2012 from Tableau Software apply to healthcare as much as any business.

10 Business Intelligence Trends for 2012

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Recently Published – Article for the American College of Healthcare Executives

John Sharp — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:36:40 +0000

I have an invited article in the current issue of the ACHE Frontiers theme issue on social media in healthcare. My article is titled, “Brand Awareness and Engagement: A Case Study in Healthcare Social Media.” With the help of my colleagues at Cleveland Clinic in Marketing, Communications and CME, I present an overview of some of the successful uses of social media Cleveland Clinic has deployed including the standard Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn sites plus a very active YouTube channel with over 800 videos. Online chats and some new blogs for heart care and rheumatologist are also discussed.

Among the many uses of social media here, I personally think how patients and families engage with a large, academic medical center through Facebook demonstrates engagement best – they use it as a vehicle to show how grateful they are for the medical care and kindness of our physicians and nurses.

This publication is primarily for members of the ACHE but can be purchased. The five articles are a great overview of social media in healthcare currently and could provide a helpful introduction to healthcare leaders in your institutions.

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Health App Development and Innovation

John Sharp — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 02:54:52 +0000

Two quick notes:

HHS kicks off $5M ‘i2′ Health IT app development program – contracts awarded for this, more innovation opportunities looking to:

Allow an individual to securely and effectively share health information with members of his or her social network.
Provide patients, caregivers and/or clinicians access to rigorous and relevant information that can support real needs and immediate decisions.
Allow individuals to connect during natural disasters and other periods of emergency.
Facilitate exchange of health information while allowing individuals to customize the privacy allowances for their personal health records.

Also announced, the Cleveland Clinic Medical Pavilion on Innocentive and the first challenge posted.

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Can Social Media Save Lives?

John Sharp — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:58:56 +0000

This provocative title of a webinar to be held next week is part of the growing optimism about the potential for social media in the process of health care. Some recent examples come to mind:

Report from the Change Foundation in Toronto on Using social media to improve the quality of patient experience (I was on the advisory board for this report)
An App that Looks for Signs of Sickness – Mobile-phone activity can provide a warning of disease flare-ups.
Community Health Data Initiative – more on this later
Case Study: Radboud Hospital Supports Young Cancer Patients With An Online Community

We are witnessing a shift from social media for pure marketing toward engagement and beyond, to changing the care process.

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Innovation Opportunities Abound

John Sharp — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 02:36:39 +0000

A new conference has been announced by the NIH: Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation. Speakers incude Tim O’Reilly and ” will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific problem across disciplines.”

Another open innovation opportunity has been recently announced called Merit Awards which is offering $50,000 on the topics of citizen engagement, defense, emergency response, entitlement reform, work force management and motivation, back office operations, results achievement and waste.

Another opportunity is a developer community called TopCoder “revolutionizing the software design and development process by tapping in to our unlimited global community.”

Will open innovation become the primary source for new ideas and products/apps in the future?

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More on Innovation – The Need for Actionable Ideas

John Sharp — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:52:52 +0000

An excellent post on Venture Valkyrie discusses why Innovation is not enough in healthcare. The author views that “there is no doubt that innovation is necessary to respond to the challenges of our current healthcare system” while “over-breeding of ideas that are innovative but not actionable.” It is important to consider innovation not just a good in itself, especially in healthcare where we are trying to impact personal health, as only good if it leads to real change. Some innovation will always fail, so the encouragement toward innovation should not have barriers that are too high, but realistic evaluation of these ideas, testing their viability, needs to occur.

Another note on innovation comes from the site udemy, a site which enables the creation of courses. Check out Ideas Come From Everywhere, a course by Marissa Mayer of Google, Inc. which she gave to Stanford Technology Ventures Program in 2006. It is certainly not dated and presents some of basic concepts of success through innovation that have made Google a success. Worth watching this short clips.

See this article from Forbes on Gladwell on Innovation: Truths & Confusions which tells a brief history of innovation but also distinguishes between innovators and creators but ends on a positive note that creators (who may come up with ideas but not successfully implement them) can become innovators.

Also posted at WikEhealth.

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Promoting Healthcare Innovation through Challenges

John Sharp — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:06:14 +0000

Innovation in healthcare is now pervasive. To continue the wave of innovation, hospitals can now earn new incentives based on competitions. These are government-sponsored, industry-sponsored challenges, and even have the potential for becoming business ventures. Here are some competitions hospitals can enter to help expand industry innovation:

Health Challenges at Challenge.gov – These include video challenges, National Library of Medicine apps, Flu apps and more. Many offer monetary rewards.
Health 2.0 Developer Challenge – Developed by the Health 2.0 Conference folks, this includes online challenges and live competitions including a Code-a-Thon which most recently occurred in February A Code-a-Thon is a day long competition to build an application. Winners included a meta-analysis engine, Healthy people 2020 tracker, and an epidemic finder.
Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) – This includes everything from equipment sterilization, blue button technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation. It encourages submissions from its own employees, as well as healthcare industry leaders.

A new player in this arena is Innocentive, an online business built around challenge-driven innovation. While not specifically focused on healthcare, it does have a Global Health Pavilion, featuring challenges from cell biology to caregiver communities. These challegnes promote the idea of an Open Innovation Marketplace, which is the topic of its new book.

For each of these healthcare challenge websites, the basic concept is open innovation. By utilizing competition for a financial reward, the government, an NGO, a private sector company and healthcare providers can generate low cost solutions. But the inventor/innovator needs to keep in mind their intellectual property rights if these are not spelled out clearly up front.

Nonetheless , the potential for healthcare innovation and problem solving are yet to be measured. Perhaps someone will some develop a site or app which aggregates these challenges and their successful solutions. Aggregation of healthcare innovation challenges would help inventors find opportunities which are sprouting up from government, conferences and corporations.

This post was originally published on Hospital Impact on May 18, 2011.

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Appropriate Use of Social Media in Healthcare Organizations

John Sharp — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 01:57:27 +0000

A question during a presentation on social media in healthcare about the appropriate use of social media in patient care areas. Social media can be an effective tool for engaging patients online. But what about the use of social media in patient care areas. Should nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers be online interacting with colleagues or family during active patient care? With busy clinics and busier hospital units and greater concern about patient safety, is there time for what administrators might view as a distraction? Would you want your nurse to be updating Facebook while you are waiting for post-op pain medication? Yet there may be some advantages to direct caregivers utilizing social media. How about the oncology nurse interacting with the cancer patient discharged last week? Or nurses within a hospital exchanging ideas about improving patient safety? Yet stories of abusive use of social media in health care persist.

Clear answers are hard to come by. Each hospital will need to develop its own policy and implementation of that policy in the use of social media in patient care environments. But when face time with the patient is the highest priority, social media may need to take a back seat.

Slides are here:

Social media in health care: What's Working, What's Not

View more presentations from John Sharp

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TEDx Maastricht – The Future of Health

John Sharp — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:17:06 +0000

In anticipation of the International event on April 4, I wanted to share some links. Although many conferences which claim to be futurist meccas for healthcare, this one is bringing together a group of people including a very strong patient perspective which all are thinking innovation. Also, it is completely full and is being simulcasted to several countries.

Website, speakers
Some of the attendees via a tool which exploits LinkedIn
mashup on VPRO
Simulcast schedule – I am being interviewed at 11:15 local time

Follow tweets at #tedxmaastricht

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