Archive for June, 2008
More Than a Reminder to take your Pills
June 27, 2008
From the Boston xconomy is a story about a start up which does more than remind people to take their medication. Non-adherence with medication is a real problem. InnovationRx first does a 20 minute interview to determine the best strategy to get past the roadblocks to medication compliance. They use text messages and emails to encourage adherence and send reminders. The cost is $7.99 per month, or $96 per year and may be something that health plans will be willing to pay for.
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New Oncology Website
June 26, 2008
OncologyStat is a relatively new website with loads of information on cancer. Oriented toward the medical professional, the site boasts of 12,000 users since launching in September 2007. It has a depth of content including journal scans, drug and treatment info, news, blogs and a tab specifically for ASCO 2008. Looks like a worthwhile offering. Registration is required to view most content but there is no fee. The site is produced by Elsevier.
Share this:Presentation Tomorrow on Web 2.0 in Health Care
June 25, 2008
The Health Management Congress invited me to give this talk as a webinar tomorrow at 2pm EST. The full title is: “Emerging Trends & Opportunities for Healthcare Organizations to Leverage Web 2.0″.
Details from the website:
The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends.
At the same time, traditional Web sites that once offered cumbersome pages of static data are developing blogs, podcasts, and customized search engines to deliver the most relevant and timely information on health
topics.
What you will learn by attending:
- Improve care self-management using Web 2.0 strategies & resources
- Analyze the impact of Web 2.0 on healthcare stakeholders
- Leverage Web 2.0 content to drive traffic to your site and customers to your facility
- Explore the return on investment for these technologies
Our Pen-and-Paper Doctors
June 25, 2008
The New York Times has an editorial today on the need for physicians to adopt EMRs. It is in reaction to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The slow pace of fast change is happening in healthcare IT. Not devoting enough resources to health IT continues the short sited path of the past. The advantages are clear – get on board and devote the resources. Improved government incentives will help.
Share this:The Petabyte Age
June 24, 2008
The latest issue of Wired magazine includes a series of articles lead by the editor Chris Anderson’s article, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” In Wired‘s usually controversial approach to topics, he leads off with the quote, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” In the petabyte age, we move from local storage to storage in the cloud and “information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics.”
He cites one medical example, he cites Craig Vetner who “went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems.” He proposes that “We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show.”
Do these rash statements have relevance to health care? Much of health care information of interest to researchers are in secure databases such as EMRs. However, these are moving to the Cloud via RHIOs and initiatives like Google Health. Some research centers have placed data online and invited others to analyze. I think that there are huge amounts of data in health care that will come available for researchers in the next few years but it may not replace traditional randomized clinical trials.
Share this:Updated Health 2.0 definition
June 23, 2008
From Ted Eytan, MD, who invited commentors to suggest edits to a previous definition. As always, Health 2.0 is person-centric:
“Health 2.0 is participatory health care. The combination of content and community enables the patient to be an active partner in their own health care and the citizen to be an equal partner in improving the health system.”
I like the “combination of content and community” – it speaks to the importance of reliable content in health care and the importance of mutual support. Also, the definition avoids the overused term empowerment and focuses on partnership with the provider and system.
Good job.
Share this:PHR Task Force Appointed
June 13, 2008
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology has established a new task force focused on PHRs. It is an interesting mix of members – Paul Tang (AMIA and PAMF), Missy Krasner (Google Health), Holly Miller (HIMSS and University Hospitals Cleveland), some significant appointments from consumer groups and government agencies including the VA. It is interesting to review the Introduction slides on the site which include the methods for reviewing products on criteria such as, functionality, security and interoperability.
Will look forward to the progress of this group.
Share this:Top Web Programmer Receives His Due in Time Magazine
June 12, 2008
It is not often that the guys and gals working behind the scenes doing the hard core programming on PHRs and other healthcare applications get their due. This time Bob Lemon, my friend and long time programmer at the Cleveland Clinic gets first paragraph mention in an article in Time Magazine titled, “Medical Mouse Practice.” Bob is responsible for much of the custom programming behind the eCleveland Clinic websites including MyChart. The article on EHRs talks about the 700 people like Bob who support the infrastructure which makes the EHR, PHR and ehealth tools possible. Bob also can take credit for the Google Walk For Good gadget.
Share this:Health 2.0 for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
June 11, 2008
A relatively new site called rVita provides what looks like a fair evaluation of CAM. Subtitled “trusted information, natural healing”, the site offers information on a broad range of topics organized by symptoms and treatments and rates the medical evidence for each. For instance, the page on green tea, the ever popular treatment with many claims to its name, reports that for everything from reducing cholesterol and treating diabetes that the evidence is unclear or conflicting. For each such treatment there are comments from blogs, reviews and links.
Most importantly, there is a page on How the scientific evidence is derived which includes ratings from strong evidence (randomized controlled clinical trials) to no evidence.
The site is well designed and also offers a trusted practitioner network and a sign up to be a blogger.
Share this:Moment of Complexity
June 10, 2008
On the World Healthcare Blog, there is a discussion of a new book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, an its application to health care. The bottom line is this quote: “the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of relations.”
Is Health 2.0 helping to achieve this moment?
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