Posts Tagged ‘eHealth’
New Online Appointment Service
January 26, 2007
DoctorsDirect.com is a new service available in just a few cities but offers a convience service for making appointments online. ” DoctorsDirect.com (www.doctorsdirect.com) is a new online marketplace for medical services and physician information that improves access to care by facilitating a faster, easier and more satisfying experience for all.” Cities currently covered are LA, San Francisco, Philly, New York and Boston. For some specialist, the initial consultation has a specific price tag, such as, LA cardiologists at $265 – $320. It also indicates if the doctor does not have any available appointments to choose from but you can request an appointment.
To me this looks like a beta launch because of the limited number of physicians using the service and the fact that some features are not yet enabled. I wonder about its potential success since it is a limited service offering. Might be more successful if it was part of a more comprehensive patient portal like RevolutionHealth.
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Virtual Visit to the Doctor
January 23, 2007
On the radio program Marketplace Money this weekend, a story on personal health records, eprescribing and other ehealth topics aired. It’s good to see PHRs and ehealth beginning to seep into the media, even if it is only NPR so far. The story (available in audio only), gave an odd example of a patient in the Boston area who actually avoids going to the doctor and gets his cholesterol-lowering drugs refilled apparently without even a blood test. Patient Site was the example given; the story could have looked more broadly at PHRs or give a more typical example of the use of communication with a provider in combination with office visits.
Share this:Free ePrescribing
January 22, 2007
A new national initiative has a bold goal: “FREE electronic prescribing…for every physician in America”. The National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) is offering this service with a list of impressive corporate members. Based on AllScripts, the initiative has major medical groups as partners as well. One major limitation is implementing eRX in the absence of an EMR or RHIOs which means more double documentation for physicians already using EMRs or paper records. While eRX has the potential for reducing errors, this double record keeping could add some risk. On the pro side of this initiative is the alerts and the elimination of dependency on paper scripts which can be prone to errors and often require phone calls from the pharmacist to the physician for clarification.
This will be an interesting trend to watch.
Share this:Palo Alto Medical Foundation blog
January 17, 2007
PAMF is a medical institution in bordered by Stanford University and Silicon Valley so it is no surprise that they are on the cutting edge of Web 2.0. The institution’s blog includes postings about once a week with a combination of health information (How often should I visit my doctor?) and institution news. It uses Google’s blogger and has a link to their Google Coop subscription page. There are also links to PAMF podcasts and Urgent Care wait time, the most interesting use of a blog for health care. I have two friends who work there, Enoch Choi, a physician in Urgent Care and Haya R. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Research Institute and formerly of Cleveland, Ohio.
Share this:Fragmented Experience on eHealth Websites
January 16, 2007
Geocentric posted an editorial by Ben Dillon titled, “The Fragmented Consumer Experience”. In addition to giving some examples of frustration with a health care provider website, he lists his expectations of consumer websites from Google and Amazon, for instance,
- I want you to remember who I am
- I want you to get smarter about addressing my needs the more time that I spend working with you
- I want my experience to be personalized around the tasks and concerns that I have right now
- I want you to provide easy access to the information and tools that I need to make decisions
- I want to interact with you through your website. Don’t send me off to other random sites, I can do that with Google. This includes passing me to some health system parent organization website. I came to you, not to them
- I want to be able to complete with you online any interaction that does not require physician examination or phlebotomy
- I want to be able to email with my physician or her office/clinic securely
- I want to be able to see my bill online, I want to get explanations of my bill online, I want to be able to ask questions about my bill online and I want to be able to pay my bill online
All of these are reasonable expectations, but few providers/health systems have these features. Why – little incentive, costs, lack of vision? If the value of a patient portal with broad features can show some return on investment, even if it is simply a competitive advantage in a local or national market, more providers might join in providing a richer experience.
Share this:Editorial by New Gingrich on Health IT Adoption
January 12, 2007
Newt Gingrich wrote an editorial for the Philadelpha Inquirer this week title: “Getting health-care field wired:
Few U.S. hospitals and doctors use information technology in delivery of care. This must change.” Some quotes are informative:
- The technological gulf in health care isn’t just inefficient and costly; it may also be involved in costly inefficiency and the persistence of a high error rate in medicine.
- Only a quarter of all hospitals and less than 15 percent of all physicians use information technology in the delivery of care.
- Payment models should not be changed for the sake of technology itself, but for the better-quality care it would help deliver.
- He cites the Stark reforms but states, “From Medicaid regulations to antiquated statutes from decades ago, all
of them should be broken down to expedite the adoption of IT.” - he encourages the use of Health IT in medical schools as a long term strategy
- and finally contrast the high use of the web by physicians as a reference and education tool while still using paper to manage clinical care.
It’s good to have a political savvy advocate like Gingrich on the site of Health IT. Let’s hope more people listen to him.
Share this:Health e-Technologies Initiative Announces Articles on eHealth Research
December 8, 2006
Published in Evaluation and Programming Planning, these articles from grantees of Health e-Technologies Initiative, are important contributions to ehealth research. Topics include,
- An introduction to methodological challenges in the evaluation of eHealth research: Perspectives from the Health e-Technologies Initiative
- A framework for evaluating eHealth research
- Multidisciplinary eHealth survey evaluation methods
You can view them on the journal’s website.
Share this:Assessing the impact of eHealth – a European Perspective
October 13, 2006
In an article on the eHealth News blog, the authors cite a report called eHealth Impact, which showed significant return on investment for eHealth projects. The authors interpret this with some caution, however. “During the research, the team discovered that ineffective eHealth services are often caused by poor service implementation. They
therefore analysed the ten evaluated sites to identify lessons to be learned for successful implementation of effective eHealth solutions.” The eHealth Impact project ” focused on the three stages in the lifecycle of eHealth investments – planning and development, implementation, and routine operation. The project team developed a set of tools to collect relevant information on each stage.” They note that it is difficult to create a standardized way of studying economic impact when the eHealth projects are so diverse. A big factor is stakeholders: “The more stakeholders and the earlier they are brought in, the greater the chances of success.”
Share this:eHealth Progress
October 6, 2006
In an editorial by Henry Potts of London, he raises the question, “Is E-health Progressing Faster Than E-health Researchers?” Some of the quotable answer includes: “Traditional healthcare, given its safety critical context, utilises an evidence base and a process of risk management that generally involves some sort of governance. These are conflicting trends: the great value of the Internet is how easy it is to make material available, but the strictures of safety and proof of efficacy run counter to that. How do we garner the benefits of the Internet – the democratization of production and distribution that has produced so much content – while maintaining safe and good practice?”
And in an acknowledgment to social networking, “Beyond healthcare, there are many more innovations that draw on user-generated content and the Internet’s democratization of production and distribution. The “killer application” in e-health will perhaps be something that can marry the democratized nature of MySpace or Wikipedia with the safety critical nature of healthcare.”
These conflicting values of control and freedom are particularly acute in web-based consumer directed healthcare. Web 2.0 values need a way to take root within healthcare.
Share this:Another Article on Patient Web Pages
October 2, 2006
This time from USA Today including citations of Carepages and others. “Mehring’s non-profit service is called
CaringBridge and is supported largely through donations, plus some hospital sponsors. The Langshurs’ for-profit service is called CarePages and has licensing agreements with about 500 health care facilities, including top-tier hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic. The participating hospitals add their logos to patients’ pages and get other benefits — including exposure to potential donors. Another service is theStatus.com.
“Though details differ, all the services allow anyone with computer access — in or outside a hospital — to quickly, at
no charge, set up a Web page to post updates and receive messages.
“One important feature: These highly personal sites aren’t detectable by search engines. Users can restrict who sees
them — or broadcast access information as widely as they like.”
Again, security and privacy in the context of social networking is key to the success and boarder adoption of these tools.
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