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Tag: Data

Health DataPalooza 2015: The Download

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By STEVE FINDLAY

flying cadeuciiHealth Datapalooza once again lived up to its reputation as the liveliest and most eclectic health IT confabs of the year.  Energetic and sleek young entrepreneurs mingled with government bureaucrats, academic types, consultants, current and former ONCers, a smattering of providers, app developers, data geeks, and patient advocates at this year’s conference, held in Washington D.C. June 1 to 3 with about 2,000 in attendance.

Although the speeches, app demonstrations, and panel sessions broke little new ground, that’s not the point.  The point is to maintain the excitement, optimism and commitment, to update the vision, showcase the creativity, and extol the virtues and power of data-driven care improvement.  Perhaps not as the solution to all the health system’s woes, but a fair share of them.

I didn’t discern a dominant theme, but amid the ra-ra and fun there was a good amount of hand-wringing around these issues:

1. Failure to engage the vast majority of consumers/patients in their own care—with data, medical records and Yelp reviews in hand.  Some two-thirds of providers attesting to stage 2 meaningful use reported that not a single patient had requested their data or records.   Continue reading…

Doctors Should Own Up to Creating the Mark Cuban Problem

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By ADAMS DUDLEY, MD

Adams Dudley UCSF

Much has been made of Mark Cuban’s medical knowledge since he tweeted, “If you can afford to have your blood tested for everything available, do it quarterly so you have a baseline of your own personal health”.  Charles Ornstein shared the tweet and many physicians and others, myself included, weighed in on the costs and potential for harm from unnecessary testing.

I’ll admit that, when I tweeted to him, I expected Cuban to agree. But he didn’t. In fact, he grew increasingly resistant. I stopped responding when he announced that the opposition to his idea his had convinced him he needed to take his proselytizing to his TV show.

Instead of poking the sore, I began to wonder about the origins of Cuban’s conviction. I remembered that he is not alone in wanting tests that clinicians who worry about value, cost, and harm think he shouldn’t have.

But where do these attitudes come from? Is it possible that clinicians are contributing in any way to this situation? Quite the contrary: most Americans want tests, even when you tell them that nothing can be done with the information. Furthermore, Americans are more convinced of the benefits of tests like mammograms than people in other countries, and then go out and get more of them.

I think that we are. My team has studied why patients get so many electively placed coronary stents, when cardiologists readily admit that randomized trials have demonstrated that there are few situations in which such stents improve survival or reduce the risk of heart attacks.

Studies of the beliefs of patients who have just received an electively placed stent give a big clue: 80% thought stenting would reduce their risk of death, even though their cardiologists knew that this was not the case.

Dudley Belief

Continue reading…

Time For a Stand Against Misinformation

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By SUSANNAH FOX

Susannah Fox Cite Me!

Two years ago, I interrupted a speaker at a big health/tech conference, right in the middle of his presentation. I still blush at the memory. But the speaker was citing data — my data—incorrectly and I couldn’t let it pass.

Brian Dolan recently wrote about how he wished he’d spoken up when he heard someone spreading misinformation at a conference:

Unfortunately, about 80 people sitting in the room either accepted this as new information or failed to stand up to correct the speaker. I wish I had pulled a Susannah Fox and done the latter.

He linked to my 2012 post about what happened at Stanford Medicine X.

In that post I asked:

  • What style of conference is the right one for the health/tech field? The TED-style “sage on stage” who does not take questions? Or the scientific-meeting style of engaged debate? Or is there a place for both?
  • Do different rules apply to start-ups? Is it OK to fudge a little bit to make a good point, as one might do in a pitch? Personally, I do not think people are entitled to their own facts. There’s too much at stake.

We can’t let misinformation—or worse—go by without comment.

I think it’s time for more people to speak up in health care.

More pediatricians should express their measles outrage.

More people should chronicle the reality of living with chronic conditions.

More people wearing medical devices should demand access to the data being collected.

More people should speak up about medical errors before—and after—they happen.

Continue reading…

In Search of Intra-Aero-Bili-ty

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By MATTHEW HOLT

Today is the kick-off of the vendor-fest that is HIMSS. Late last week on THCB, ONC director Karen De Salvo and Policy lead Jodi Daniel slammed the EMR vendors for putting up barriers to interoperability. Last year I had my own experience with that topic and I thought it would be timely to write it up. (I’ll also be in the Surescripts booth talking about it at 3.45 Monday)

I want to put this essay in the context of my day job as co-chairman of Health 2.0, where I look at and showcase new technologies in health. We have a three part definition for what we call Health 2.0. First, they must be adaptable technologies in health care, where one technology plugs into another easily using accessible APIs without a lot of rework and data moves between them. Second, we think a lot about the user experience, and over eight years we’ve been seeing tools with better and better user experiences–especially on the phone, iPad, and other screens. Finally, we think about using data to drive decisions and using data from all those devices to change and help us make decisions.

Slide47

This is the Cal Pacific Medical Center up in San Francisco. The purple arrow on the left points to the door of the emergency entrance.

Slide48
Cal Pacific is at the end of that big red arrow on the next photo. On that map there’s also a blue line which is my effort to add some social commentary. To the top left of that blue line in San Francisco is where the rich people live, and on the bottom right is where the poor people live. Cal Pacific is right in the middle of the rich side of town, and it’s where San Francisco’s yuppies go to have their babies.
Slide49
Last year, on August 26, 2014 at about 1 am to be precise, I drove into this entrance rather fast. My wife was next to me and within an hour, we were upstairs and out came Aero. He’s named Aero because his big sister was reading a book about Frankie the Frog who wanted to fly and he was very aerodynamic. So when said, “What should we call your little brother?” She said, “I want to call him Aerodynamic.” We said, “OK, if he comes out fast we’ll call him the aerodynamic flying baby.” So he’s called Aero for short.

Slide51
Thus began the Quest for Intra-Aero-Bili-ty –a title I hope will grow on you. The Bili part will become obvious in a paragraph or two.

Something had changed since we had been at Cal Pacific three years earlier for the birth of Coco, our first child.

Slide53
If you look carefully at the top of Amanda’s head, there’s now a computer system. Like most big provider systems, Sutter–Cal Pacific’s parent company–has installed Epic and it’s in every room or on a COW (cart on wheels). Essentially we have spent the last few years putting EMRs in all hospitals. This is the result of the $24+ billion the US taxpayer (well, the Chinese taxpayer to be more accurate) has spent since the 2010 rollout of the HITECH act.Continue reading…

Let’s Play “What If”—the Data for Health Edition!

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by MICHAEL PAINTER, MD

Optimized-MichaelPainterWhat if I asked you to talk data—about lots and lots of health data? By that I mean data about you and your community that you and others could use to improve your health.

What if I asked you to sit for hours with others from your community to talk about using the giga-bytes of data from your devices and other sources like electronic health records to help improve health—your health and the health of your community?

Would you play?  Would you do that?

Or would you blanch, shake your head incredulous, yawn with boredom and possibly run in the opposite direction?

Well, your colleagues in five cities, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Des Moines, San Francisco and Charleston, SC, played that very game with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and members of our Data for Health advisory committee along with the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and members of her staff.

Boy, did they play.

Last fall in our initiative, Data for Health, the Foundation asked people in those places to spend an entire day talking with us about their hopes, aspirations, worries and concerns with using digital data to improve health.

Honestly, we weren’t at all certain people would play this particular game. We understood—in fact some people told us—that this discussion could seem turgid, distant, maybe even a boring academic hypothetical discussion.

That was not the case.

Turns out it was very easy to draw people into this conversation. People attended and engaged passionately and vigorously. It was a powerful thing to behold.

These people were very interested in using data to improve both their individual as well as their community’s health. Continue reading…

Why Data Handoffs Matter

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By JORDAN SHLAIN, MD

jordan shlainChief information officers (CIOs) and chief medical information officers (CMIOs) have spent the better part of two decades on a quest for interoperability; yet, their Achilles heel lies in the “information” part of their titles. If information is the sole beacon of efficiency and value, the invaluable contours of human suffering, personal preferences and humanity itself are lost.

Information is the first step to developing knowledge and understanding, but what physicians and patients rely on in the real clinical setting, rife with changes, are knowledge, understanding and empathy. The cold, hard calculus of a=b does not always apply when dealing with people because they are much more complex and complicated than binary machines with screens. If it were so easy, there would be no problem reaching 100% compliance with medication or a plan of action.

Sadly, all data lives in a database; which might as well be called a wait-a-base; after all, the data just sits there and waits for someone to look at it.

The fundamental problem with today’s information architecture is that all data are not created equal. Data, information and knowledge degrade with each new doctor that becomes involved. In addition, systems design lacks an understanding of how the human computer works in the context of illness, anxiety or uncertainty. Healthcare is a people business in need of data, not a data business in need of people. Data are the means; people are the beginning and the end.

Continue reading…

Feedback Loop

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By PHILIP ALLEN GREEN

flying cadeuciiRight now there are two patients in every room. One is made with flesh, bones, and blood. One is made with a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard.

Both demand my time.

Both demand my concentration.

A little over two weeks ago I wrote the short story Please Choose One. I posted it online. The response it generated exceeded anything I could have ever imagined. It struck a nerve. People contacted me from all over the world, from all walks of life, about the story. Everyone, it seems, can relate to the challenge of having to choose between a person and a screen.

People sent me all kinds of suggestions and ideas. A few sent words of encouragement. Yet, what struck me the most about the people who contacted me was what they did not say. Not a single IT person argued the computer was more important than the patient. Not a single healthcare provider stated they wanted more time with the screen and less time with the patient. And finally, most importantly, not a single patient wrote me and said they wished their doctor or nurse spent more time typing and less time listening.

Medicine is the art of the subtle- the resentful glance from the mother of the newborn presenting with the suspicious bruise, the solitary bead of sweat running down the temple of the fifty three year old truck driver complaining of reflux, the slight flush on the face of the teenage girl when asked if she is having thoughts of hurting herself. These things matter. And these same things are missed when our eyes are on the screen instead of the patient.

Continue reading…

The Facebook Model for Socialized Health Care

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By EDGAR T. WILSON

Screen Shot 2015-02-26 at 5.06.17 PMAs government involvement in U.S. health care deepens—through the Affordable Care Act, Meaningful Use, and the continued revisions and expansions of Medicaid and Medicare—the politically electric watchword is “socialism.”

Online, of course, social media is not a latent communist threat, but rather the most popular destination for internet users around the world.

People, whether out of fear for being left behind, or simply tickled by the ease with which they can publicize their lives, have been sharing every element of their public (and very often, their private) lives with ever-increasing zeal. Pictures, videos, by-the-minute commentary and updates, idle musings, blogs—the means by which people broadcast themselves are as numerous and diverse as sites on the web itself.

Even as the public decries government spying programs and panics at the news of the latest massive data-breach, the daily traffic to sites like Facebook and Twitter—especially through mobile devices—not only stays high, but continues to grow. These sites are designed around users volunteering personal information, from work and education information, to preferences in music, movies, politics, and even romantic partners.

So why not health data?

Continue reading…

The Tao of Wearables

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By JOE KVEDAR, MD

Connected

The hype around wearables is deafening.  I say this from the perspective of someone who saw their application in chronic illness management 15 years ago. Of course, at that time, it was less about wearables and more about sensors in the home, but the concept was the same.

Over the years, we’ve seen growing signs that wearables were going to be all the rage. In 2005, we adopted the moniker ‘Connected Health’ and the slogan, “Bring health care into the day-to-day lives of our patients,” shortly thereafter.  About 18 months ago, we launched Wellocracy, in an effort to educate consumers about the power of self-tracking as a tool for health improvement.  All of this attention to wearables warms my heart.  In fact, Fitbit (the Kleenex of the industry) is rumored to be going public in the near future.

So when the headline, “Here’s Proof that Pricey Fitness Wearables Really Aren’t Worth It,” came through on the Huffington Post this week, I had to click through and see what was going on.  Low and behold this catchy headline was referring to a study by some friends (and very esteemed colleagues) from the University of Pennsylvania, Mitesh Patel and Kevin Volpp.

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Will Getting More Granular Help Doctors Make Better Decisions?

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By MARC-DAVID MUNK

flying cadeuciiI’ve been thinking a lot about “big data” and how it is going to affect the practice of medicine.  It’s not really my area of expertise– but here are  a few thoughts on the tricky intersection of data mining and medicine.

First, some background: these days it’s rare to find companies that don’t use data-mining and predictive models to make business decisions. For example, financial firms regularly use analytic models to figure out if an applicant for credit will default; health insurance firms can predict downstream medical utilization based on historic healthcare visits; and the IRS can spot tax fraud by looking for fraudulent patterns in tax returns. The predictive analytic vendors are seeing an explosion of growth: Forbes recently noted that big data hardware/software and services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 30% through 2018.

Big data isn’t rocket surgery. The key to each of these models is pattern recognition: correlating a particular variable with another and linking variables to a future result. More and better data typically leads to better predictions.

It seems that the unstated, and implicit belief in the world of big data is that when you add more variables and get deeper into the weeds, interpretation improves and the prediction become more accurate.Continue reading…