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Tag: Data

A New Way to Explore and Comment on Doctor Data

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By Fred Trotter

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The American Medical Association (AMA) says the number one issue with recent data releases from HHS is that “there is currently no mechanism for physicians and other providers to review and correct their information.”

We think we have a way to fix that problem over at the DocGraph project!

Over the last two years there have been three major breakthroughs in the analysis of doctors using Open Data. The first was the original teaming and referral database obtained by DocGraph (us) under a FOIA request. The second was the prescribing data set obtained by ProPublica. Both DocGraph and Propublica worked around the 1978 injunction limiting the use of FOIA for doctor data.

The third is the new procedure pattern data set announced as the direct result of the overturning of the 1978 injunction.

We are happy to announce the release of the first “all-in-one” open doctor data browser that we are calling DocGraph Omni. We have created a public tool that allows you to browse the merger of all three major new open data sets about doctors and other healthcare providers that bill Medicare.

Now in one place you can view how a provider prescribes, how they collaborate, and which procedures they work with. Our intention to turn Omni into a browser where you can find any open data about doctors, no matter what the source.

But this is not just about “finding” the data. We have created a system that allows anyone to comment on any given data point in these data sets.

Continue reading…

Why Transparency Doesn’t Work.

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By Alexander Chaitoff

The Cleveland Clinic is by far the best provider of cardiac care in the nation. If you have cancer there is no better place to be than Texas. Johns Hopkins is the greatest hospital in the America.

Why? Because US News and World Report suggests as much in its hospital rankings.

But which doctors at the Cleveland Clinic have the highest success rates in aortic valve repair surgeries? What are the standardized mortality rates due to cancer at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center? Why exactly is Johns Hopkins the best?

We don’t have answers to these types of questions because in the United States, unlike in the United Kingdom, data is not readily available to healthcare consumers.

The truth is, the rankings with which most patients are familiar provide users with little. Instead, hospitals are evaluated largely by “reputation” while details that would actually be useful to patients seeking to maximize their healthcare experiences are omitted.

Of course, the lack of data available about US healthcare is not US News and World Report’s fault – it is indicative of a much larger issue. Lacking a centralized healthcare system, patients, news sources, and policy makers are left without the information necessary for proper decision-making.

While the United Kingdom’s National Health Service may have its own issues, one benefit of a system overseen by a single governmental entity is proper data gathering and reporting. If you’re a patient in the United Kingdom, you can look up everything from waiting times for both diagnostic procedures and referral-to-treatment all the way to mortality and outcome data by individual physician.

This is juxtaposed to the US healthcare system, where the best sources of data rely on voluntary reporting of information from one private entity to another.

Besides being riddled with issues, including a lack of standardization and oversight, the availability of data to patients becomes limited, manifesting itself in profit-driven endeavors like US News and World Report or initiatives like The Leap Frog Group that are far less well-known and contain too few indicators to be of real use.

The availability of data in the United Kingdom pays dividends. For example, greater understanding of performance has allowed policy makers to consolidate care centers that perform well and close those that hemorrhage money, cutting costs while improving outcomes.  Even at the individual hospital level, the availability of patient data keeps groups on their toes.

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Some Predictions on How Medicare Will Release Physician Payment Data

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By CHARLES ORNSTEIN

The federal government’s announcement last week that it would begin releasing data on physician payments in the Medicare program seems to have ticked off both supporters and opponents of broader transparency in medicine.

For their part, doctor groups are worried that the information to be released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will lack context the public needs to understand it.

“The unfettered release of raw data will result in inaccurate and misleading information,” AMA President Ardis Dee Hoven, MD, said in a statement to MedPage Today. “Because of this, the AMA strongly urges HHS to ensure that physician payment information is released only for efforts aimed at improving the quality of healthcare services and with appropriate safeguards.”

On the other hand, healthcare hacker Fred Trotter has raised concerns about CMS’ plan to evaluate requests for the data on a case-by-case basis. That isn’t much of a policy at all, he wrote, giving federal officials too much discretion about what to release.

So, how is this all going to shake out?

Three recent examples offer some clues.Continue reading…

Whose Data Is It Anyway?

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By John Moore & Rob Tholemeier

A common and somewhat unique aspect to EHR vendor contracts is that the EHR vendor lays claim to the data entered into their system. Rob and I, who co-authored this post, have worked in many industries as analysts. Nowhere, in our collective experience, have we seen such a thing. Manufacturers, retailers, financial institutions, etc. would never think of relinquishing their data to their enterprise software vendor of choice.

It confounds us as to why healthcare organizations let their vendors of choice get away with this and frankly, in this day of increasing concerns about patient privacy, why is this practice allowed in the first place?

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released a report this summer defining EHR contract terms and lending some advice on what should and should not be in your EHR vendor’s contract.

The ONC recommendations are good but incomplete and come from a legal perspective.

As we approach the 3-5 year anniversary of the beginning of the upsurge in EHR purchasing via the HITECH Act, cracks are beginning to show. Roughly a third of healthcare organizations are now looking to replace their EHR. To assist HCO clients we wrote an article published in our recent October Monthly Update for CAS clients expanding on some of the points made by the ONC, and adding a few more critical considerations for HCOs trying to lower EHR costs and reduce risk.

The one item in many EHR contracts that is most troubling is the notion the patient data HCOs enter into their EHR is becomes the property in whole, or in-part, of the EHR vendor.

It’s Your Data. Act Like it.

Prior to the internet-age the concept that any data input into software either on the desktop, on-premise or in the cloud (AKA hosted or time sharing) was not owned entirely by the users was unheard of. But with the emergence of search engines and social media, the rights to data have slowly eroded away from the user in favor of the software/service provider.

Facebook is notorious for making subtle changes to its data privacy agreements that raise the ire of privacy rights advocates.

Continue reading…

Should We Sacrifice Medicine’s Sacred COW?

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By Richard Gunderman, MD

Chicago Cubs fans of a certain vintage will never forget broadcaster Harry Carey’s signature line, “Holy cow!”  Some have speculated that the exclamation may have originated in Hinduism, one of the world’s major religions, whose adherents worldwide number approximately one billion.  Hindus regard cows as maternal, caring figures, symbols of selfless giving in the form of milk, curds, butter, and other important products.

One of the most important figures in the faith, Krishna, is said to have been a cowherd, and one of his names, Govinda, means protector of cows.  In short, cows are sacred to Hindus, and their slaughter is banned in virtually all Indian states.

Medicine, too, has its sacred cows, which are well known to physicians, nurses, and patients visited by medical teams on their hospital rounds.  In this case, the cow is not an animal but a machine.  In particular, it is the computer on wheels, or COW, a contraption that usually consists of a laptop computer mounted on a height-adjustable pole with a rolling base.  It is used to enter, store and retrieve medical information, including patients’ diagnoses, vital signs, medications, and laboratory results, as well as to record new orders.

As the team moves from room to room and floor to floor, the COW is pushed right along. The COW is often treated with a degree of deference seemingly bordering on reverence.  For one thing, people in hallways and patients’ rooms are constantly making way for the COW.  As an expensive and essential piece of equipment, it is handled gingerly.  Often only the senior member of the medical team or his or her lieutenant touches the COW.

Others know that they have said something important when they see the chief keyboarding the information into the COW.  Sometimes it plays an almost oracular role. When questions arise to which no one knows the answer, such as the date of a patient’s admission or the time course of a fever, they often consult the COW. Just as cows wandering the streets of Indian cities often obstruct traffic, so healthcare’s COWS can and often do get in the way of good medicine. Continue reading…

Why Badly Designed iPad Apps Put Patients at Risk: EMS and ePCR

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By Jonathon S. Feit

Everyone who knows my writing can attest that I neither pull punches nor play politics. It may distress people, and hopefully it won’t harbinger my demise.  But as CEO of a young firm bringing overdue innovations to the Fire and Emergency Medical Services industry, there are only four groups to whom I am duty-bound: our partner-clients, their patients, our team members, and our investors (in no specific order).  To remain mum on topics that could affect the physical or financial health and wellbeing of any of these parties would be a disservice.

When I was in the magazine business, I often used the phrase “Respect the medium.”  The meaning was simple: when every industry player surfing the waves of innovation is trying something new, how many are asking whether the form is appropriate to the intended function?  What changes need to be made to magazine’s font so its text can be read clearly on a small, backlit screen?  What interactivity can be embedded into a digitally delivered? How will the user’s experience change when network access is down?  (In February 2012, I wrote about these topics for Electronic Design Magazine.)

Failure to ask these questions is often the downfall of the delivery method: either the medium changes or its use declines; rarely do customers acclimate.  In the publishing world, if your readers ignore you, you go away—no lasting harm or foul.  Not so in healthcare or public safety. Especially during emergencies, if a product fails to work as intended—or to work at all—it can mean lost productivity, mountainous legal fees, brain death, or loss of life, limb and property.

Healthcare IT offers outsized benefits to Emergency Response teams, which depend on speed, ease of training and use, data accuracy, and interoperability.  But the stakes of failure or disruption are so high that one can say there are few areas of development with a more desperate need for criticism.

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With CDC Seasonal Flu Data Unavailable, An Electronic Medical Record Offers a Glimpse of Early Activity Levels

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By Iyue Sung

As Washington remains deadlocked on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the US government’s shutdown has resulted in the furlough of nearly 70% of the Centers for Disease Control‘s (CDC’s) workforce. CDC Director Tom Frieden recently shared his thoughts in a tweet. We agree whole-heartedly.  Although it’s all too easy to take the CDC staff for granted, they are the frontline sentinels (and the gold standard) for monitoring disease outbreaks.  Their ramp-down could have serious public health consequences.

We are particularly concerned about the apparent temporary discontinuation of the CDC’s flu surveillance program, which normally provides weekly reports on flu activity. Although flu season typically begins in late fall, outbreaks have occurred earlier in previous years. In 2009, flu cases started accumulating in late summer/early fall.  And given the potential for unique variants, such as the swine or avian flu, every season is unpredictable, making the need for regular CDC flu reports essential. We therefore hope to see the CDC restored to full capacity as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we would like to help by sharing data we have on communicable diseases, starting with the flu.


Because the athenahealth database is built on a single-instance, cloud-based architecture, we have the ability to report data in real time. As we have described in earlier posts, the physicians we serve are dispersed around the country with good statistical representation across practice types and sizes.

 

To get a read on influenza vaccination rates so far this season, we looked at more than two million patients who visited a primary care provider between August 1 and September 28, 2013 (Figure 1).  We did not include data on vaccinations provided at retail clinics, schools or workplaces.

This year’s rates are trending in parallel to rates over the last four years, and slightly below those of the 2012-2013 season. However, immunizations accelerate when the CDC, and consequently the media, announce disease outbreaks and mount public awareness campaigns.

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Washington In Crisis: ONC Announces That It Will Not Tweet Or Respond to Tweets During Shutdown

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By THCBist

The U.S. government shutdown continues to claim victims.

The latest is HealthIT.gov, the website designed to help doctors and hospitals make the transition to electronic and make better use of health information technology – a key component of Obamacare’s drive to transform healthcare.

The Health Information Technology Office of the National Coordinator posted a brief announcement on the site informing visitors to HealthIT.gov that “information … may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations have been enacted.”

Officials also sent a tweet saying that the ONC regrets to inform us that while the shutdown continues it will “not tweet or respond to tweets.”

This struck THCBist as slightly odd.

After all, if you’re looking for an inexpensive way to communicate with the public in a pinch, Twitter seems like the perfect choice.  We get that government websites are ridiculously expensive things to run. Blogs are considerably cheaper.  Operating a Twitter account — on the other hand — is almost free.  Our brains were flooded with scenarios.  How much could the ONC possibly be spending on Twitter? And for that matter, didn’t the Department of Defense originally invent the Internet to allow for  emergency communication during times of national crisis? Doesn’t a fiscal insurrection by cranky Republicans qualify?

Fallout for the National Health IT Program

While federal officials have issued repeated assurances that the shutdown will not impact the Obamacare rollout, it does look as though there will be a fairly serious impact on the administration’s health IT program.  If HHS sticks to script, only 4 of 184 ONC employees will remain on duty during the shutdown. That makes it sound like activities are going to have to be scaled back just a bit.

If you’re counting on getting an incentive payment from the government for participation in the electronic medical records program, you may be in trouble — at least until the stalemate is settled.  Although ONC has not yet made an official statement,  presumably because the aforementioned Twitter channel has been disabled, leaving the agency unable to speak to or otherwise communicate with the public, going by the available information in the thirteen-page contingency plan drafted by strategists at HHS, it is unclear where the money will come from.

This could be bad news for electronic medical records vendors counting on the incentive program to drive sales as the Obamacare rollout gets officially underway.

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Understanding the Hospital Consolidation Numbers: The Centrality of Data Quality

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By Bruce Levinson

Is hospital consolidation creating new efficiencies or does it give health care providers clout over health care insurers?  A well-publicized study published in Health Affairs last year by Robert Berenson, Paul Ginsburg, et. al said the latter:  hospital consolidation has resulted in “growing provider market clout.”

The Berenson study’s key conclusion is that growing hospital clout has resulted in insurers not aggressively containing their claims payments, a view that will stun every patient who has had a health insurance company deny coverage for a procedure, prescription or preferred health care provider.

Because the Berenson study’s finding are counterintuitive to consumer experience, and because they have been widely discussed in publications ranging from Forbes to National Journal, the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a regulatory watchdog with extensive experience in analyzing federal health policies, undertook an analysis to see if the study complied with the Data Quality Act (DQA).

The DQA, administered by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sets standards for virtually all data disseminated by the agencies.  Under the DQA, agencies may not use or rely on data in federal work products (reports, regulations) which don’t comply OMB’s government-wide Data Quality standards. Thus, unless the Health Affairs study complies with federal Data Quality standards, it is useless to Executive Branch policy officials.

The primary data source cited by the Berenson study as the basis for their conclusions regarding trends in relative clout between hospitals and health insurers is a well-respected, longitudinal tracking study which included interviews with heath care leaders from insurance companies, hospitals, and academia.   The health care interviews, however, were only conducted in a single year following a change in longitudinal study’s methodology.

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What the Recent Data Breach Says About the State of Health IT

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By David Do, MD

Recently officials at Oregon Health Sciences University discovered that residents in several departments were storing patient information on Google Drive, and had been doing so for the past two years. They treated this discovery as a breach of privacy and notified 3000 patients about the incident.

While I don’t condone the storage of patient information on unapproved services like Gmail or Google Drive, this incident pretty much highlights the sorry state of information systems within the hospital and the unfulfilled need by physicians for tools that facilitate workflow and patient care.

It says something that the Oregon residents felt compelled to take such a drastic action. I don’t know what punishment – if any – those responsible were given by administrators for their “crimes.” I’ll leave it to readers to make up their own minds about the wisdom of the unauthorized workaround and the appropriateness of any punishment. But I do know that the message the incident sends is a very clear one.

We’re screwing this up. There is really no earthly reason why it should be any more difficult to share a patient record than it is to share a Word doc, a Powerpoint or yes, even a cloud-based Google Drive spreadsheet.

Why the Breach Happened

What’s going on here? Let’s say I admit a patient to the hospital.  Our friend was hospitalized here just last month, and like many patients, he has dementia or is poorly educated, and does not know the names of the medications he takes. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to see what he takes or how he was treated during the prior admission because the records in the computer are there for documentation’s sake and don’t contain any meaningful information. This is clearly a problem for me.

Therefore I will spend time calling outside facilities to gather information and repeat several tests and imaging procedures.

Medical care has become a team sport, and residents have developed systems for keeping track of their patients and communicating to other physicians. It takes some time to think about and process each patient that comes in, to consolidate all the information. Ultimately, I need to boil that information down to a five-minute description on the patient, their problems, the status of their current admission, and what needs to happen before they go home.  We do this in the form of a signout document.

Figure: The signout document has four to five columns and includes the To Do list for each patient.

The EMR does not have a good way to store information in this format, and  additionally I have no way of editing this in real-time to communicate with my
coworkers what still needs to be done. That’s why residents were storing their  signouts in Google Drive.

What providers need here is simple data management. We need to store and access this list from different computers. We need the ability to enter a subset of those data  using a custom form, and the ability to print subsets of those data to create a To Do lists, rounding sheets, or progress notes.Continue reading…