Tag: Startups

AARP, online trends health IT and fixing US Healthcare

Dec 24, 2008• 5

By Val Jones MD

Valjones
I had the chance to speak with John Rother, Executive Vice President of Policy and Strategy for the AARP
about the intersection of online health, information technology (IT),
and the baby boomer generation. Find out what America’s most powerful
boomer organization thinks about the future of healthcare in this
country. > Listen to the podcast

Dr. Val: Recent studies suggest that Americans age 50 and
older are more Internet savvy than ever before. How are AARP members
using the Internet to manage their health?

Rother: People over the age of 50 are the
fastest growing set of online users, and healthcare is the major reason
why they’re going online. They’re looking for health related news, help
with diagnosis, and finding appropriate healthcare providers.

Dr. Val: What role can online community play in encouraging
people to engage in healthy lifestyles that may prevent chronic
disease?

Rother: Our experience is that online
communities can be extremely helpful in several ways. First, it
provides emotional support for people who have a shared experience,
whether it’s as a caregiver, or being recently diagnosed with a disease
or condition. Second, people seem to feel more comfortable asking
questions of others with their condition than they do their own
physicians. And third, online communities can reinforce needed behavior
change. Whether it’s weight loss, exercise, or quitting smoking –
online communities can be just as effective in encouraging behavior
change as a face-to-face community.

Dr. Val: Tell me a little bit about the communities on the AARP website.

Rother: Currently our communities are organized
around medical topics, but in the future I think the communities will
become more geographical. An online community designed to serve the
needs of people in a given location can facilitate information sharing
about how to navigate a particular hospital system, for example,
instead of just general information about coping with a disease or
condition.

Next Steps for Interoperability

Dec 23, 2008• 9

By JOHN HALAMKA

There are some folks in Washington who have made statements that we
should delay investments in EHRs because current vendor products lack
the functionality needed to support a coordinated healthcare system.
Others have said that we lack the standards or security framework to
implement interoperability. Here are my thoughts.

Take a look at
the successes in Massachusetts and New York with commercial EHR
products. We’ve implemented eClinicalWorks, which includes decision
support, e-prescribing, administrative transactions with payers,
clinical summary sharing across the community, and quality measurement
(all the National Quality Forum high priority measures). It’s
web-based, using a service oriented architecture in a cloud computing
environment. By implementing this product at BIDMC, we’re meeting all
the payer guidelines for delivering appropriate, coordinated, high
value care. Vendor products from Epic, Allscripts, NextGen, GE,
Meditech, eMDs, MedSphere, and other CCHIT certified vendors have
similar features.

Should we wait for something better that has more interoperability?

Do
you drive a car? Why? It pollutes, costs a lot, and generally is not
very efficient in traffic. You’d be much better off asking Scotty to
beam you up via the transporter. Should we eliminate all cars, planes
and trains until the transporter is invented? The same can be said of
EHRs and health information exchange.

The Connected Medical Home: Health 2.0 Says “Hello” to the Medical Home Model

Dec 22, 2008• 21

By David Kibbe & Joe Kvedar

The concept of participatory medicine is taking hold, fueled, at least in part, by what we see as two complementary forces, these being the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and Health 2.0. Health 2.0 is very much a grass roots phenomenon, dominated by a small but significant group of patients who are testing the hypothesis that the wisdom of the crowd can rival the wisdom of physicians. The PCMH is a concept, not new, but gaining tremendous traction in the provider sector now as a best-try effort by some providers to be truly patient centric in their approach. The two should be complementary and mutually self-supporting. One might even suggest their respective champions should be collaborating right now, when the scent of health reform is in the air in our nation’s capital. But they are not. Lets examine why and explore ways in which to create a natural bridge between these two concepts and their champions.

The medical home concept was first introduced by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the 1960s. But several factors are now converging to update this original concept for today’s health care environment. The growth in chronic illness, the emergence of new reimbursement models designed to improve quality and control costs (e.g. pay for performance), and the greater availability of monitoring and messaging technologies have providers, payers and patients taking a fresh look. This is a good thing, in that it is an effort by organized medicine and large corporations to get into the reform conversation.

But the aspects of the medical home that are getting the most airtime are largely focused on rounding out office staff, adding new roles that take work away from the physician so that the physician can tend to more patients, and taking a population view of the patient panel. This vision is idyllic, but several challenges suggest that as conceived it will be tough to get it out of the womb.

Cool Technology of the Week

Dec 20, 2008• 5

By John Halamka

In my experience, social networking applications gain marketshare by being first to innovate and then spreading virally.

I
was an early adopter of Facebook but delayed joining Twitter, a
microblog that enables me to post instant blog entries via SMS from my
Blackberry.

Over the past 60 days, I have seen an incredible
rise in Twitter use among my colleagues and have now joined the ranks
of folks who "Tweet" their blogs. You’ll find me at http://twitter.com/jhalamka

Here’s what I do to use Twitter :

Washington, Please Don’t Bail Out the Health Care Industry

Dec 19, 2008• 61

By RICK PETERS Capital

A health care Marshall Plan — $50 Billion stimulus to get electronic health records (EHRs) in every doctor’s hands or $50,000 to each physician -– what an incredible marketing job.

Detroit, are you listening? Stop whining to Congress that you need a bailout. Tell them you want to be the new alternative energy Manhattan Project, get the money, and then keep building SUVs and flying around in corporate jets.

To Congress, Daschle, and Obama, please don’t do this. Our industry, health care, combines the worst of the Big Three automakers with the worst of the hubris, dishonesty, and failure of the public trust of Wall Street. Please do not bail us out.

An Open Letter to the Obama Health Team

Dec 19, 2008• 48

By David C. Kibbe & Brian Klepper

It seems likely that the Obama administration and Congress will spend a significant amount on health IT by attaching it as a first-order priority to the fiscal stimulus package. We take the President-elect at his word when he recently said:

“…we must also ensure that our hospitals are connected to each other through the Internet. That is why the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives. We will make sure that every doctor’s office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.” (December, 6, 2008)

Whether the health IT money is well spent will depend on how it is distributed and what it buys. Most observers suppose that federal health IT investment dollars will be used to help doctors’ offices and hospitals acquire and implement electronic health record systems (EHRs or EMRs). These are commercial software suites for entering, storing and managing patient health data within a practice or health organization.

ePatient Dave & his doc Danny Sands speak out

Dec 18, 2008• 2

By Matthew Holt

One of the most remarkable people I’ve met this year is Dave deBronkart, better
known as ePatient Dave (fourth from left on top of the e-Patients.net blog). Dave has had a remarkable recovery from cancer and has probably used as many Health 2.0 tools as any patient.His blog is here.

I got the chance this week to talk at length with Dave and his GP Danny Sands. Danny is not only a practicing doctor in the BIDMC system in (Boston, yes that one with the blogging CEO and blogging CIO!) but also the Director of Medical Informatics for Cisco (FD, Cisco is a Health 2.0 sponsor and I’ve done consulting work for them in the past).

We covered a lot of ground in this conversation—starting with Dave’s illness, Danny’s role as a physician working with a very savvy patient, and the role of ACOR. But then we moved onto some critical questions about who will control the patient experience in the future in a world of Health 2.0 and what providers, patients and physicians need to do to prepare for it.

A fascinating conversation recorded via Cisco’s Webex technology that you can listen to here.

PS Dave asked me, what the most important issue raised in this interview was. I said "who is going to perform the function you performed for yourself for people who
don’t grab the bull by the horns the way you did? Because apparently it won’t be the Danny’s or
the BIDMCs of the world"

A new national privacy and security framework for HIT

Dec 16, 2008• 1

By BOB COFFIELD

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) issued a paper Monday called The Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework for Electronic Exchange of Individually Identifiable Health Information. The summary states that the framework creates a set of consistent principles to:

“.
. .address the privacy and security challenges related to electronic
health information exchange through a network for all persons,
regardless of the legal framework that may apply to a particular
organization. The goal of this effort is to establish a policy
framework for electronic health information exchange that can help
guide the Nation’s adoption of health information technologies and help
improve the availability of health information and health care quality.
The principles have been designed to establish the roles of individuals
and the responsibilities of those who hold and exchange electronic
individually identifiable health information through a network.”

Along with the Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued The Health IT Privacy and Security Toolkit. The Toolkit includes new HIPAA Privacy Rule guidance documents developed by the ONCHIT and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to help facilitate the electronic exchange of health information.

EMR use: on the steep part of the S curve, or being replaced by a new idea?

Dec 14, 2008• 16

By MATTHEW HOLT

Ten plus years ago, I was giving talks suggesting that at some point relatively soon the EMR was going to become a reality. In 1999, at Harris Interactive I actually got the chance to launch a study which I hoped was going to soon show a relatively steep growth in EMR use in physicians’ practices. (The study was called Computing in the Physician’s Practice). Sadly because the study wasn’t a huge financial success and because I wandered off to do other things, it was only fielded in late 1999 and early 2001.

Computing in the Physician’s Practice

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: Harris 2.0)

Open source is a transparent Trojan horse

Dec 12, 2008

By Scott Shreeve Scottshreeve

I have been blogging and twittering
from the World Health Innovation and Technology conference this week
while waiting to present today. The keynote speaker before me was Scott
McNealy, the Chairman and founder of Sun Microsystems. He has a long
and storied history with Sun, and a well earned reputation as the “human quote machine.”

He delivered.

His talk started with several examples of his health care experience
(long time user as a hockey player and father of four boys) and
business experience had so many corollaries. The fight for standards.
The fight for common interfaces. The fight for privacy and security.
The find for high quality, low cost, and transparency.