Tag: Startups

Gates Foundation to fund global informatics training

Dec 8, 2008• 1

By Neil Versel

The American Medical Informatics Association will announce today that it has received a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote health informatics and biomedical education and training worldwide, particularly in developing countries.

This will be the first project of a new program called 20/20, in which the International Medical Informatics Association
and its regional affiliates, including AMIA, will attempt to train
20,000 informatics professionals globally by 2020. This is an outgrowth
of the AMIA 10×10 program to train 10,000 people in informatics in the U.S. by 2010. IMIA will present details of 20/20 this week at the Wellcome Trust in London.

AMIA
will use the Gates Foundation money to develop "scalable" approaches
to e-health education, including a replicable blueprint for training
informatics leaders, including physicians, medical records
professionals, computer scientists and medical librarians.

Confessions of A Physician EMR Champion, Part 2: Empowering Health IT for the Connected Medical Home

Dec 8, 2008• 9

By David C. Kibbe Kibbe

In a post here three weeks ago, I explained that I am engaging physician audiences in a conversation about participatory medicine, using a talk and presentation entitled "Confessions of a Physician EMR Champion.”

I “confess” my own misplaced hope in the EMR movement, and that I’m finally embracing the reality that most investments in health IT have not met expectations.

My broad message is that the key lesson of this failure has been that adoption of health IT without understanding the fundamental interactions between people, business process, and technology wastes both human and economic capital.

To be successful, the adoption of health IT by physicians, nurses, and staff must extend communication and health data exchange beyond their practices and bill payers to include the patient and family members, the patient’s team of health and wellness professionals, and ancillary service providers such as pharmacists and lab technicians in the community.

Health IT must be able to support coordination and continuity of care, as well as accountability for doing the right things for patients. I now realize most EMRs are not sufficient to this task, and I was wrong to think they would evolve in this direction.

Technology should promote patient involvement not replace it

Dec 4, 2008• 3

By THCB Reader SR

This post came as a comment by SR to Dr. Kibbe’s piece on electronic medical records. It’s a great consumer perspective and worth reprinting in full. — THCB Staff

Health Care consumers and patients have a wide range of interests,
needs and values that vary across our lifespans and circumstances and
hopefully there will be many different tools, products and services
provided to both providers and users of health care.

For example, my 70-year-old retired father is the head of a neighborhood
wellness program with over 3,000 people and maintained a family blog
during my mom’s cancer treatment but doesn’t own a cell phone and would
rarely change physicians despite differences in quality. I am rarely
ill, and yet expect SMS alerts if a lab test is done and want my
clinical records to link with my Nike tracker in my shoe as well as
apps on my Iphone.

I envision a system similar to the financial sector (bad example
right now perhaps) where you are able to move your information from
clinician to clinician (online bank statements = EMR) supplement that
with information gathered via other ancillary providers (investment
account at E-trade) take all of that information into my PHR (without
entering most of the data so it is similar to downloading into
Quicken) adding in some personal data (from my nike+ sensor and mobile
apps that track my diet and yoga classes) and generate reports (like
turbo tax) to share with some of my providers

Extracting more value from the health care dollar

Dec 2, 2008• 1

By Sarah Arnquist

Americans spend more money on health care than any other nation, but get far less in return, say multiple health care executives in Sunday’s Washington Post.

That’s not news to readers of this blog, but probably is not yet common knowledge among the general American taxpayer. That might change. The news media seems to be writing about this "value gap" more frequently, particularly in citing the growing momentum behind creating a center for comparative effectiveness research to evaluate drugs, devices and treatments to find out what works best.

Defining and measuring value is not easy, but increasingly public and
private health care purchasers are using their market power to demand higher quality care. Whether the science is
ready to support this "value-based purchasing" is the topic at the ECRI Institute’s annual conference today and tomorrow. (I’m attending the conference and will report on it tomorrow.)

Electronic health records provide the foundation for clinical excellence

Nov 24, 2008• 5

By Scott Shreeve Scottshreeve

I have mentioned this many times but it bears repeating with three
recent news articles – the electronic health record itself is not a
game changer but it is a powerful information gathering tool.

However,
by gathering information in a single collaborative place, EHR
technology allows all clinical providers to measure, monitor, and begin
to improve the way they provide care. It is this later part, which is part of the overall organizational transformation enabled by the technology (not solely because of it), that allows an organization to achieve the promised high performance results of an often painful EHR implementation.

Medical informatics needs a rock star

Nov 17, 2008• 2

By Neil Versel

Medical informatics needs a rock star. Not a David Brailer-esque figure
who could excite people in the technology sphere, but perhaps a Don
Berwick type who can reach every level and constituency of health care,
and even capture the imagination of the general public.

I had this thought yesterday during a highly engaging session at the American Medical Informatics Association‘s
annual symposium in Washington, a session with the mouthful of a title,
“Harnessing Mass Collaboration to Synthesize and Disseminate Successful
CDS Implementation Practices.” In English, that means panelists were
discussing the forthcoming “Improving Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: An Implementer’s Guide” and related feedback mechanisms, including a wiki.

Telehealth right here right now

Nov 14, 2008• 1

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

A very smart doctor told me, "there’s been a realization that the exam room is wherever the patient is."

That simple, elegant and insightful remark was offered by Dr. Jay Sanders, one of the godfathers of telehealth. I quote him here from my report published this week by the California Health Care Foundation. It’s called Right Here Right Now: Ten Telehealth Pioneers Make It Work.

This report is coupled with another by Forrester, Delivering Care Anytime, Anywhere: Telehealth Alters the Medical Ecosystem. My colleagues at Forrester, Carlton Doty and Katie Thompson, have assembled a very current look into the state of telehealth and drivers for the future.

Forrester defines "telehealth" as, "The use of telecommunications and information technologies in any area of health care, including medical intervention, prevention, care management, education, administrative tasks, and even health advocacy….It is a broader term than ‘telemedicine.’"

Winners & Losers in HIT

Nov 13, 2008• 1

By John Halamka Halamka

I was recently asked to predict IT Winners and Losers in 2009. Rather than name individual companies, I’d like to highlight categories.

Winners1. Electronic Health Record vendors, especially web-based applications – The Obama administration has promised $50 billion for interoperable EHRs.

2.
Software as a Service providers – SaaS providers offer lower cost of
ownership and faster implementation than traditional software
installation approaches.

3. Open Source – I’m embracing Open
source operating systems, databases, and applications as long as they
can provide the reliability and supportability that I need.

4.
Green IT – Winners will be innovative techniques to adjust power draw,
such as idle drive management, cpu voltage adjustments, and high
efficiency power supplies.

5. Cloud Computing offerings – These
are remote infrastructure utilities such as storage and high
performance computing. Friday’s Cool Technology of the Week will
describe a new technology called Cloud Optimized Storage.

Getting value from medical devices

Nov 12, 2008• 1

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

The buyers of medical devices aren’t very good shoppers. They lack the kind of information about technologies that would help them make value-based purchasing decisions, according to James Robinson in the most recent issue of Health Affairs.

This issue is so important because medical technology is the No. 1 factor driving up health spending in the U.S., according to the Center for Studying Health System Change in their recent report, High and Rising Health Care Costs: Demystifying U.S. Health Care Spending.

What are medical devices? They’re the hardware used by surgeons and clinicians in curing, cobbling together, stabilizing, and managing patients’ medical challenges. They cover orthopedics, interventional cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, and neurosurgery. The technologies represented here are collectively known as “physician preference items.” They can account for one-third of overall hospital supply costs and are growing as a percent of total costs according to the Financial Leadership Council of the Advisory Board. They have an FDA-designed life cycle, as shown in the figure.

MD Rating Sites: Current State of the Space and Future Prospects

Nov 10, 2008• 24

By Ruth Given

Ruth Given has spent the last few months doing an exhaustive study of the physician ratings business. Ruth is an independent health economist and consultant who has in the past worked for Kaiser, the California Medical Association and Deloitte Consulting. We’re very happy to make her study available on THCB and the Health 2.0 Blog. You can download the full report at the end of this introductory article — Matthew Holt

The past few years have seen an explosion in growth of websites allowing patients to review/rate (usually rant or rave about) their health care providers. Recent mainstream media attention has focused on the rating of physicians, with over 30 such sites now operating. A few sites, including RateMDs and Healthgrades, have been around for a number of years, but several high profile initiatives were recently launched. Last fall, national health plan Anthem announced that it would be partnering with restaurant rater Zagat to allow its enrollees to rate their MDs online. And in April, Angie’s List, whose subscribers rate a wide variety of local service companies, began to include all types of health care providers, including physicians.

Physician reaction to these sites has been generally unenthusiastic; but there is currently very little MDs can do legally to stop patients from posting opinions about them online. While this approach to reporting on MD performance has its shortcomings, there is also a growing recognition of the importance of accounting for patient experience in evaluating quality of care. The federal government, through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is moving to collect patient experience-related feedback, such as that included in their annual consumer assessment of hospitals reports. An AHRQ/Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey tool on patients’ experience with physicians has also been developed and is currently in use in a number of settings.

Given the recent ramp-up in sites and their newly legitimized role, the future for online MD rating seems fairly rosy. But is this really the case?