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Tag: Social Media

The Rise of Big Data

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By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

Health care is in the process of getting itself computerized. Fashionably late to the party, health care is making a big entrance into the information age, because health care is well positioned to become a big player in the ongoing Big Data game. In case you haven’t noticed computerized health care, which used to be the realm of obscure and mostly small companies, is now attracting interest from household names such as IBM, Google, AT&T, Verizon and Microsoft, just to name a few. The amount and quality of Big Data that health care can bring to the table is tremendous and it complements the business activities of many large technology players. We all know about paper charts currently being transformed via electronic medical records to computerized data, but what exactly is Big Data? Is it lots and lots of data? Yes, but that’s not all it is.Continue reading…

Steve Jobs, Health Care Apps & Me

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By Michelle Snyder

When I heard the news about Steve Jobs on Wednesday, I was surprised at how profoundly sad I felt. Although I had never met him, my company had the thrill of sharing the stage with Steve when Apple announced they would open their platform to third party developers. At the time, I was head of marketing and subscriptions for Epocrates, then best know for our Palm Pilot application for physicians.

At the time, we thought we had done a pretty good job of disproving the old notion that physicians are slow to adopt new technologies.  Steve was about to show us our full potential.

It was a surprise for us to be up on that stage, to say the least. Our fellow presenters were industry giants: EA, AOL, SalesForce, Sega and…us. The Sesame Street song ran through my head – “one of these things is not like the other.” Naturally, we were thrilled, but we had no idea how profoundly our company and industry were about to change.

Before the iPhone, Epocrates had built a great business creating drug, disease and formulary content for mobile devices. We launched our first product in 1999 with the premise that physicians were mobile and wanted to access information anywhere, anytime. Health care professionals loved their Palm Pilots – and I still have a bag of Palm IIIs, VX, Tungsten, Handspring, and Treo devices to prove it! Business was going well and we had grown to 25% of U.S. physicians. But we faced a challenge – we had already saturated the market of physicians with a device – and growth of the mobile device market had stagnated.

To this day, I don’t really know how we ended up that stage. But I like to believe the story we were told. Apparently, Steve asked one of his personal physicians why she wouldn’t switch to an iPhone and she replied “because I can’t use Epocrates on it.” True or not, we got an invitation from Apple to be one of their very first third party developers.Continue reading…

Lab Results For All!

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By DAVID HARLOW

On September 14, HHS released for comment draft lab results regulations that will, if finalized, effectively bathe the Achilles’ heel of health data in the River Styx of ¡data liberación! All lab results will be made available to patients, just like all other health data.  (See the HHS presser and YouTube video from the recent consumer health summit.  Todd Park, HHS CTO, is also the chief activist for what he calls ¡data liberación!)

Forgive me for mixing my metaphors (or whatever it is I just did), but even though there are just a couple dozen words of regulations at issue here, this is a big deal.

When HIPAA established a federal right for each individual to obtain a copy of his or her health records, in paper or electronic format, there were a couple of types of records called out as specifically exempt from this general rule of data liberation, in the HIPAA Privacy Rule, 45 CFR § 164.524(a)(1): psychotherapy notes, information compiled for use in an administrative or court proceeding, and lab results from what is known as a CLIA lab or a CLIA-exempt lab (including  “reference labs,” as in your specimens get referred there by the lab that collects them, or freestanding labs that a patient may be referred to for a test; these are not the labs that are in-house at many doctors’ offices, hospitals and other health care facilities — the in-house labs are part of the “parent” provider organization and their results are part of the parents’ health records already subject to HIPAA).Continue reading…

Did a Scrappy Little Startup Just Embarrass the FDA?

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By Jan Gurley, MD

Adverse Events is a heath-tech start-up so new, they barely exist. Despite that, they’re getting some major results. This week they announced that they found from their early analysis – of the FDA’s own data – that two epilepsy drugs may be more dangerous in pregnancy than their FDA labeling might suggest. They used the FDA’s adverse event reporting data to compare the adverse events of commonly prescribed epilepsy drugs in pregnancy. What they found was that the FDA’s own labeling wasn’t consistent with their data.

Currently, the FDA classifies drugs used during pregnancy as being anywhere on a scale of safety from class A (“no known risk”), through levels of increasing risk labelled B, C, D, and then one final class X (“danger – do not use”). Specifically, Adverse Events found that two drugs, Lamictal and Keppra, which are Class C, may be “as dangerous to a fetus as drugs currently listed” in a more risky category (D).

In fact, Adverse Events’ analysis showed that an average birth defect rate comparison between the two groups, C and D, revealed no meaningful differences between the two. This scrappy little start-up’s analysis of the FDA’s own data may indicate that the FDA’s current categorization of pregnancy risks for epilepsy drugs may need revision. Or may be subject to bias.

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Social Media’s Evolving Role in Health Care

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By WENDY LYNCH

On August 23, 2011, some people in New York knew an earthquake was coming before it happened.  They weren’t psychic (as far as I know), but digital tweets from their friends in Washington, DC arrived 30 seconds before any seismic rumbles began (1, 2).  Afterwards, the U.S. Geological Survey asked people to “tweet if you felt it.” Over 122,000 people responded, providing a detailed map of activity within hours (3).  Though phones were dead near the epicenter of the quake, texts kept moving.

Welcome to SOLOMO (SOcial, LOcal, MObile) communication, connecting us instantly through handheld devices.  News now literally travels at the speed of light, with words strapped to the backs of zippy electrons. Emergency preparedness and disaster response teams are taking note, using social media to both get and spread the word.  The Red Cross has dedicated teams who monitor Facebook and Twitter (4).

While the speed of social–media communication is impressive, its volume is daunting and its content overwhelmingly messy.  Besides 300 billion emails (5), each day across the globe we send 200 million tweets(6); search the Web more than four billion times(7); and add 5,000 new blog sites to the 170 million that already exist (8). Ten million people, including the president, belong to FourSquare (9), which delivers personalized offers and local news interactively based on where you are (GPS) and what is nearby.  In the 3.5 hours we spend each day “connected” (10) we buy, sell, chat, gossip, work, cheer, complain, and advise.  We plan everything from dinner parties to Mideast revolutions, we ask about everything from movie ratings to interplanetary travel, and we monitor progress of local teams, hurricanes, and political races.

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Sharing Data on Social Media

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By BRIAN MOSSOP


People use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites as channels for self-expression. But whether updating or uploading, people are telling their social stories with only two tools: text and images.

But what if social media wasn’t confined to words and pictures, but instead, allowed users to uploaded graphs or tables? In other words, could data, pure data, become a token in our social currency?

That’s the thought contributed during a panel session at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco byGary Wolf, contributing editor at Wired, and an organizer of Quantified Self, a community whose users meticulously track certain aspects of their lives, some down to infinitesimal levels, such as how they spend every minute of the day (no joke).

Wolf’s comment followed a presentation by Stead Burwell, the CEO of Alliance Health Networks, who demoed Diabetic Connect an information and community site for patients battling diabetes. Alliance spent a great deal of time (read: money) on creating user profiles that would allow visitors of the site to connect with their peers, patients who share similar experiences. But that connection, they found, was key. As Burwell said in his presentation, users not only like to receive badges and virtual rewards, they like to hand them out as well.

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The Doctor is Social

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By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

Doctors and hospitals are going social, adopting social media for professional and clinical use, based on surveys conducted in mid-2011 by QuantiaMD and Frost & Sullivan and the Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2).

In Doctors, Patients & Social Media, dated September 2011, QuantiaMD and the Care Continuum Alliance report a high level of physician engagement with online networks and social media. Two-thirds of physicians are using social media for professional purposes, and see potential in the use of these channels to facilitate patient-physician communication. The survey found a cadre of “Connected Clinicians” who use multiple media sites to positively impact patient care. Over 20% of clinicians use 2 or more sites.

Only 1 in 10 physicians is familiar with one or more online patient communities, as the first chart illustrates. Among those who know about at least one community, a majority believe the sites have a positive impact on patients (either very positive or positive in the survey response). This is true across various condition categories, especially for rare diseases, cancers, chronic conditions, maternal and child health, and wellness/prevention. As one physician shared anecdotally, “Patients can share their stories, learn from others, spread knowledge, and instill hope.”

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The Social Media Doctor Is In

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By DAN PELINO

All around the world, businesses are getting social. Ford Motor Co. is crowd-sourcing ideas for features in future cars. Shoe seller Zappos shares Facebook “likes” with customers. Toy maker Hasbro ties Facebook videos to its Cranium board game.

Hospitals, doctors, nurses and patients would seem like naturals for social media. But they have been slow to take advantage of it because of well-founded fears of violating patient-privacy laws.

As valuable as social media can be for businesses and employees, they can also be perilous. Workers who love to use wikis and chat for personal communications or YouTube for showing off funny videos, can get in trouble when they start using them for sharing company plans or customer information.

This is particularly true in industries where information sharing is subject to government regulation. Health care is a field where strict patient-confidentiality rules have kept hospitals and doctors from embracing social media.

In a sign of the growing concern about the issue, a Westerly, R.I. hospital, just fired an emergency room doctor for posting information about a patient on her Facebook page, even though she didn’t name the patient. The disciplinary action follows sanctions against doctors and nurses in California and Wisconsin over similar issues, according to the Boston Globe.

Two physicians at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital recently wrote an opinion piece in The Annals of Internal Medicine that physicians should think of the Internet as the world’s elevator where someone is always listening in.

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Google + Shines the Light on the Value of Data Portability

By VINCE KURAITIS

It’s understandable that a healthcare delivery system would have a mindset and business objective to keep referrals within its network of care providers. Businesses have a right and an obligation to try to hang on to their customers.

It’s a different issue whether closed or walled garden HIT is an acceptable means toward that end.

Outside of healthcare, we understand and can accept that businesses used closed, proprietary IT as part of their business model. Apple has designed their iPod with an eye toward incompatibility and high hassle factor in not being plug-and-play with other music players and systems.

IMHO, however, healthcare is different. Keep your proprietary business model away from my body and gimme my damn data.

Google+ v. Facebook on Data Portability

We are witnessing an important dynamic begin to play out between FB and Google+. I note a significant difference in mindset and policies toward data portability.

FB seems to have a mindset to maintain customer data within its walled garden as much as possible. For example, when G+ first opened, I remember seeing an early article about how easily to import some of your FB data into G+; hours later I read an article how FB had plugged this leak. Deleting your FB account is difficult — there are articles walking you through the 634 steps you need to go through.

G+ seems to be built on a diametrically opposing mindset. You can download your data. You can export your data and import it into another social networking site. You can easily delete your G+ account and wipe out your data.Continue reading…

Can Blogging Be Harmful to Your Career?

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By JOHN HALAMKA

I blog 5 days a week. This is my 935th post. Monday through Wednesday are generally policy and technology topics. Thursday is something personal. Friday is an emerging technology.

Everything I write is personal, unfiltered, and transparent. Readers of my blog know where I am, what I’m doing, and what I’m thinking. They can share my highs and my lows, my triumphs and defeats.

Recently, I had my blog used against me for the first time.

In discussing a critical IT issue, someone questioned my focus and engagement because I had written a post about single malt scotch on June 2 at 3am, recounting an experience I had Memorial Day Weekend in Scotland.

I explained that I write these posts late at night, in a few minutes, while most people are sleeping. They are not a distraction but are a kind of therapy, enabling me to document the highlights of my day.

I realize that it is overly optimistic to believe that everyone I work with will embrace values like civility, equanimity, and a belief that the nice guy can finish first.

If Facebook can be used against college applicants to screen them for bad behavior and if review of web-based scholarly writing can be used by legislators to block executive appointment confirmations, what’s the right way to use social media to minimize personal harm?

Continue reading…