ICMCC

Researchers Target Devices, EHRs

“HIMSS Analytics and the American College of Clinical Engineering, Plymouth Meeting, Pa., will survey hospitals to evaluate the patient safety and quality of care benefits of medical devices that share data with electronic health records.”
Article
Health Data Management, 9 October 2008

Physicians sought in electronic health records program

“Efforts to recruit 200 primary-care physician practices for a federally funded electronic health records demonstration project have been hampered by two hurricanes, but officials hope to meet the goal by the Nov. 26 deadline.”
Article
Ted Griggs, Advocate Business, 9 October 2008

EHR Incentive Dollars Flowing to Physicians

“It’s no secret that cost continues to be the greatest deterrent to physician adoption of electronic health records, or EHRs. In recent weeks, two separate organizations have released reports that examine the progress of initiatives designed to help physicians pay for the implementation and maintenance of EHR systems. What they show is that there’s significant funding available for this purpose, but it’s moving more slowly through some vectors than others.”
Article
AAFP, Sheri Porter, 9 October 2008

“Patient Portals”

“According to the Deloitte 2008 Survey of Health Care Consumers, over 70 percent of consumers want their hospital to provide online access to an integrated view of their medical information, including test results, doctor visits and hospital stays. Yet the percentage of hospitals that have deployed a true patient portal is still in the single digits.”
Article
Peter Kuhn, Acumeme, 8 October 2008

Health IT behind bars

“Until recently, California’s record of health care for its prison inmates was abysmal. After lawsuits and a federal takeover, however, the state stands to have one of the best systems in the country in the next few years. It will be fueled by a massive investment in health information technology.
By the end of next year, if things go as planned, a high-speed fiber-optic network will link California’s 33 prisons, and each institution will have a fast local-area network connecting all its buildings. The goal is to have the entire system’s medical recordkeeping and other processes fully electronic by 2013.”
Article
Brian Robinson, GHIT Notebook, 8 October 2008

Group to Build Privacy Data Standards

“OASIS, a Boston-based international consortium that develops e-business standards, has formed a technical committee to standardize how health care providers and payers exchange privacy policies, consent directives and authorizations. The goal is to have standard formats for the exchange of this data to further interoperability of information systems.”
Article
Health Data Management, 9 October 2008

Paging Dr. Google! We Are Waiting for a Second Opinion.

“In case any of you have missed this, the web with the help of “Dr. Google” is a major source of medical information for a broad swath of healthcare consumers in the U.S. Whenever I make this point to clinicians, the response from a few is always: Tisk, tisk. What a shame. There is so much bad stuff out there. To which I usually reply: Uhhh, there’s also a few bad docs. Informed patients can help to weed them out.”
Article
Bruce Friedman, Lab Soft News, 9 October 2008

Community, Twitter, Weblogs, RSS en Social networking ?

“U ziet ons vaker schrijven over de inzet van nieuwe media in de zorg. We doen dit in navolging van ontwikkelen in “de rest” van de maatschappij waarin de manier van communiceren aan het veranderen is. Korter, sneller, oppervlakkiger. In het laatste schuilt natuurlijk een gevaar, we moeten dus alert blijven op het doorslaan van deze maatschappelijke ontwikkeling daar dit niet alleen een on-line verschijnsel is.”
Article (Dutch)
Lucien Engelen, Acute Zorgregio Oost, 9 October 2008

Breaking News: Congress Wants to Create National eHealth Network, Legislate Who “Owns” Health Data

“Clue - it ain’t patients. Google. Microsoft. I hope someone in your healthcare organizations reads this brief. Look especially to the latter 1/3rd.
Browsing Twitter this afternoon, I learned about a House bill draft (HR ____) nicknamed “Health e-Information Technology Act of 2008″ from @jesran.
It has not yet been assigned a number, but the draft copy is available here. It looks to be in pre-committee.
Sponsors: Mr. STARK (for himself, Ms. SCHWARTZ, Mr. MCDERMOTT, Mr. MCNULTY, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. EMANUEL, Mr. NEAL of Massachusetts, Mr. PASCRELL, and Mr. LEWIS of Georgia).
IF YOU ARE IN HEALTHCARE, THIS BILL IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU MAY READ THIS YEAR.”
Article
Jen McCabe Gorman, Health Management Rx, 8 October 2008

When physicians are ready to promote patient empowerment / engagement, what do we want them to do?

“This question was posed to me by Ann Barber, MD, who I just spoke with. Ann reached out to me because she has been following the work of the group at e-patients.net, and specifically their call to recruit physicians to support the patient empowerment movement. Ann is an internist who specializes in hospital medicine, and has recently relocated to New York.”
Article
Ted Eytan MD, 8 October 2008

iSoft to launch RadCentre in the Netherlands

“Health IT specialist iSoft says it will launch its RadCentre radiology information system in the Netherlands this autumn.
RadCentre is a modern, scalable product designed for use in practices and hospitals. The system is said to be in use by more than 200 healthcare organisations across Europe.”
Article
Jon Hoeksma, e-Health Europe, 9 October 2008

Database Project To Track Health Of 100,000 U.S. Children

“An ambitious new government study to follow the health of 100,000 U.S. children from before birth to age 21 is launching in January, and information technology for data collection and analysis is playing a central role.
The National Institutes of Health National Children’s Study, which was authorized by Congress in the Children’s Health Act of 2000, will examine the effects of genes and environmental factors on the health of American children based on volunteer participants in 105 locations, representing a composite of the U.S. population.”
Article
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek, 7 October 2008

‘EPD, Clip of Chip?’

“Tegenwoordig zijn er legio mogelijkheden om patiënteninformatie op te slaan. Naast de ouderwetse hard copy dossiers zijn er nu ook digitale patiëntendossiers. Sinds dit jaar is het UMC in Maastricht met de Cardiostick op de markt gekomen en zelfs de Hollandsche Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam, beter bekend als de HEMA, heeft al een Medistick.”
Article (Dutch)
Sivera Berben en Tom van de Belt, Medicalfacts.nl, 8 October 2008

Robot suit rentals in Japan for disabled, elderly reads brain signals to help move legs

“A robotic suit that reads brain signals and helps people with mobility problems will be available to rent in Japan for US$2,200 a month starting Friday — an invention that may have far-reaching benefits for the disabled and elderly.
HAL — short for “hybrid assistive limb” — is a computerized suit with sensors that read brain signals directing limb movement through the skin.”
Article
Mainichi Daily News, 7 October 2008

The Northeast Biomedical High Performance Computing Collaborative

“Biomedical Informatics is at an exciting cross roads: the computational challenges facing researchers, clinicians and public health professionals now exceed the computational power typically available in an academic biomedical setting. This is exciting because it means that the advances in high performance computing from other disciplines (e.g. physics) can be brought to bear on the great challenges of life sciences, health and medical research. The opportunities to develop new therapies, monitor trends in ambulatory hospital data and catch and avert drug related mishaps (e.g. Vioxx) are truly astounding. With the advent of the $1,000 “ome” (genotype, phenotype, labs) – the capacity to analyze and predict longitudinally and in real time as well as the ability to hypothesis test retrospectively will challenge the computational boundaries of all biomedical research organizations. Computational power is now at the very core or our ability to rapidly advance the state of clinical care and healthcare.”
Article
John Halamka, Life as a Healthcare CIO, 8 October 2008

Health-e Information Technology Act of 2008

“To promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology, and for other purposes.”
Preliminary bill text
US House of representatives

Is your EMR legal? A document can look like a medical record, but not meet the legal definition.

“You might find your electronic medical record to be an efficient way to store patient data, but is that record legal? If it were subpoenaed, would it help you or hurt you in court?
These kinds of questions are emerging as more physicians go electronic. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2006, not only make any electronically stored data discoverable in a trial, but also open up physicians to several new liabilities inherent in the detail electronic data provides.”
Abstract
Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews, 13 October 2008

Integrated personal health records: Transformative tools for consumer-centric care

“Background
Integrated personal health records (PHRs) offer significant potential to stimulate transformational changes in health care delivery and self-care by patients. In 2006, an invitational roundtable sponsored by Kaiser Permanente Institute, the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality was held to identify the transformative potential of PHRs, as well as barriers to realizing this potential and a framework for action to move them closer to the health care mainstream. This paper highlights and builds on the insights shared during the roundtable.
Discussion
While there is a spectrum of dominant PHR models, (standalone, tethered, integrated), the authors state that only the integrated model has true transformative potential to strengthen consumers’ ability to manage their own health care. Integrated PHRs through transparency of information and the capacity for iterative communications can improve the quality, completeness, depth, and accessibility of health information provided by both clinicians and patients; provide access to highly specific health knowledge for patients; ensure portability of medical records and other personal health information; and incorporate auto-population of content. Numerous factors impede widespread adoption of integrated PHRs: obstacles in the health care system/culture; issues of consumer confidence and trust; lack of technical standards for interoperability; lack of HIT infrastructure; the digital divide; uncertain value realization/ROI; and uncertain market demand. Recent efforts have led to progress on standards for integrated PHRs, and government agencies and private companies are offering different models to consumers, but substantial obstacles remain to be addressed. Immediate steps to advance integrated PHRs should include sharing existing knowledge and expanding knowledge about them, building on existing efforts, and continuing dialogue among public and private sector stakeholders.
Summary
Integrated PHRs promote active, ongoing patient collaboration in care delivery and decision making. With some exceptions, however, the integrated PHR model is still a theoretical framework for consumer-centric health care. The authors pose questions that need to be answered so that the field can move forward to realize the potential of integrated PHRs. How can integrated PHRs be more rigorously evaluated and moved from concept to widespread practical application? Would a coordinating body expedite this strategy? How can existing initiatives or new policies serve as catalysts to advance integrated PHRs?”
Article
Don E. Detmer, Meryl Bloomrosen, Brian Raymond and Paul Tang, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2008, 8:45doi:10.1186/1472-6947-8-45

High Stakes, Difficult Choices

“Long choked with paper, and burdened with workflows that they don’t fully understand, physicians in group practices have good reason to embrace electronic health records and integrated practice management systems. No wonder they may think of the automated chart as digital candy. And they want to try as many high-tech features as possible.”
Article
Gary Baldwin, Health Data Management, 1 October 2008

Finding a Needle in a Haystack

“Some might call it “data mining on steroids.” But the organizer of an ambitious research project at Montefiore Medical Center in New York describes it as “asking clinically cogent questions of ragged data while respecting the need for user flexibility.”
No matter what you call it, the Clinical Looking Glass project, headed by Eran Bellin, M.D., is taking data mining to the next level. The application, 10 years in the making, is enabling some 250 physicians to conduct their own ad hoc research studies. Some are as simple as identifying all patients taking a drug that has been recalled. Others are far more complex, such as assessing whether a certain type of filter is beneficial to patients with blood clots.”
Article
Howard J. Anderson, Health Data Management, 1 October 2008

iPHR 2008 Market Report: Executive Summary

“This 20pg Executive Summary, which is being offered for free, highlights the findings of Chilmark Research’s recently published comprehensive report on Internet-based Personal Health Record (iPHR) market, which was released in late May 2008. Exec. Summary provides an overview of market trends for Internet-based PHR solutions as well analysis on the future impact of major platforms from Dossia, Google and Microsoft.”
Report
Chilmark Research, October 2008

Standards Collaborative

“Standards facilitate information exchange and are a critical foundation for an interoperable electronic health record (iEHR).
They create the opportunity for future cost reduction as systems converge on pan-Canadian and international standards. But more importantly, common data and communication standards support timely, appropriate diagnosis and treatment and improve planning and coordination of care. In addition, standards can reduce medical error and increase patient safety. The following clinical scenario demonstrates how standards contribute to the safety, quality and efficiency of patient care.”
Catalogue
Canada Health Infoway, September 2008

Connected Personal Health in 2015: “Getting it Right!”

“This Vision Paper is a creative synthesis of many ambitious ideas about possible developments in the field of telehealth. These imaginative glimpses of telehealth futures, crafted by some of the leading health and technology experts in the field, project a fascinating new world of personal health possibilities that could become very real within the next few years. Making “best-case scenarios” such as these come true is part of the Continua Alliance’s mission to promote sustained leadership in technology R&D, service innovation, public policy, corporate strategy, and personal behavioral changes around the world.
Join us in imagining the possibilities!”
White Paper
Conintua, September 2008

E-Prescribing: Why the Fuss?

“Recently electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) has been a hot topic. Policymakers in Washington assume that widespread adoption of e-prescribing will save money and improve health care quality.
They anticipate cost reductions through the reduction of medical errors and through increased prescription of more affordable medications, such as generics. Preliminary research supports these assumptions.”
Article
FP Kenneth Adler, Family Practice Management, pre-published September 2008

Accelerating Progress: Using Health Information Technology and Electronic Health Information Exchange to Improve Care

“The U.S. health care system offers some of the most advanced and effective care in the world, with some of the best-trained providers and most advanced technology. Yet, the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other developed country while often achieving equal or poorer results in terms of health outcomes and access to services.
Health information technology (HIT) and electronic health information exchange (HIE) are critical tools in states’ efforts to transform health care in this country. HIT has strong potential to drive health system improvements, and states have taken steps in recent years to promote widespread use of HIT and enable access to information through electronic exchange.”
Report
State Alliance for e-Health, September 2008

Some light behind the dikes?
Posted 4 Oct 2008

Confusion behind the dikes
Posted 26 Sep 2008

The im-patient patient
Posted 19 Sep 2008