A nice reminder why I did it in the first place, but where is the patient?

On September 8 it was 4 years ago that I founded ICMCC, supported by my first, visionary board members. Medical and care ICT was something I had stumbled upon and knew little about in those days.
After the first 2 years, September 2006, we had a final definition of the word compunetics, thus being the only global organisation dealing with patient-related ICT. Unfortunately, by that time my mentor and ICMCC co-founder Swamy Laxminarayan had passed away and I was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of Non-Hodgkin.
During the past 2 years, ICMCC has developped itself. Our newspage, with an average of 6,000 unique visitors per month, has become an important source of information. Our Record Access Portal is still the only of it’s kind on the subject. Compunetics as a discipline is slowly entering other areas (e.g. behavioural compunetics), our annual conferences have become important meeting points, our proceedings are considered outstanding publications.

However, when you go through the emotional roller coaster that seems to be more or less obligatory after major treatment for a major kind of cancer, it is nice to read an article that reminds you of why you started it all in the first place. Prescription for change, from professor Amar Gupta, published in the Wall Street Journal on 20 October 2008, is such an article.

“In the future, there will be three often overlapping modes of delivering health-care services: services performed in person by humans, services that can be performed by people at a remote location, and services performed by computers without direct human involvement. Offshore outsourcing in combination with a 24-hour work cycle will be appropriate when certain conditions are met — mainly, if the information involved in the task can be digitized, and if workers at different sites can do their jobs independently from one another.”

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Pharma to see growth in drug safety monitoring IT

“Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly relying on signal detection technologies to aid in identifying and managing adverse drug events, says a new report.
According to analysts at the British market research firm Datamonitor, the pharmaceutical industry will see accelerated growth in the uptake of drug safety monitoring technology.
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 6 June 2008

Medicare prescription data will be scanned for harmful drug effects

“The Food and Drug Administration now has access to another major ingredient of its Sentinel project, intended to detect adverse drug effects by mining medical data.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will make claims data from its Medicare Part D prescription drug program available to the FDA, researchers and others. Although the data will be anonymized, it can be linked to Medicare inpatient and outpatient claims records, enabling researchers to associate drugs and medical devices with their effects on health.”
Article
Nancy Ferris, Government Health IT, 22 May 2008

Swedish centre mines drug reaction data

“A Swedish monitoring centre is using data mining techniques to help identify adverse drug reactions based on Yellow Card patient records.
The Yellow Card is the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) scheme, which has been used for over 40 years to collect information on suspected side effects from all types of medicines.”
Article
eHealth Europe, 23 April 2008

Europe-wide project to detect drug reactions

“QResearch, the not-for-profit research partnership between EMIS and the University of Nottingham, is supporting a new European-wide initiative, the ALERT project, to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) faster.
The project will involve a consortium of 18 leading European research institutions using clinical data from the electronic healthcare records (EHRs) of over 30m patients from European countries, including the Netherlands, Denmark, UK and Italy.”
Article
e-Health Insider Primary Care, 31 March 2008