LifeCOMM: Will the Newest Personal Health Information Platform Play Nicely with Google and Microsoft?

“It looks like 2009 will be the year that LifeCOMM finally makes its debut!
We’ve been hearing dribs and drabs about LifeCOMM for a long time. I remember Don Jones, VP Business Development for Qualcomm, first talking about plans for LifeCOMM at the Healthcare Unbound conference in 2005.
While we await final details, in this discussion I’d like to:
* Place LifeCOMM in the same category with the other personal health information (PHI) platforms — Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault and Dossia
* Ask a central question about how LifeCOMM will play in this new ecosystem: Will LifeCOMM exchange patient data with Google Health, HealthVault and Dossia?  Or will it be a closed platform, more akin to an iPhone?
These are complex issues, but I’ll try to explain things in plain old English.”
Article
Vince Kuraitis, Center for Connected Health, 18 November 2008

Please : don’t widen the jab between health informatics people and health care systems users.

“I am attending now to Healthcare quality management diploma , yesterday was quite simple seminar about Hospital Information system , however , the instructor fails to convince me that HL7 is different topic than Health Information system . and Our attender don’t know HL7 and include it in HIS ( health information system cause its more technical more than summary for users ).”
Article
Goomedic, 2 November 208

CCHIT Should Support BOTH the HL7 CCD and the ASTM CCR for PHRs.

“The federal government sponsored Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT ) is undertaking a certification process for personal health records (PHRs). The CCHIT PHR Work Group has invited public comment on the First Draft of the PHR Certification Criteria.”
Article
Vince Kuraitis, e-CareManagement blog, 24 October 2008

EMR Adoption and PHRs

“Chilmark Research published a “PHR Market Report, Analysis and Trends” - the Executive Summary is available for free (with sharing of your details). In their blog commentary they make an relevant point.”
Article
Nick van Terheyden, Accelerating Adoption of Healthcare IT, 6 October 2008

The EMR as a Data Shredder: Implications of a Single-Source-of-Truth Policy

“My colleague in pathology at the University of Michigan, Dr. Ulysses Balis, has taken to referring to EMRs as data shredders. What does he mean by this? The use of the term simply reflects that fact that after an LIS transmits test results to an EMR as an HL7 stream, they are reformatted based on the rules and constraints of the EMR system. The sad part about this daily scenario is that pathologists and lab medicine experts have been perfecting lab result formatting for many decades and the EMR support personnel frequently have little or no understanding about this knowledge domain. They thus turn to lab professionals for help in formatting the data that had been optimized in the LIS prior to transmission but which were then shredded by the interface and the EMR.”
Article
Bruce Friedman, Lab Soft News, 26 September 2008

Cell Phone App to Link to HealthVault

“Wilkes-Barre, Pa.-based AllOne Health Group Inc. will integrate its AllOne Mobile software with the HealthVault initiative of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. This will enable consumers to access and transmit their personal health information using cell phones and smart phones.”
Article
Health Data Management, 22 September 2008

Integrated Community EHR

“This is a Getting Started resources discussing Community Electronic Health Records.
This discussion between Robert Gleeman and Mark Anderson, CEO of the AC Group, Inc. discussing Integrated Community Exchange or an Integrated Community EHR. This interview is also provided as a written transcription below.
Article
Nick Harrington, EMRUpdate, 3 September 2008

Meeting the Requirements of Project HealthDesign: Comparative Analysis with Respect to Existing and Emerging Clinical Data Standards and Commercial PHR Data Repositories

“Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), in collaboration with the California HealthCare Foundation, Project HealthDesign is a $5 million national program of PHR systems. Administered by a national program office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Project HealthDesign’s goal is to design and test a variety of PHR tools and applications that work together to help people achieve their various and specific health goals in an integrated fashion.
The program is supported by the Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, which funds innovative projects that can lead to breakthrough improvements in the future of health and health care.”
Report
Sujansky & Associates, LLC, Project HealthDesign, August 2008

Providence Healthcare Integrates Bedside Barcoding with EMR

“Providence Healthcare Network in Waco, Texas, has completed implementing San Diego-based IntelliDOT’s Bedside Medication Administration system and has integrated it with its Epic EMR.
According to the company, this is the first implementation where IntelliDOT BMA has been integrated with an EPIC HIS.”
Article
Healthcare Informatics, 25 August 2008

Version 3 of HL7 released

“Developer of global healthcare standards, Health Level Seven, has announced the release of Version 3 Normative Edition 2008, a globally-defined suite of specifications based on HL7’s Reference Information Model.
Article
e-Health Europe, 18 August 2008

CfH technology boss says paper not fit for purpose

“Connecting for Health’s chief technology officer, Paul Jones has stressed the importance of integrating standards to achieve interoperability in healthcare, saying paper is “no longer fit for purpose”.
Speaking at last week’s Connecting for Health’s SNOMED CT and interoperable healthcare conference, Jones said health providers were under increased pressure to ensure the care they provide is “safe, effective, reproducible and state-of-the-art”.”
Article
e-Health Insider, 7 July 2008

Untangling the electronic health data exchange

“The purpose of this post is to help a non-technical audience untangle some of the confusion regarding health data exchange standards, and particularly come to a better understanding of the similarities and  differences between the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) standard and the CDA Continuity of Care Document (CCD). But what I’m most interested in is getting beyond the technical, political, or economic positions and interests of the proponents of any particular standard to arrive at some principles that demonstrate in plain language what we are trying to achieve by using such standards in the first place.”
Article
David Kibbe, The Health Care Blog, 18 June 2008

Dictaphone links lab to EMR

“Nuance Communications has introduced a new solution designed to bridge the gap between the lab and the electronic medical record. Nuance’s Dictaphone Healthcare Division this morning rolled out the Vocada Veriphy-Ready HL7 Integration Server (VIS), which allows Vocada Veriphy, the company’s critical test result management (CTRM) solution, communicate directly with internal diagnostic systems and enterprise-wide clinical information systems.”
Article
Eric Wicklund, Healthcare IT News, 31 March 2008

HL7 Conformance: How to do Proper Messaging

Frank Oemig a and Bernd G.M.E. Blobel b
a Agfa HealthCare / GWI Medica GmbH, Bonn, Germany,br /> b eHealth Competence Center, University of Regensburg Medical Center, Germany

Abstract.

Communication and cooperation between different applications is mediated by interfaces following corresponding standards. The interpretation of standards, the understanding of requirements and specification of solutions is very different within the vendor community. In a shared care environment based on extended inter-organizational inter-relationships, this interoperability has to be provided at semantic and service-oriented level. For that purpose, harmonized reference models, agreed terminologies, ontologies and concept representations as well as a unified development and deployment process have to be standardized. The latter also includes testing and certification procedures. The paper shortly introduces in the semantic interoperability approach provided by HL7.

EHR

Thomas Beale
UCL, London, UK

Abstract:

• Intro: how does a comprehensive and interoperable EHR contribute to e-Health
• What requirements does the EHR have to meet
• Messages versus the EHR
• What current standardisation activities are contributing to achieving this vision
• What is openEHR, why open source, and who is using it
• Comparison of CEN, HL7 and openEHR
• Discussion: how should current EHR adoption programmes best utilise EHR research and standards

COFFEE BREAK

• Reasons for adopting a two-level modelling approach
• Outline of key features of an EHR Reference Model
• The wider challenges of achieving semantic interoperability - a 4-level viewpoint
• Discussion