Growing the Tree Trunk - An Argument for User-Friendly Personal Health Platforms

“Ignorance is bliss. Except when, suddenly, you find yourself smack dab in the hospital and desperately in need of a working, easy to use PHR. Let’s hope the industry catches up with the need. Someone better start believing in unicorns. Someone else better start designing a rocketship.”
Article
Jen McCabe Gorman, Health Management Rx, 18 November 2008

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

Renal PatientView to attract more users

“Thousands more kidney patients are to be encouraged to use Renal PatientView, a secure online service that gives them password-protected access to test results and information about their diagnosis and treatment.”
Article
e-Health Insider, 24 September 2008

New Frontiers in PHRs

“Normally talk about “new ecosystems” might be heard at a wildlife conference, but it dominated the presentations given in Washington on September 17 during a conference on “New Frontiers in Personal Health Records” sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).”
Article
Stephen Barlas, Digital Healthcare & Productivity, 23 September 2008

Communiqué des associations médicales belges sur le projet de loi relatif à l’institution et à l’organisation de la plate-forme eHealth.

“Sur son site, l’asbym met en ligne un communiqué commun des associations médicales belges à la veille du vote à la chambre. Depuis, la chambre a approuvé eHealth avec certains amendements du MR et l’OpenVLD. L’ABSyM souhaite que la nouvelle loi soit évoquée au Sénat. Si le Sénat modifie le texte, il devra être revoté par la Chambre.”
Article
Soins Infirmiers & Informatique, 14 July 2008

See also:
Wetsontwerp e-health gestemd, Maggie de Block, 14 July 2008

Medicine meets the mouse

“Is it ready? Is there something for everyone? No, Health 2.0 is in its infancy, as we recently found out. A few months ago, a friend and I plunged in. Using blogs, syndication and social networks similar to Facebook, we developed the ‘’New'’ Prostate Cancer InfoLink. Its resources unite doctors, patients, wives, ministers, government officials –anyone with an interest in prostate cancer.”
Article
Arnon Krongrad, Miami Herald, 6 July 2008

IRIS Hospital Network Chooses dbMotion to Improve Patient Care with Enterprise-wide Interoperability Platform

“IRIS, the organizational network of Brussels’ 5 public hospitals, and dbMotion today announced the agreement for a major project to provide an interoperability platform for medical information sharing to the Brussels region.”
Article
dbMotion, 1 July 2008

Sharing and Caring, PHSCG Conference, 1 July 2008, Chesford Grange, UK

More details on the conference.

View the speech.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all I would like to thank the organisation and Dr. Amir Hannan for inviting me to address this conference.
Secondly I apologize for not being here myself.

This conference deals with sharing and caring and I was specifically asked to highlight the international aspects.

ICMCC introduced 4 years ago the word Compunetics and we were the first to link it to healthcare. Compunetics defines the social, societal and ethical aspects of the use of computing and networking. So we already realised the importance of these issues before Web2.0 and Health2.0 appeared on the horizon. The use of the word compunetics directly and urgently implicates the patient as one of the main focussing points of our foundation. More specifically we concentrate on awareness and information supply. To serve the patient in the best way, we also have to concentrate on the health professional.
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The Patient as the Platform

“Yet for me the chance of getting pancreatitis was 1-in-1. Could we have known that? I believe we could have made a more educated guess than the 1-in-20 template alone provided. The fault there is partly mine, because I knew (and cared) more about myself than the medical system did, and there were possible risk factors which, in retrospect, I should have flagged. But I trusted the system. Thus I found what I should have known first: that the system is built to treat templates, not the pile of combined oddities and typicalities that comprise a sixty-year-old human being.”
Article
Doc Searls, Linux Journal, 24 June 2008

AMERICAN WELL Launches the online healthcare marketplace

“American Well™ today announced the availability of the Online Healthcare Marketplace™, a new, first-of-its-kind platform that enables health plans to offer online care services to consumers and physicians.”
Press Release
18 June 2008

Connecting for Health to take over NHS Choices

“NHS Connecting for Health is to take over responsibility for the NHS Choices portal, the government’s national patient portal for delivering patient choice and health information services.
Following the transfer, NHS Choices will become the point of access for HealthSpace, the online organiser used to give people access to their NHS Summary Care Record. It will also be the route for the public to access the electronic booking system, Choose and Book.
Article
e-Health Insider Primary Care, 10 June 2008

The deployment of integrated care services for chronic patients (NEXES project)

“Abstract: The societal adaptations required for reducing the burden of chronic disorders and ageing have been recently framed by the WHO initiative on Innovative Care for Chronic Conditions. With this scenario in place, a successful deployment of innovative integrated care services to support healthier and independent living for chronic patients and elderly has emerged as an urgent unmet need. The NEXES project aims at undertaking the deployment of four integrated care programs addressing various aspects of chronic disorders selected because of promising outcomes generated by previous small-scale randomized controlled trials:

• Wellness-rehabilitation: Early diagnosis, promotion of healthy life-styles and patient self-management. Physical activity and cognitive aspects being main components
• Enhanced Care Support of unplanned hospitalizations
• Home hospitalization of patients with exacerbations
• Support: Transient remote support to diagnosis and/or treatment

The project focuses on the main factors modulating the success of an integrated care approach in delivering the services, namely: a) the co-morbidity challenge; b) articulation of healthcare and community services; c) organizational and educational issues; d) modularity, scalability and interoperability of the ICT platform, and, e) identification of business models ensuring service sustainability. Accordingly, the validation strategy prioritises the discovery of evidence supporting the extensive use of the services, applicable at the level of policy decision makers.
Technologically, the Linkcare platform (Linkcare eTEN 517435) sets the reference architecture. Modularity, flexibility and scalability are based on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) using the IBM UML 2.0 Profile for Software Services. Briefly, the platform consist of a web-based application addressed to management of chronic patients and elderly, facilitating organizational interoperability following a distributed model. The following services are available at the moment: a) Health portal, b) Call centre service, c) Professional mobile access, d) Patient wireless monitoring service, e) Collaborative work service, f) Security modules, and g) Interoperability module with hospital information systems and shared electronic patient records. In the future, it will incorporate knowledge management applications and it is foreseen its evolution towards an IMS platform.”

Bárbara Vallespín, David Fonollosa, Albert Alonso, Josep Roca
Hospital Clinic de Barcelona. Villarroel, 170, 08036 Barcelona, Spain

To be presented at the ICMCC Event

Rural India to Reap Benefits of E-health Services

“HealthSprint, a healthcare IT company, in collaboration with various microinsurance service providers, is poised to offer e-health services to rural India. The company, through its e-health services offers transfer of healthcare data, appointments with specialists, health insurance coverage, Web-based searches for physicians, and online prescriptions and medical reports. In addition, the company offers customers’ connectivity with neighborhood laboratories and pharmacies through technology-based systems.”
Article
Updates@NIASoM, 4 June 2008

Mobile Monday 6 Review-Why Hospitals Must Develop Mobile Tech NOW

“HIT’s major weakness is that designers, innovators, and executives aren’t paying intimate attention to what’s going on in the world of mobile tech development.
Sure, we talk about being addicted to our Crackberries the latest Apple device, and what laptop we’ll purchase next, but the experience of using high tech mobile and electronic devices is largely divorced from healthcare strategic communications planning. Some of us are working on harnessing gaming and web-based worlds like Second Life and wrestling them into applicability for the healthcare sector. Yay, us. The problem is that resurfacing gaming tech and bending it to health and wellness utility (a la Wiihabiliation) is just not enough.
As a result, we always seem to be several steps behind. Strike that - it’s an almost criminally gross understatement. In HIT, we always seem to be several evolutionary stages behind. And even worse, some so-called HIT firms still don’t get it.”
Article
Jen McCabe Gorman, Health Management RX, 3 June 2008

Médica Blogs, la nueva plataforma interactiva

Diario Médico introduces a blog service for health professionals.

Article (Spanish)
Sara Domingo, Nacho Serrano, Diario Médico, 27 May 2008

Evaware launches new telehealth platform

“Software developer, Evaware has launched a new telehealth device, which wirelessly connects with its Project E-vita web-based electronic patient record, enabling clinicians to remotely monitor the vital signs of their home-based patients.”
Article
e-Health Insider Primary Care, 22 May 2008

ICMCC Event Preview 1

This is the first of a series of blogs in which I will give a preview of the various aspects of the upcoming ICMCC Event.

The Monday morning has 2 parallel sessions.

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Waiting For The Killer App & Why I Don’t Give a S%$# About PHR Security

“Just before moving to Holland, I received a letter from the community hospital in my old hometown, where I was both a patient and an employee.
The letter informed me that my medical record was stored on a laptop that was stolen.
This wasn’t my first experience dealing with identity theft. Nor will it be my last.”
Article
Jen McCabe Gorman, Health Management RX, 28 April 2008

Health World Web: A Health 2.0 Platform

“Health World Web, Inc., a Jacksonville, FL company is trying to create a new, more interactive platform for patients as well as medical professionals. It offers help, emotional support, non-medical advice or ratings, reviews and recommendations for local doctors, dentists and chiropractors. The database now consists of more than one hundred patient communities and nearly 1.5 million doctors.”
Article
MedGadget, 25 April 2008

The Wisdom of Patients - Social Media In Health Care

“Social media on the Internet are empowering, engaging, and educating health care consumers and providers. While consumers use social media — including social networks, personal blogging, wikis, video-sharing, and other formats — for emotional support, they also heavily rely on them to manage health conditions.
The Internet has evolved from the information-retrieval of “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0,” which allows people who are not necessarily technologically savvy to generate and share content. The collective wisdom harnessed by social media can yield insights well beyond the knowledge of any single patient or physician, writes report author Jane Sarasohn-Kahn. The outcome of this development is “Health 2.0” — a new movement that challenges the notion that health care happens only between a single patient and doctor in an exam room.
Using examples, this report describes how the Web is becoming a platform for convening people with shared concerns and creating health information that is more relevant to consumers. Social networks, ranging from MySpace to specific disease-oriented sites, are proliferating so rapidly that new services are already under development to help health consumers navigate through the networks.
The report details how innovative collaborations online are changing the way patients, providers, and researchers learn about therapeutic regimens and disease management. It examines the benefits and concerns regarding Health 2.0 and it also includes an extensive listing of health media resources.
According to the report, the growing demand for transparency will drive the evolution of social media in health. A growing array of tools will become available that are increasingly mobile, as well as personal health data storage in commercial products like Microsoft Health Vault, Google Health, and others. The author concludes that the ongoing demands of a consumer-driven health marketplace will inspire innovation in applications that integrate clinical, financial, and ratings information.”
Report
Jane Sarasohn Kahn, THINK Health for California Healthcare Foundation, April 2008

Privacy Problem Not Limited to PHR Vendors

“While there has been plenty of press on privacy and security as it relates to PHR vendors, especially now that Google and Microsoft have jumped into the arena, it is absolutely critical that the press, various “privacy pundits” and the consumer realize that this issue is not just limited to PHR vendors.”
Article
John Moore, Chilmark Research, 10 April 2008

Social Network of PESCA (Open Source Platform for eHealth)

Abstract:
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are revolutionizing how healthcare systems deliver top-quality care to citizens. In this way, Open Source Software (OSS) has demonstrated to be an important strategy to spread ICTs use. Several human and technological barriers in adopting OSS for healthcare have been identified. Human barriers include user acceptance, limited support, technical skillfulness, awareness, resistance to change, etc., while Technological barriers embrace need for open standards, heterogeneous OSS developed without normalization and metrics, lack of initiatives to evaluate existing health OSS and need for quality control and functional validation. The goals of PESCA project are to create a platform of interoperable modules to evaluate, classify and validate good practices in health OSS. Furthermore, a normalization platform will provide interoperable solutions in the fields of health-care services, health surveillance, health literature, and health education, knowledge and research. Within the platform, the first goal to achieve is the setup of the collaborative work infrastructure. The platform is being organized as a Social Network which works to evaluate five scopes of every existing open source tools for eHealth: Open Source Software, Quality, Pedagogical, Security and privacy and Internationalization/I18N. In the meantime, the knowledge collected from the networking will configure a Good Practice Repository on eHealth promoting the effective use of ICT on behalf of the citizen’s health.

Carlos L. SANCHEZ^b, Miguel ROMERO-CUEVAS^a , Diego M. LOPEZ^c, Julio LORCA^a, Francisco J. ALCAZAR^b, Sergio RUIZ^d, Carmen MERCADO^a and Pedro GARCIA-FORTEA^a
a Fundación para la eSalud-FESALUD, Spain
^b Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Andalusian Government, Spain
^c Departamento de Telemática, Universidad del Cauca, Colombia
^d Revistaesalud.com, Spain

To be published in “Medical and Care Compunetics 5″, IOSPress, 2008.

Map of Medicine sold to Hearst Corporation

“Map of Medicine, the provider of web-based patient pathways tool developed from an NHS-funded research project and widely installed across the health service, has been bought from Informa by the Hearst Corporation for an undisclosed sum.
Map of Medicine offers clinical information simply displayed online as 392 graphic patient pathways. It has been adopted as one of the applications offered by the £12.4bn NHS IT programme.”
Article
e-Health Insider, 7 April 2008

“Living, Breathing, Interaction with Data” - Demo of the Myca Patient-Provider EHR platform

“Health care disruptor Jay Parkinson, MD, just posted a nice demo of the Myca platform for patients and providers, that wowed so many at the Health2.0 conference in March.”
Article
Ted Eytan, 2 April 2008

Improving Healthcare Services using Web Based Platform for Management of Medical Case Studies

Abstract:
The paper presents a web based platform for management of medical cases, support for healthcare specialists in taking the best clinical decision. Research has been oriented mostly on multimedia data management, classification algorithms for querying, retrieving and processing different medical data types (text and images). The medical case studies can be accessed by healthcare specialists and by students as anonymous case studies providing trust and confidentiality in Internet virtual environment. The MIDAS platform develops an intelligent framework to manage sets of medical data (text, static or dynamic images), in order to optimize the diagnosis and the decision process, which will reduce the medical errors and will increase the quality of medical act. MIDAS is an integrated project working on medical information retrieval from heterogeneous, distributed medical multimedia database.

Cristina OGESCUa, Claudiu PLAISANU^a, Florian UDRESCU^a, Silviu DUMITRU^b
aThe Company for Research, Development, Engineering and Manufacturing for Control Systems – IPA S.A, Bucharest, Romania
^bInstitute for Computers – ITC SA, Bucharest, Romania

To be published in “Medical and Care Compunetics 5″, IOSPress, 2008.
To be presented at the ICMCC Event 2008.

Virtual Health Platform for Medical Tourism Purposes

Abstract:
This paper introduces an overview of the Virtual Health Platform (VHP), an alternative approach to create a functional PHR system in a medical tourism environment. The proposed platform has been designed in order to be integrated with EHR infrastructures and in this way it expects to be useful and more advantageous to the patient or tourist. Use cases of the VHP and its potential benefits summarize the analysis.

Debora MARTINEZ^a, Pedro FERRIOL^a, Xisco TOUS^a, Miguel CABRER^b and Mercedes PRATS^a
a e-Government, e-Business and e-Health, Fundació IBIT, Spain
^b Innovation, Research and Communication Consulting, S.L., Spain

To be published in “Medical and Care Compunetics 5″, IOSPress, 2008.
To be presented at the ICMCC Event 2008.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) in PROMED platform in accordance with the Romanian legislative framework

Abstract.
The paper describes how the PROMED platform can be used as a Electronic Patient Record (EHR) system and also the platform’s contribution to the improvement of the healthcare services in Romania as a solution for the integration of the main stakeholders involved in a National Healthcare System: patients, health care providers and public health authorities. By using the PROMED platform, the Public Health Authorities will be able to view various reports about the population health status and can elaborate timely prevention and warning plans in case of epidemic diseases.

Roxana ANTOHI^a, Cristina OGESCU^a, Daniel BISTRICEANU^a , Livia STEFAN^b, Silviu DUMITRU^b
a The Company for Research, Development, Engineering and Manufacturing for Automation Equipment an Systems -IPA SA, Bucharest Romania
^b Institute for Computers- ITC SA, Bucharest Romania

To be published in “Medical and Care Compunetics 5″, IOSPress, 2008.
To be presented at the ICMCC Event 2008.

Scotland rolls out sexual health IT system

“The National Health Service of Scotland has begun to roll out a major healthcare IT platform to support specialist sexual health services in 12 NHS Boards throughout the country.”
Article
Chip Means, Healthcare IT News EU, 28 March 2008

New Web Portal Provides U.S. Physicians With Unbiased Information On Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices

“The Federation of State Medical Boards Research and Education Foundation (FSMB) announced the launch of a new Web-based tool providing U.S. physicians with access to accredited educational programs about pharmaceutical industry marketing techniques and their effect on prescribing practices.”
Article
Medical News Today, 24 March 2008

Practicing Patients

“But PatientsLikeMe seeks to go a mile deeper than health-information sites like WebMD or online support groups like Daily Strength. The members of PatientsLikeMe don’t just share their experiences anecdotally; they quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. They note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages and score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over time, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the software behind the site. And it’s all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient experience.”
Article
Thomas Goetz, The New York Times, 23 March 2008