Prescription for Change

“The health-care industry is about to undergo a global revolution driven by a force it can no longer resist: information technology.
While hospitals and other care providers have long been quick to adopt breakthrough technology in medical devices, procedures and treatments, far less attention has focused on innovations in networking and communications.”
Article
Amar Gupta, The Wallstreet Journal, 20 October 2008

Personal Health Records: More portable, but few seek access from health providers

“Americans have the right to access and take ownership of their health records, yet few take advantage of it despite the increasing complexity and cost of health care.
Physicians, for their part, are wary of relying on records provided by patients.”
Article
Gary Gosselin, Michigan Business Review, 3 September 2008

Speaking For Consumers On Health IT

“Achieving comprehensive national uptake of health information technology (IT) is a monumental issue for the United States, in terms of improving patient safety, lowering taxpayer costs, and making health care portable in our increasingly portable society. By incorporating advanced IT into our health care delivery system, we will be able to transform our current system into one that better meets patients’ needs consistently through timely, affordable, transparent, interoperable processes that assure instant access to complete medical information — anytime, anywhere — that is transmitted seamlessly and securely from provider to provider.”
Article
Nancy Davenport-Ennis, Health Affairs, 20 August 2008

What I learned about CCR, Part I

“This is a bit overdue for me given that I learned what I learned about CCR at the ASTM Workshop in May, 2008, conducted by David Kibbe, MD, MBA, and Steven Waldren, MD. I think what I learned is important for supporting patient-centered HIT, so I’m putting my summary here. A reminder that the beauty of Web 2.0 is that nothing is ever finished - feel free to clarify or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong.”
Article
Ted Eytan, 27 June 2008

Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente partner on PHR pilot

“Kaiser Permanente and Microsoft Corp. are launching a pilot project to bring Microsoft’s HealthVault platform together with Kaiser Permanente’s personal health records for use by Kaiser employees and their doctors.
The partnership is expected to reveal new ways of caring for patients, said Jan Oldenburg, practice leader for the Internet services group at Kaiser, “We’re absolutely excited about this,” she said.”
Article
Diana Manos, Healthcare IT News, 9 June 2008

Cerner Disses Google Health. Surprised?

“The real question in all of this is how long will it take for Cerner’s customers to realize that private and proprietary network architectures are not in their best business or clinical interests, and that not being able to exchange health data with consumers through Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault means that the hospital will be isolated and distanced from its core customers — doctors and patients.”
Article
e-CareManagement blog, Vince Kuraitis, 1 June 2008

Indiana hospital to provide portable medical records to patients

“Patients at St. Vincent Heart Center of Indiana will now be able to carry their medical records with them in case of emergencies. The hospital is offering patients a small compact disc that contains their updated cardiovascular medical information and history.”
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 28 May 2008

EHR - Patient Managed?

It was said, it was said loudly and not by the least of persons. Don Holmquest, President and CEO of CalRHIO in his interview with HISTalk made it very clear:

“First we’ve got to figure out what a personal health record is. There’s lots of ideas about that. They sound wonderful. I would love to have one. Every time I try to create one for myself, I run out of time and interest.
We don’t think they will be practical until somebody other than the patient is putting the information into that record in a reliable way. Of course you have to permit the patient to interact with it - add stuff, comment on stuff, and correct stuff. It will be challenging to figure out what that is.“

Read the rest of this entry »

How Can the German Electronic Health Card Support Patient’s Role in Care Management

Abstract:
All types of advanced communication, collaboration, and cooperation in healthcare require a strong involvement of all addressed parties including health professionals and patients. Modern healthcare aims at involving patients having them take over responsibility for their own health status. Allowing them to take on their changed roles as emancipated partners in advanced care management, health professionals need to be educated and patients need to be empowered. From a security viewpoint, health issues have to be communicated via trusted health networks. To provide communication and cooperation between professionals and patients as well as to guarantee the required level of involvement of patients in shared care management environments, cards are widely used as person identifiers, on the one hand, and as security tokens, on the other. Being introduced as storage media and portable personalized application system, cards enable a patient controlled access to personalized health services as well as proper use and exchange of personal health data for specific purposes such as emergency. Furthermore, cards allow access to the wider electronic patient record via pointers or tickets. Cards can empower patients. The German Electronic Health Card (eGK) shall thus support care management and specific workflow processes e.g. for prescription and disease management. Regardless whether designed as data or pointer card - international standardization is a prerequisite also for national solutions. The more information patients have regarding different procedures and processes in healthcare, the more are they able to play their dedicated role within care management. Cards can and will contribute by allowing patients to get controlled access to administrative and medical data stored either on cards or in networks. Card holders determine who has access to their health information.

Peter PHAROW^a, Bernd BLOBEL^a and Claudia HILDEBRAND^b
a eHealth Competence Center, University of Regensburg Medical Center, Germany
^b Institute for Biological and Medical Imaging / Medis, Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany

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

Portable Electronic Medical Records

“I have been meaning to do a long post on EMRs for a while. After reading a recent post on Ars Technica on this issue, I decided this is as good of a time as any.”
Article
Jonathan Blackhall, Encephalosponge , 27 March 2008

A new day for medical records

“The Fallon Clinic, the Worcester-based medical practice with more than 250 doctors, spent $25 million and several years converting to electronic records.
But if a patient heads to a doctor or hospital unrelated to the Fallon Clinic, there’s no guarantee her electronic records will make the trip, too.”
Article
Lisa Eckelbecker, Telegram & Gazette, 23 March 2008

Business forum: Health care needs new treatment

“The U.S. health care system has problems that require turnaround management, not just fine-tuning. Two Minnesota business organizations have a plan for a fix.”
Article
David Olson and Carlie Weaver, StarTribune.com, 16 March 2008

Aetna Keeps Pushing the Envelope

“Aetna is pretty aggressive on the personal healthcare front.
First they buy ActiveHealth Management.  Granted, ActiveHealth’s main target is not the consumer (disease management is their core competency), but they did introduce an online PHR early last year.
Secondly, Aetna has partnered with all the major personal health systems (PHS) plays which include Dossia, Google and Microsoft’s HealthVault. A key part of these partnerships what often goes unnoticed is that Aetna is providing their customers data portability with the ability to store their Aetna-sourced health record data (claims data, and possibly medication and lab data) on any of these platforms. The consumer is not tethered to Aetna.
And today they announced SmartSource, an embedded health search tool that leverages Healthline. There is a quick little video within the Aetna PR that demonstrates what SmartSource actually does that is well worth viewing, at least once you get past the tacky beginning.”
Article
John Moore, Chilmark Research, 12 March 2008

Health 2.0: My Notes

“I am just flying back from the Health 2.0 conference out in San Diego. I feel like there is a ton of information that I want to share so kudos to Matthew and Indu for the great job. (And, if you make it to the end of this post, you must really like the topic.)
I decided the best way to do this is in three posts: (1) Notes; (2) Companies; and (3) Observations.”
Article
Health 2.0: Observations
George Van Antwerp, Patient Centric Healthcare, 5 March 2008