Quick: turn on the TV (no, streaming doesn't count!). You won't have to wait too long before an ad for some prescription drug comes on. Watch long enough and pretty soon you'll suspect that you have a variety of conditions that you may have never realized before and need to do something about immediately. Fortunately for you, of course, the pharmaceutical industry has solutions for you. It's all there in those ads. Whether we really understand them or not is another question. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads for prescription drugs are booming. After a brief respite during the most recent recession, they're back up, with spending estimated at some $5.2b in 2015 (amazingly, the DTC ads are less than 20% of pharma's overall marketing budget, with the majority of that going to face-to-face "educational" efforts with physicians)...
A New Meaning for Connected Health at 2016 Symposium (Part 2 of 4)
Tullman’s principles of simplicity, cited in the previous section, can be applied to a wide range of health IT. For instance, AdhereTech pill bottles can notify the patient with a phone call or text message if she misses a dose. Another example of a technology that is easily integrated into everyday life is a thermometer built into a vaginal ring that a woman can insert and use without special activation. This device was mentioned by Costantini during her keynote. The device can alert a woman–and, if she wants, her partner–to when she is most fertile. Super-compact devices and fancy interfaces are not always necessary for a useful intervention.
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Halamka Says "We Must Think and Act as One Planet"
Over the past few days, several journalists have asked me to comment about travel bans, immigration policy changes, and trends in isolationism. My opinions are my own and do not reflect any official position from my employer or my academic affiliation. Information Technology is global. We hire the best talent regardless of nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or race/ethnicity. Having worked in 75+ countries in my adult life, I can say that innovation crosses all boundaries and cultures. It’s just as likely that next big breakthrough will come from EMEA as it is from APAC. I cannot imagine restricting the flow of collaboration among academics and technology professionals from any country...
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Diagnosing the Problem with Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Ads
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Ignoring the Obvious: Major Health IT Organizations Put Aside Patients
Frustrated stories from patients as well as health care providers repeatedly underline the importance of making a seismic shift in the storage and control of patient data. The current system leads to inaccessible records, patients who reach nursing homes or other treatment centers without information crucial to their care, excess radiation from repeated tests, massive data breaches that compromise thousands of patients at a time, and–most notably for quality–patients excluded from planning their own care.
A simple solution became available over the past 25 years with the widespread adoption of the Web, and has been rendered even easier by modern Software as a Service (SaaS): storing the entire record over the patient’s lifetime with the patient....
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Interview With LibreHealth Open Source Health IT Project Leader Judy Gichoya
LibreHealth is the largest health IT project to emerge recently, particularly in the area of free and open source software. In this video, Dr. Judy Gichoya of the LibreHealth project explains what clinicians in Africa are dealing with and what their IT needs are. Both developed and developing countries need better health IT systems to improve patient care. In the developed countries, electronic records and other health IT systems sprout complexities that reflect the health care systems in which they function. But these IT systems are far removed from real-life needs of doctors caring for patients, and have transformed physicians in the US into its largest data entry workforce...
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A New Meaning for Connected Health (Part 1)
Those of us engaged in health care think constantly about health. But at the Connected Health symposium, one is reminded that the vast majority of people don’t think much about health at all. They’re thinking about child care, about jobs, about bills, about leisure time. Health comes into the picture only through its impacts on those things. Certainly, some people who have suffered catastrophic traumas–severe accidents, cancer, or the plethora of unfortunate genetic conditions–become obsessed about health to the same extent as health professionals. These people become e-patients and do all the things they need to do regain the precious state of being they enjoyed before their illness, often clashing with the traditional medical establishment in pursuit of health...
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Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 1)
Many of us strain against the bonds of tradition in our workplace, harboring a secret dream that the industry could start afresh, streamlined and free of hampering traditions. But history weighs on nearly every field, including my own (publishing) and the one I cover in this blog (health care). Applying technology in such a field often involves the legerdemain of extracting new value from the imperfect records and processes with deep roots. Along these lines, when Apixio aimed machine learning and data analytics at health care, they unveiled a business model based on measuring risk more accurately so that Medicare Advantage payments to health care payers and providers reflect their patient populations more appropriately...
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Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 2)
The previous section of this article introduced Apixio’s analytics for payers in the Medicare Advantage program. Now we’ll step through how Apixio extracts relevant diagnostic data. Providers usually submit SOAP notes to the Apixio web site in the form of PDFs. This comes to me as a surprise, after hearing about the extravagant efforts that have gone into new CCDs and other formats such as the Blue Button project launched by the VA. Normally provided in an XML format, these documents claim to adhere to standards and offer a relatively gentle face to a computer program. In contrast, a PDF is one of the most challenging formats to parse: words and other characters are reduced to graphical symbols, while layout bears little relation to the human meaning of the data...
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Halamka's Recommendations for Effective Care Management
I recently joined the advisory board of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions, a leading provider of analytics, decision support, and workflow enhancement services. At my first advisory board meeting there was a rich debate about the marketplace for care management and population health tools. I’ve spent years studying such solutions at HIMSS and found most of the products are “compiled in Powerpoint”, which is a very agile programming language, since it’s so easy to change…
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Living in a Retro Health Care System
EHRs are a perfect example of how we took something that should revolutionize health care, and turned it into something that not only no one is happy with but that many feel often impedes care, to the point some want to go back to paper records. That's not retro, that's just stupid. We didn't do the wrong thing with EHRs, we just are doing it wrong. As I've written before, we should be thinking big and bold about how we want our health care system to work in the 21st century. We should be setting tough goals for how effectively it works for us -- and expecting to achieve them. We should be looking forward, not backward...
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