Some health care providers balk at the requirement to share data, but their legal and marketing teams explain that they have been doing it for years already with companies whose motives are less commendable. Increasingly, the providers are won over. The analytics service appeals particularly to small, rural, and safety-net providers. Hammered by payment cuts and growing needs among their populations, they are on the edge of going out of business and grasp the service as their last chance to stay in the black...

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All reformers in health care know what the field needs to do; I laid out four years ago the consensus about patient-supplied data, widespread analytics, mHealth, and transparency. Our frustration comes in when trying to crack the current hide-bound system open and create change. Recent interventions by US Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, whatever their effects on costs and insurance coverage, offer no promise to affect workflows or treatment. So this article suggests three potential scenarios where reform could succeed, along with a vision of what will happen if none of them take hold...

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I was quite privileged to talk to the leaders of Health 2.0, Dr. Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt, in the busy days after their announced merger with HIMSS. I was revving to talk to them because the Health 2.0 events I have attended have always been stimulating and challenging. I wanted to make sure that after their incorporation into the HIMSS empire they would continue to push clinicians as well as technologists to re-evaluate their workflows, goals, and philosophies...

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The first section of this article reported some news about Epic’s Orchard, a new attempt to provide an “app store” for health care. In this section we look over the role of APIs as seen by EHR vendors such as Epic. Dr. Travis Good, with whom I spoke for this article, pointed out that EHRs glom together two distinct functions: a canonical, trusted store for patient data and an interface that becomes a key part of the clinician workflow. They are being challenged in both these areas, for different reasons...

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The HITECH act of 2009 (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) gave an unprecedented boost to an obscure corner of the IT industry that produced electronic health records. For the next eight years they were given the opportunity to bring health care into the 21st century and implement common-sense reforms in data sharing and analytics. They largely squandered this opportunity, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars while watching health care costs ascend into the stratosphere, and preening themselves over modest improvements in their poorly functioning systems...

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Ask orthopedic surgeon Andrew Jawa, M.D., when his total shoulder replacement patients can expect to put on a jacket without help. His answer is likely to include the exact postoperative week — with evidence-based variations due to each patient's age and condition. Jawa performs more than 220 total shoulder replacements each year at the Boston Sports and Shoulder Center. And his success relies in part on self-reported data provided by his patients at every visit, from the first preoperative appointment through every follow-up visit for the next five years...

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Among patients with colon cancer, researcher Tom Marsilje has made a name for himself by helping others learn about new clinical trials. He has scoured the database ClinicalTrials.gov, circulated a weekly spreadsheet, and served as a clearinghouse for patients desperate for a chance to beat back their disease. But, for Marsilje, it has been a labor-intensive process, and it has been hard to escape a troubling reality...

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These were the first words spoken over the telephone by inventor Alexander Graham Bell on March 10, 1876. According to popular legend, this call was also the first time the telephone was used to summon help, as Bell had just spilled acid.1 In a way, we can look back on this incident as prophetic, with the advent of telemedicine capabilities. Today, remote patient monitoring encompasses various audio, video, and augmented reality-related technologies and processes used for health information exchange between a patient and physician system. This is also sometimes called “connected health”...

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The March issue of Health Affairs demonstrates the potential of health care delivery system innovation to improve value for both patients and clinicians. Technology innovations such as machine learning and artificial intelligence systems are promising breakthroughs to improve diagnostic accuracy, tailor treatments, and even eventually replace work performed by clinicians, especially that of radiologists and pathologists. Machine-learning systems infer patterns, relationships, and rules directly from large volumes of data in ways that can far exceed human cognitive capacities...

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