With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement (including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what’s next for EHRs. Clearly the industry is in a state of transition. eCW will be distracted by its 5 year corporate integrity agreement. AthenaHealth will have to focus on the activist investors at Elliott Management who now own 10% of the company and have a track record of changing management/preparing companies for sale. As mergers and acquisitions result in more enterprise solutions, Epic (and to some extent Cerner) will displace other vendors in large healthcare systems. However, the ongoing operational cost of these enterprise solutions will cause many to re-examine alternatives such as Meditech...
Alexa
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5 Ways Humanitarian Bots Can Save the World
Fifteen year old Sarafina, a female student in the capital city of Liberia, had a distressing problem at school: Her math teacher refused to give her a report card unless she had sex with him. Every day at school, he would request sexual favors and touch her inappropriately. Embarrassed, Sarafina kept the issue hidden from everyone, even her parents, until her father overheard a sexually harassing phone call the teacher made to their home. Sarafina’s father successfully confronted the man and got the report card, but his daughter was reprimanded for reporting her teacher’s sexual advances and forced to move to another school...
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Amazon Digital Health Talent Grab: Box Exec Reportedly Joins Team
Amazon is quietly building up its digital health tech talent, reportedly poaching a healthcare exec from Box. The Seattle behemoth may be best known for its retail business, but in the background it has a growing footprint in all manner of health technology areas. This latest Amazon talent grab appears to be another move to shore up those...
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Amazon Echo’s Alexa Has Great Potential in Healthcare
I bought an Amazon Echo this week and have been enjoying using it in the kitchen. I can ask, “Alexa, what time is it in Germany?” and it will tell me. Or I can say, “Alexa, play music by the Beatles,” or ask, “Alexa, how many ounces in a cup?” and it will let me know. It’s remarkably easy –and not at all frustrating– to use. The whole family is enjoying it. Naturally I started almost immediately to think of healthcare uses, so I wasn’t at all surprised to pick up the Boston Globe yesterday and see that my friends from Boston Children’s Hospital are a step or two ahead...
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Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy
We often talk about Amazon as though it were a retailer. It's an understandable mistake. After all, Amazon sells more clothing, electronics, toys, and books than any other company. Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon. But to describe Amazon as a retailer is to misunderstand what the company actually is, and to miss the depth of the threat that it poses to our liberty and the very idea of an open, competitive market...
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Halamka on What's Next for Electronic Health Records
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Halamka Recounts Early Experiences with Ambient Listening Devices (Alexa and Google Home)
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has a long tradition of testing speculative technologies with the notion that breakthroughs often require tolerance for failure. For example, we’ve embraced blockchain in healthcare because we believe public ledgers have promise to unify medical records across institutions. Over the past few months, we’ve developed healthcare applications for Alexa, Amazon’s ambient listening device that combines natural language processing and easy to use application program interfaces. We have also tried Google Home. Here’s our experience thus far...
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Halamka's Cautionary Tale for Healthcare
During my CIO career, I’ve worked on a few Harvard Business School case studies and I’ve had the “joy” of presenting my failures to Harvard Business school students for over a decade. I enjoy telling stories and inevitably the cases I teach are about turning lemons into lemonade. In this post, I’d like to tell a story about a recent experience with Marvin Windows and lessons learned that apply to healthcare...
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Health Care in a Post-Privacy World
Someone knows you are reading this. They know what device you are using. They know if you make it all the way to the end (which I hope you do!). They may be watching you read it, and listening to you. They know exactly where you are right now, and where you've been. As FBI Director James Comey recently proclaimed, "there is no thing as absolute privacy in America." Director Comey was speaking about legal snooping, authorized by the courts and carried out by law enforcement agencies, but, in many ways, that may be the least of our privacy concerns...
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How Bot That!
About a year and a half ago I wrote I Hate Apps, expressing my concerns that apps had outlived their usefulness due to how they are cluttering up our devices, and found I wasn't alone in this attitude. Now Facebook is doing something about it, with their vision that they can use "bots" within their Messenger app to eliminate the need for many standalone apps. Indeed, as David Marcus, the head of messaging at Facebook, told Wired: "Everyone wanted websites when the web was launched. And then everyone wanted apps. This is the start of a new era"...
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What Is Deep Learning, and Why Should You Care About It?
Whether it's Google's headline-grabbing DeepMind AlphaGo victory, or Apple's weaving of "using deep neural network technology" into iOS 10, deep learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage these days, promising to take applications to new heights in how they interact with us mere mortals. To go deeper (yes, I went there) on the subject, I reached out to the team at the deep learning-focused company Skymind, creators of Deep Learning For Java (DL4J), and authors of the recently released O'Reilly book Deep Learning: A Practitioner's Approach, Josh Patterson and Adam Gibson...
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Where HIMSS Can Take Health 2.0
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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