social determinants of health (SDOH)

See the following -

Closing the Referral Problem in Distributed Care Networks

There have been any number of people and companies working tirelessly to solve healthcare's interoperability challenges. Hospitals, EHR software companies, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Federal and State governments, payers, and others have developed, tested, and implemented many in-house or vendor-built solutions to try to clear this hurdle. Recently, consumer technology vendors and patient-centered innovation programs have begun to make significant strides on directly expanding patients access to their own records. This is great news for patients, but when I am a patient, I also want my doctors and other caregivers to be able to communicate about me when needed. So, making me responsible for stewarding pieces of my record between them doesn't solve the challenge. Especially if I have received care in three or four different places or worse yet, become incapacitated.

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Healthcare's Death Star Thinking vs. Human Centered Design

I missed it when it first came out, but a providential tweet from the always perceptive Steve Downs tipped me to a most interesting article from Jennifer Pahlka with the wonderful title “Death Star Thinking and Government Reform.” The article is not directly related to healthcare, although it does include healthcare examples, but Ms. Pahlka’s central point very much applies to most efforts to reform healthcare: The need to believe that a Death Star-style solution is at hand — that we have analyzed the plans and found the single point of failure — runs deep in our culture.

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Healthcare: We Get What We Pay For

Politico (Dan Diamond) had two great pieces last week -- one on how tax-exempt hospitals benefited from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) while cutting charity care, and the second on how the Cleveland Clinic has built an island of prosperity amidst an impoverished community.  I'd like to say I'm surprised, but I'm not.  I wrote about the supposed community benefits of "non-profit" hospitals two years ago, and Politico's analysis suggests things are getting worse. They looked at the top seven hospitals, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, and found...

John Koenig

John Koenig is a data scientist based in the Washington DC area who specializes in designing custom machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms for large-scale clients in the healthcare industry. He is currently the senior data scientist for a Department of Health and Human Services program that is using AI and blockchain technologies to optimize federal procurement. Read More »

FHIR North 2021

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
October 12, 2021 - 9:00am - October 14, 2021 - 5:00pm

Hosted annually by Mohawk College’s MEDIC, Gevity, Smile CDR, OntarioMD and Canada Health Infoway, FHIR North is the only Canadian Digital Health conference focused on building awareness, knowledge and experience around HL7® FHIR healthcare interoperability standards in Canada. FHIR North is more than just a developer’s conference: our sessions can help build understanding and knowledge for anyone in your organization that wants to understand how this standard can improve patient care and the clinical experience.

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