Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

We Really Have To Hope That The New ACeH Will Be Rather More Open And Better Than NEHTA.

This appeared a few days ago.

NEHTA Dose Based Prescribing Reference Sets open for review

Created on Friday, 21 August 2015
As part of ongoing product development NEHTA conducted a market survey to identify potential areas of improvement to the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT). The survey results were used to prioritise areas for development.  One priority area identified was dose based prescribing (acute care).
Through a series of workshops and previous communications, NEHTA engaged with clinical representatives from various state health jurisdictions, vendors who provide software to those jurisdictions, and others in an effort to define standardised terminology to support dose based prescribing. 
An open review of the resulting draft reference sets is now underway. 
If you are interested in participating in the review, please contact Naomi Graham on email Naomi.Graham@nehta.gov.au or phone (02) 8298 2693.   Feedback is due by close of business Friday 4 September to Emma.Black@nehta.gov.au.
All feedback will be collated and analysed to form the final content for the first release of Route of Administration, Dosage Form and Dose Frequency reference sets. The reference sets are scheduled for the November 2015 release of SNOMED CT-AU. 
The release is found here:
A few of questions.
1. Where is the link to the list of priorities and how they were ranked with an explanation of how the survey was being conducted and who was consulted?
2. What were the previous communications?
3. Why an emphasis on providers to the jurisdictions - what about the rest of the e-Health domain.
4. Why does the release not explain what a ‘Dose Based Prescribing Reference Sets’ are?
5. Why just a couple of weeks to respond?
It is because of this sort of nonsense we are seeing the back of NEHTA - and frankly they richly deserve to be going - given their non-transparency and failure to understand they exist to serve NOT rule!
Good riddance - you have been a dismal failure. If, as an organisation, you had even been half useful this would not have been your fate - so your score card is pretty clear!
David.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Weekly Australian Health IT Links – 24th August, 2015.

Here are a few I have come across the last week or so.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.

General Comment

A very quiet week unlike last week. Interesting there just seems to be ongoing Health IT problems in both Adelaide and Perth with their new hospitals.
Good to see increasing activity in the private sector in the e-Health space.
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SA Health rejected “fix” for EPAS woes

Bension Siebert | 19 August 2015
Adelaide | A former head of SA Health says technology that would fix problems with the state’s beleaguered $422 million electronic health system was rejected by the department last year.
Former SA Health CEO Ray Blight told InDaily he had pitched the Miya patient flow system – developed by his SA-based company Alcidion – to SA Health in November last year.
He said the technology was a relatively inexpensive method to speed up doctors’ access to patient information within the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS), as well as other e-health systems.
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Pilgrim reappointed to Privacy Commissioner role

Appointed for 12 months amid continued uncertainty about the OAIC's future
Timothy Pilgrim has been reappointed to the role of Australian Privacy Commissioner, ending the vacancy since his previous term expired in July.
After his previous five-year term expired, Pilgrim was appointed acting Australian Information Commissioner.
That role came on the heels of Australian Information Commissioner Professor John McMillan leaving the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) to take on the role NSW Ombudsman.
"Mr Pilgrim was appointed acting Australian Information Commissioner for a three month period in July 2015 while the Government considers options for the future of the Information Commissioner position," a statement issued today by Attorney-General George Brandis said.
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Crackdown looms over pharmacists' scanning fails

Serkan Ozturk and Meg Pigram | 18 August, 2015
Supermarket shoppers are not the only ones plagued by self-scanning issues with some pharmacists suffering “perennial problems” with scanning barcodes on medication packaging.
But while Coles and Woolworths are looking to redesign their self-serve checkouts so frustrated shoppers no longer need to hear the phrase “unexpected item in the bagging area”, pharmacists who continue to fail to scan the barcodes of items may soon face unprofessional conduct charges.
More than 110 complaints had been received by the Pharmacy Board of Australia in the past 12 months about dispensing irregularities and errors, the majority of which were caused by the failure of pharmacists to use scanners.
Errors have involved drugs with a narrow therapeutic index such as digoxin and methotrexate, which in two instances partly contributed to fatalities. 
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Google Flu Trends calls in sick, indefinitely

Google will pass along search queries related to the flu to health organizations so they can develop their own prediction models
Google has shut down its website that predicted how influenza and dengue fever were spreading based on queries that people ran in the company's search engine.
Instead of running Google Flu Trends, the company will pass along the data gleaned from user searches to heath organizations that study infectious diseases so they can develop their own prediction models. Those organizations include the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Influenza Division, Google said Thursday.
Google is also making the historical data its collected as part of the project available for download.
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NEHTA Dose Based Prescribing Reference Sets open for review

Created on Friday, 21 August 2015
As part of ongoing product development NEHTA conducted a market survey to identify potential areas of improvement to the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT). The survey results were used to prioritise areas for development.  One priority area identified was dose based prescribing (acute care).
Through a series of workshops and previous communications, NEHTA engaged with clinical representatives from various state health jurisdictions, vendors who provide software to those jurisdictions, and others in an effort to define standardised terminology to support dose based prescribing. 
An open review of the resulting draft reference sets is now underway. 
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From Emerald to Japan (and back again)

There’s a long tradition of Australian doctors having multiple specialties. Dr Ewen McPhee is one of them. A rural GP obstetrician, he has operated a rural health clinic in Emerald, Central Queensland, for the last quarter century.
Last week Dr McPhee undertook a trip to Japan at the behest of a Japanese colleague he met at a conference in Dubrovnik. The Japanese doctors wanted to learn how rural and remote GPs in Australia manage to cover multiple specialties. That’s not the case in Japan, where doctors may have additional qualifications, but they’re generally not allowed to practise them.
The conference in Japan was well attended by doctors who showed a great willingness to change and to learn. “There is a tremendous enthusiasm for [doctors having] multiple skills, but they are not allowed to practise those skills,” he says.
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Opinion: GPs should use technology to their advantage

18 August 2015
SO MANY things now no longer need physical human interaction. You can organise a loan without visiting the bank. Accountants, lawyers and other professionals rely heavily on electronic communications.  
What does this mean for the medical profession? Why do we still insist on seeing people? 
I am not advocating we no longer see patients face to face (f2f), merely that we can be more efficient by not doing so for much of our work, and still be just as effective (from both technical and relationship perspectives). And this doesn’t necessarily mean Skype.
Online tools for mental health are well received by patients and show positive outcomes, yet:
  • I can’t routinely book my doctor’s appointment online (specialist or generalist).
  • I can’t email my doctor with a simple question and instead must lose an entire morning sitting in the waiting room.
  • I must play telephone ping pong with my providers. 
Funding plays a role yet, in a workforce-limited world, inefficiencies abound. In one 15-minute f2f consult time, I could probably deal with four email consults: your cholesterol level is okay; no, you don’t need to come in unless it doesn’t improve by tomorrow; I’ve got the test results; you can take the antibiotics. 
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Clinical Informatics Business, Alcidion Corporation to List on ASX

PRWeb  
August 20, 2015 9:12pm   
Alcidion Corporation, a leading health informatics company based in Adelaide has entered into a binding agreement with Naracoota Resources Ltd to list Alcidion on the ASX via a Reverse Takeover (Transaction). The Transaction will see Alcidion valued at $12m with a healthy $7.00m in cash post listing.
Adelaide, SA (PRWEB) August 21, 2015
Alcidion Corporation a leading health informatics company based in Adelaide has entered into a binding agreement with Naracoota Resources Ltd to list Alcidion on the ASX via a Reverse Takeover (Transaction). The Transaction will see Alcidion valued at $12m with a healthy $7.00m in cash post listing.
The Transaction is being backed by Allure Capital, the private investment vehicle of technology entrepreneur Mr. Nathan Buzza, BlueSky Private Equity (ASX:BLA) and Patersons Securities Limited. Mr Buzza was previously the second largest shareholder of Clinical Middleware Provider, Azure Healthcare, which catapulted into the spotlight after the stock rocketed from 3.3c to 34c over his two and a half year tenure.
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Bill Madden: Archaic communication

Bill Madden
Monday, 17 August, 2015
IS sending a time-sensitive letter about a patient by ordinary post an archaic means of transmission in 2015?
The recent findings of an inquest by the South Australian Deputy State Coroner Anthony Schapel into the death of Marjorie Irene Aston suggest that the answer is “yes”.
Mrs Aston, aged 86 years, had consulted a cardiologist just before Christmas, a month before she died. He recommended she begin warfarin therapy of 5 mg once daily for her atrial fibrillation, replacing the aspirin she had been taking for the condition.
The cardiologist (in the patient’s presence) dictated a letter to her GP about her starting warfarin therapy and advised of the need to test and adjust the dose in the usual way.
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New Zealand firm Datacom posts healthy revenue growth

Jennifer Foreshew

Datacom Group has reported a lift in revenue of 6.3 per cent overall and maintained the 10-year compound annual growth rate at 11.2 per cent.
The New Zealand-owned and headquartered IT company saw total operating revenue increase to $920.5 million ($NZ937 million).
The Group profit before tax for the year was at $34.7 million ($NZ35.3 million) below the previous year’s unusual high of $57.4 million ($NZ64.7m). Profit after tax was $23.9 million ($NZ24.3 million).
Datacom Group chief executive officer Jonathan Ladd said the 2013-14 profit period was assisted by the divestment of the Group’s Asia contact centre business.
“Also this year, we have greatly increased our investment in new lines and a lot of that comes as operating expenditure so it comes off the P & L line,’’ he said.
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Hospitals & patients will benefit from more efficient Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software

Leading hospitals in Australia are looking for technologies to provide efficiency gains across departments, reducing the risk of human error and improving patient care with a single platform. This is the new mantra for Australia’s preeminent hospitals.
Hyland, creator of OnBase - a leading ECM software technology company headquartered in the United States – continues to increase its investment in Australia.  
Susan deCathelineau, Vice President of Global Healthcare Sales and Services, Hyland –recently attended the Health Informatics Conference (HIC), Australia’s premier digital health, health informatics and e-health conference and expo in Brisbane - said “Hospitals benefit both clinically and administratively from working with OnBase.”
“While hospitals are well versed in paper scanning, the next evolution of this process is taking the information gathered and doing meaningful things with it. How can that data be used to automate business processes helping clinical and administrative staff efficiently manage work processes, reduce the risk of error and improve patient care? With the future of increasing patient numbers and tight budgets, technology must be leveraged to provide efficiencies to do more with existing staff and infrastructure,” Ms. deCathelineau said.
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Human performance analytics are coming to an office near you

Date August 16, 2015 - 9:06PM

Olivia Solon

The future of the high-performance workplace is taking shape behind closed doors and kept quiet by non-disclosure agreements.
Across Britain, hedge funds, banks, call centres and consultancies are installing tracking systems to link bio-sensing wearable devices with analytics tools once the preserve of elite sports.
The idea that you can augment yourself with technologies will become absolutely commonplace and a natural progression. 
Chris Brauer, University of London
"There isn't a competitive sports team in the world that doesn't adopt high-end analytics tracking the athletes on the field, off the field, at home, when they're sleeping, when and what they're eating," says Chris Brauer, Director of Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London. "The workplace is heading towards that model."
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About Us - Specialists Doctors

SPECIALIST DOCTORS is a unique web-based search facility developed to fill a major gap in the provision of medical services to patients and their families.
It has always been a significant problem for patients needing a medical specialist to know who to choose, especially as medical knowledge and expertise have expanded to the point that highly specialised and specific expert specific advice (equal to that available anywhere in the world) is now available in Australia.
The question for patients and, indeed for most referring general practitioners, is which specialists have the highly developed expertise that may be required for many conditions.
There is no shortage of websites which simply list medical specialists; the vast majority of these are essentially variations of “Yellow Pages” listings; that is to say, each specialist will have paid to have an entry listed.
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Systems science – the new way of thinking?

| Aug 20, 2015 8:13AM | EMAIL | PRINT
In this fourth instalment on the CEIPS (Centre of Excellence in Intervention and Prevention Science) seminar series Rebecca Zosel delves into the world of systems science and public health. What is systems thinking? How should we apply it? Or has the systems approach already run out of time to prove it’s worth?
Rebecca Zosel writes:
In the fourth of the CEIPS Seminar Series on Tuesday 23 June, Dr Therese Riley, Senior Research Fellow, explored two questions about quality in systems science in her presentation: ‘How do we know our systems science is any good?’
Therese spoke of ‘the turn to complexity’, which has seen an ever growing list of disciplines grappling with complexity theory and systems science. More recently, public health in Australia (and Victoria in particular) has seen the investment of significant effort and resources in systems science. Systems thinking has been positioned as a new way of thinking in public health, and the preferred approach when addressing complex health issues such as the rising rates of chronic disease.
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Windows 10 is here – what happens next?

Windows 10 was built with the help of a huge number of ‘Windows Insiders’ who were largely responsible for the start menu returning, thousands of new features, and making the product the most stable and trouble free Windows release ever.
So now Windows 10 has been released the ‘Insiders’ are keen to continue to drive its ongoing development.
Their first task is to look at the next generation of Windows 10 – and if that sounds like it should have been Windows 11 or 12, you are wrong. Windows is Windows and will now become a homogenised operating system continually centrally updated to avoid the horror fragmentation issues that plague other operating systems. The aim is to get most of the legacy one billion desktops, tablets, notebooks, and soon smartphones that run Windows 7 or 8.x and Phone 8.1 onto Windows 10.
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Enjoy!
David.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

It Seems Wisdom And Common Sense Can Emerge From All Sorts Of Interesting Places!

This appeared a few days ago:

From Emerald to Japan (and back again)

There’s a long tradition of Australian doctors having multiple specialties. Dr Ewen McPhee is one of them. A rural GP obstetrician, he has operated a rural health clinic in Emerald, Central Queensland, for the last quarter century.
…..
The Japanese trip followed a presentation at the recent HIC 2015 conference, where Dr McPhee addressed the issue of whether general practitioners are ready for the electronic revolution, and what is needed to get them to engage.
“There is a lot happening in terms of system integration, the ehealth record, secure messaging and referrals, as well as other templates to improve the patient journey,” he says.
The main problem, he believes, is that government and the vendor community are not taking the general practice community along with them on these complex IT ventures as consultations are often too superficial leading to incorrect assumptions.
“There seems to be an expectation that it will work like a hospital or other parts of the health system.”  McPhee believes that in order to get GPs to go along on the electronic journey a bottom up rather than today’s top-down consultation approach is needed and he points to the PCEHR as a prime example. 
“We tend to be suspicious of people developing solutions and telling us they are going to implement them with minimal engagement with the GP community,” he says.
So the question remains – how do vendors and government get GPs onto the electronic patient record journey, and into using IT in general as part of their daily practice?
The full article is found here:
How good to see some wisdom emerge from the Deep North! Even more interesting is that the views were presented at the usually more e-Health enthusiastic and uncritical e-Health Conference HIC 2015.
Dr McPhee has hit the nail on the head as far as I am concerned. I hope he has the occasional browse of my blog to get some support for his pragmatic and sensible views that are not all that often but out there!
David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 284 – Results – 23rd August, 2015.

Here are the results of the poll.

Which Organisation Best Represents Your Views On What Is Needed In Australian E-Health?

ACHI 23% (22)

HISA 3% (3)

HIMAA 0% (0)

Federal DoH 0% (0)

NEHTA 6% (6)

Academia 1% (1)

Some Other Organisation 4% (4)

No Organisation Gets It 59% (57)

I Have No Idea 4% (4)

Total votes: 97

Well what we seem to see here is that over ½ of readers reckon they are not being represented by anyone who gets e-Health. Of those who liked an organisation ACHI was the clear winner.

Good to see such a great number of responses!

Again, many, many thanks to all those that voted!

David.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Weekly Overseas Health IT Links -22nd August, 2015.

Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
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openEHR in Brazil – Sirio Libanes

10/08/2015 wolandscat
openEHR training session last week at Hospital Sirio Libanes, one of the premiere teaching and research hospitals in Brazil. I delivered the background and theory part, Samuel Frade and Bostjan Lah (both from Marand) delivered the programming part.
We were there at the invitation of Beatriz de Fario Leao (no introduction needed there). Met a great team of business analysts and developers, some in the above photo. Looking forward to working more with them.
Brazil is starting to work a lot with openEHR, and may become one of the premier locations using it. Which would be great – a large country moving to a semantic, model-based technology for the EHR and interoperability.
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Melanoma App Vendor Barred from Making Deceptive Health Claims

AUG 14, 2015 7:42am ET
Under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, a melanoma-detection app vendor has been barred from making further deceptive health claims about his products available for sale online in the Apple and Google app stores.
According to FTC, Avrom Lasarow is now “prohibited from making any misleading or unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits or efficacy of any product or service, including that a device detects or diagnoses melanoma.” Earlier this year, FTC charged U.K.-based Lasarow and his company—L Health Ltd.—with false advertising regarding the Mole Detective family of apps and their ability to detect melanoma or the risk of melanoma.
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Natural language processing in high demand

Posted on Aug 14, 2015
By Bernie Monegain, Editor-at-Large
The global healthcare Natural Language Processing (NLP) market is expected to grow from $1.10 billion in 2015 to $2.67 billion by 2020, according to a new report.
That forecast translates to a compound annual growth rate of 19.2 percent.
The explosive growth in healthcare and life sciences industries, with their vast troves of unstructured clinical data in EHRs, are the main market drivers.
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Meaningful use didn't spark EHR uptake

Posted on Aug 14, 2015
By Jack McCarthy, Contributing Writer
There will be government officials and health IT experts who refute these findings. Others, meanwhile, are likely to argue that it just confirms what they've been saying all along.
Here goes: There is little or no actual hard evidence to prove that the Meaningful Use program triggered an uptake in electronic health records adoption. That's  according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
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Hospital EHR adoption grows, but other care settings still lack ability to receive data

August 14, 2015 | By Katie Dvorak
While exchange of data between hospitals and outside providers is increasing, the industry still faces many barriers when it comes to interoperability.
Last year, three out of four hospitals acquired a basic electronic health record system, according to analysis of a study conducted by the American Hospital Association in 2014.
In addition, about 40 percent of hospitals can access clinical information electronically from outside providers or sources, though only 25 percent engaged in the four activities related to interoperable exchange--find, send receive and use--according to a new data brief on the report.
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Zobreus launches patient-centered EMR

Written by Akanksha Jayanthi (Twitter | Google+)  | August 12, 2015
Zobreus Medical Corp. has launched its Patient-Oriented Electronic Medical Record in the App Store.
The POEM Record is consumer-centric, yet still allows providers to integrate notes and engage with patients through the platform.
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EHRs can increase docs' medical malpractice liability

August 10, 2015 | By Marla Durben Hirsch
Electronic health records can increase a provider's malpractice exposure, according to an article published in Oncology Business Management.
The article notes that EHRs initially were envisioned to reduce medical errors, but surmises that hasn't yet occurred. Instead, it says, EHRs are causing or contributing to malpractice problems. Lingering issues include:
  • Computer glitches and design flaws, such as a restrictive drop down menu, which can cause medical errors
  • The "transparency" of EHRs themselves, which makes it harder to hide mistakes or sloppy work habits
  • The increased documentation requirements and resulting desire to use templates and other shortcuts, which can lead to discrepancies in the EHR
  • The inability of EHRs to catch some errors, such as dosage mistakes
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EHR costs outweigh benefits, analysis finds

August 6, 2015 | By Marla Durben Hirsch
Electronic health records have potential, but their benefits won't be achieved without significant upfront costs by providers, patients and the federal government, according to a new analysis from the American Action Forum, a nonprofit think tank.
The analysis finds that the hardware, software and labor costs for a solo practitioner to transition to an EHR are about $163,765, and $233,298 for a five-person physician practice. However, physicians were not yet seeing a payoff, with increased costs at least for the first three years after adoption.
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DH refuses to release IT savings report

Thomas Meek
13 August 2015
The Department of Health has turned down a Freedom of Information request from Digital Health News to see a report that purportedly shows how technology can save the NHS billions of pounds each year.
If accurate, these savings could account for around half of the £22 billion in annual efficiency gains that NHS England is looking to make by 2020, to help fill a £30 billion gap between funding and demand that could otherwise open up by then.
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Report: 50 percent of digital health startups will fail within 20 months

August 13, 2015 | By Katie Dvorak
As more startups enter digital healthcare, more are likely to quickly fail, but that gives larger companies the ability to "mine" them for new innovations, according to a report from Accenture.
Accenture examined 900 health IT startups and found that half were in danger of failing within 20 months of their creation. The researchers call them "zombie" start-ups, and say instead of discarding them, larger industry players should acquire them.
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Karen DeSalvo: In hindsight, we needed common interoperability standards

August 13, 2015 | By Dan Bowman
A common set of standards for the exchange of electronic health information likely could have improved the current state of interoperability in the industry, National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo said.
Speaking Wednesday at the eHealth Initiative's iThrive Innovation Challenge in the District of Columbia, DeSalvo (pictured) was asked about what she wishes she or the healthcare industry would have done differently in regard to the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009.
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Study: Use of OpenNotes increases safety, patient engagement

August 13, 2015 | By Susan D. Hall
Through five years of experience with OpenNotes, which allows patients access to the doctor's notes in their record, researchers say using the tool can increase safety, care quality and patient engagement, according to a study in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
The OpenNotes study began in 2010 when more than 100 primary care doctors at three hospitals opened their notes to 20,000 patients, who were allowed to read their records through a secure, patient website, according to an announcement on the study.
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Personal Finance | Wed Aug 12, 2015 10:07am EDT

Coming soon to a screen near you: Doctors

NEW YORK | By Beth Pinsker
Reuters/Steve Marcus (UNITED STATES - Tags: BUSINESS SCI TECH HEALTH) - RTXW7TI
When the great summer cold hit my family, we hunkered down with soup, tissues and TV. But then my cough started to sound more worrisome.
Too weary to spend a chunk of my day trooping off to the nearest urgent care center or my primary care physician, I fired up my computer and saw a physician online.
Signing up with Doctor On Demand took only a few clicks. Less than half an hour later, prescriptions were waiting for me at my pharmacy.
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Survey: Docs Growing Unhappier With EHRs

August 12, 2015
Compared to five years ago, more physicians are reporting being dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their electronic health record (EHR) system, according to a physician-based survey from online resource organization AmericanEHR Partners and the American Medical Association (AMA).
The survey included 940 providers and 155 questions, and found that close to, or more than half of all respondents, reported a negative impact in response to questions about how their EHR system improved costs, efficiency or productivity.
In a similar survey conducted by AmericanEHR five years ago the majority of respondents said that overall they were satisfied or very satisfied with their EHR system; with 39 percent being satisfied and 22 percent being very satisfied. In the current survey the majority of respondents indicated that overall they were dissatisfied with their EHR system; with only 22 percent indicating they were satisfied and 12 percent indicating they were very satisfied.
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21st Century Cures Act Prompts Debate Over Patient Consent Rules

by Nicole Lewis, iHealthBeat Contributing Reporter Thursday, August 13, 2015
As the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee crafts its own version of the 21st Century Cures Act, patient privacy advocates vow that they'll impress upon senators the dangers of using personal health data for biomedical research without requiring patient consent.
Patient privacy advocates worry that the House version of the 21st Century Cures Act (HR 6), which was passed last month, changes the HIPAA privacy rule in ways that could undermine the trust between patients and their doctors.
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EHR Vendor Details Sophisticated Cyberattack

HIM-HIPAA Insider , August 13, 2015

Indiana-based Medical Informatics Engineering says the compromised PHI may have included patients' names, Social Security numbers, mailing addresses, email addresses, birthdates, medical conditions, and lab results.

This article originally appeared in HIM-HIPAA Insider.
An Indiana-based EHR vendor and its subsidiary company were the victims of a sophisticated criminal cyber-attack last week that exposed the PHI of some patients at several of the vendor's clients, according to a notice Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE) posted to its website June 10.
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HIE among Hospitals Increasing, Further Progress Needed

AUG 12, 2015 7:36am ET
While health information exchange among U.S. non-federal acute care hospitals grew in 2014, only 23 percent of hospitals nationwide were able to find, send, receive and use data electronically to/from sources outside their hospital system.
That’s one takeaway from a nationwide American Hospital Association survey released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. In addition, only 41 percent of surveyed hospitals last year reported having necessary clinical information available electronically from outside providers or sources when treating a patient that was seen by another provider or care setting.
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ONC tackles interoperability barriers

Posted on Aug 12, 2015
By Bernie Monegain, Editor-at-Large
Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two to exchange healthcare information, and therein rests the rub.
Many hospitals ready and willing to exchange healthcare data with other providers find themselves stymied because the healthcare organization at the other end is unable to receive it.
It is one of the chief barriers to interoperability, Vaishali Patel, ONC senior advisor, told the federal Health IT Policy Committee at its meeting Tuesday.
"We examined a number of technical, operational and financial barriers to interoperability," she said, "And we found that lack of exchange partners with the capability to electronically receive information, whether that was because they lacked a system or because their system lacked the capability to receive the information was a top barrier to interoperability, reported by about six in 10 hospitals."
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Too little research backs high-risk medical devices

August 12, 2015 | By Susan D. Hall
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Premarket Approval pathway allows high-risk medical devices on the market with only one study to prove their safety and effectiveness, and there are a limited number of studies done post-market, according to research published in Journal of the American Medical Association.
Medical device regulation in the U.S. is more rigorous than in other parts of the world, but "the difference is, in many European countries they have much better capacity to follow devices once they are in practice," senior author Joseph S. Ross, M.D., of the Yale University School of Medicine, told Reuters.
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Federal advisory draft report outlines big data challenges

August 12, 2015 | By Dan Bowman
While big data analytics can help to improve the health of individuals and communities, as well as support growth of a learning health system, its use presents several privacy and security challenges, according to a federal advisory group.
In a draft report presented at the Aug. 11 meeting of the Office of the National Coordinator's Health IT Policy Committee, the Privacy and Security Workgroup (PSWG) outlines those challenges and recommends steps to address them. For instance, it notes that "rapid growth" in the amount of health information boosts the risks for violations to occur. What's more, the workgroup says despite efforts to de-identify information in data sets, the threat of re-identification persists.
"Additionally, the complex legal landscape around health privacy creates obstacles for individuals trying to access their personal information and hurdles for researchers attempting to grow the LHS," the workgroup says.
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The hackers have spoken: healthcare needs more patient-centered solutions

Vivek Bhatia
Aug 11, 2015
A slew of interesting factors are converging together in healthcare that are putting the patient firmly in the center of the care continuum. This is a big change for provider organizations used to being in that center.
Here at AustinHealthTech, however, we are excited by the dawning of the patient-centered era and nowhere was that more evident than last month during athenahealth’s inaugural Austin More Disruption Please (MDP) hackathon, supported by our local group AustinHealthTech, along with Seton Healthcare and SXSW. The hackathon featured more than 120 hackers from all backgrounds – some traveled from as far as California and Maine to participate in the multi-day event. The goal: change the status quo in health care.
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In digital age, paper records still matter

Jeff Rowe
Aug 12, 2015
At any time of technological transition, there’s a period, sometimes a rather long one, in which stakeholders have one foot in the future and one foot in the past.  Take electronic health records, for example.  While significant strides have been taken toward the digitization of health data, in recent years, paper records, and getting access to them, remain the reality for many.
At HealthITAnalytics, Jennifer Bresnick recently looked at some current legislative efforts to ensure that patients have affordable access to their records by capping the copying fees healthcare organizations can charge.  Along the way, she provides a glimpse at some of the more stubborn impediments to a more comprehensive shift to digital communication.
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Survey: Most Providers Not Confident in ONC’s Interoperability Plan

August 11, 2015
Just 17 percent of surveyed healthcare providers said they are confident that the industry will meet the 10-year goal for nationwide interoperability, set last year by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
The survey, from Austin, Tx.–based document management solutions provider Scrypt, polled more than 700 healthcare providers to gauge their opinions of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance in the wake of several high profile healthcare-related data breaches. It revealed that staff or human error is the biggest concern in terms of a potential HIPAA breach within healthcare organizations, despite that fact that 98 percent of respondents have policies in place to keep staff informed about changes in HIPAA compliance within their own practice.
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Why IBM Just Bought Billions of Medical Images for Watson to Look At

IBM seeks to transform image-based diagnostics by combining its cognitive computing technology with a massive collection of medical images.

Why It Matters

It can be difficult for physicians to detect diagnostic information from medical images.
IBM says that Watson, its artificial-intelligence technology, can use advanced computer vision to process huge volumes of medical images. Now Watson has its sights set on using this ability to help doctors diagnose diseases faster and more accurately.
Last week IBM announced it would buy Merge Healthcare for a billion dollars. If the deal is finalized, this would be the third health-care data company IBM has bought this year (see “Meet the Health-Care Company IBM Needed to Make Watson More Insightful”). Merge specializes in handling all kinds of medical images, and its service is used by more than 7,500 hospitals and clinics in the United States, as well as clinical research organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Shahram Ebadollahi, vice president of innovation and chief science officer for IBM’s Watson Health Group, says the acquisition is part of an effort to draw on many different data sources, including anonymized, text-based medical records, to help physicians make treatment decisions.
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Jacksonville University’s MSHI program also gives you the confidence of knowing that you’re completing your degree from a university with 14 years of proven online healthcare education leadership – and one consistently ranked among America’s best colleges among regional universities in the South by U.S. News & World Report. Add in the personalized attention only a private university can give you, and your choice is clear.
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Technology Driving Healthcare Revolution, Not Policy

AUG 11, 2015 7:57am ET
Jeffrey A. Sachs has worked on various high-level health initiatives over the years, from advising former New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo to providing guidance on California's Medicaid waiver in 2010.
Yet Sachs, founder of Sachs Policy Group, a New York City-based boutique consultancy, has a career history far-flung from the buttoned-down and cautious health policy wonk might expect him to be – and he makes no bones in discounting the healthcare industry's preoccupation on policy minutiae in turbulent times.
"The move to value is a convergence being driven by technology, not public policy," Sachs said. "I say to the people I talk to, 'If you think it's public policy, that would be really good for you, because you could stop it.' But it's not public policy."
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What Google's Alphabet transition means for its healthcare future

August 11, 2015 | By Dan Bowman
In announcing the creation of holding company Alphabet this week, Google's healthcare ventures--of which there are many--could be greatly impacted, Advisory Board Daily Briefing Executive Director Dan Diamond writes in a Forbes blog post.
Primarily, the new structure, of which Google will be one of many subsidiaries, will allow Alphabet to "maximize" the potential of its various units, which include Google X and Calico, Diamond says. The former unit, via collaboration with Novartis, is working on developing smart contact lenses for measuring blood sugar levels using tear fluid. It also has been working on Baseline Study--its research efforts into human disease and illness to better understand how the body goes from healthy to sick--and Google Glass, which reportedly is being updated for specific industries, including healthcare.
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Cedars-Sinai's Brennan Spiegel: Digital health no easy feat

August 11, 2015 | By Susan D. Hall
Digital health is at its infancy, and even technical solutions that hold great potential to transform health outcomes can be waylaid when applied to everyday humans, Brennan Spiegel, director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai Health System, writes in a blog post.
Patients lose their devices, can't charge them, feel stigmatized by wearing them, or just have no interest at all in using them, he says. What's more, the data can be misleading.
He cites, as an example, a study conducted at Cedars-Sinai to measure activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. A 72-year-old woman found relief during the treatment course of the study, and while the data showed a decrease in her pain, the sensors also showed a marked decrease in her activity.
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Workgroup Makes Recommendations for HIE in Emergency Medicine

August 10, 2015
An emergency physician-led workgroup has published several recommendations about how to maximize the value of health information exchange (HIE) in emergency departments.
The recommendations were published online last week in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Health Information Exchange in Emergency Medicine"). The workgroup, from the American College of Emergency Physicians, the national medical society representing emergency medicine, made five primary recommendations, and seven secondary ones, in support of HIE in emergency medicine. The five primary ones include:
1. Emergency physicians must be involved in regional and federal HIE activities;
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Six mobile health startups from the first White House demo day

By: Jonah Comstock | Aug 10, 2015
As his time in office draws to a close, President Obama secured his reputation as our first geek president by hosting a tech startup demo day in the White House last week. Although the primary purpose of the demo day was to showcase diversity in tech entrepreneurship, a number of mobile health and wellness-focused companies filled out the ranks of Obama’s invited startups.
Here’s a round-up of the mobile health entrepreneurs that showed off their companies at the White House last week.
Open Health Network — Founded by Los Altos, California residents Tatyana Kanzaveli & Maksim Tsvetovat, Open Health Network is a “smart mobile health platform that helps healthcare organizations, researchers, and patient advocate groups create cutting-edge mobile applications that run on any device and in any language in a day without coding”. The platform lets users create patient surveys and apps that integrate easily with wearable devices and social networks.
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How Google Glass can save lives

August 10, 2015Eric Wicklund - Editor, mHealthNews
Even though the prototype was panned by many critics and a new version isn't due out until next year, Google Glass is finding willing users in healthcare. One recent test found that it may have even saved the lives of several poison victims in a hospital ED.
The latest success story comes from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where researchers used the interactive eyewear on a test of toxicology consults at UMass Memorial Medical Center. As reported in the Journal of Medical Toxicology, emergency medicine residents at the hospital used Google Glass in 18 consults, evaluating patients while a secure video feed was established with a supervising consultant.
In each case, the supervising consultant guided the resident through the consult by means of text messages shown on the eyeglasses. In addition, residents had access to images of medicine bottles, EKGs and other information on Glass as they worked with the patients.
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Google plans to grow healthcare efforts under Alphabet

Posted on Aug 11, 2015
By Tom Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Healthcare IT News
Google divulged an interesting plot late Monday when it announced Alphabet.
Alphabet will be the parent company presiding over many distinct entities, of which Google is to be the largest initially. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be Alphabet CEO and president, respectively.
"Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related," Page wrote on the company's blog.
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Study reveals discrepancy between pharmacy claims data, EHR data

Written by Max Green | August 10, 2015
The majority of patient EHRs may contain medication information that is not up to date, according to a study published in the American Journal of Managed Care.
Medication reconciliation — the process of comparing a patient's medication orders to the medications they have been taking — is valuable in inpatient settings, at transitions of care and in ambulatory settings, where discrepancies between physician medication orders in the EHR and what the patients actually take frequently occur, according to the authors.
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HIE Critical to Emergency Medicine, But Info Lacking in ERs

AUG 10, 2015 7:34am ET
Care standards and protocols to support data exchange in emergency department electronic health records need to be developed, including workflow optimizations and pushing of important information to the clinician through “flags” in the EHR.
Those are among the recommendations from an emergency physician-led workgroup on how to maximize the value of health information exchange in emergency departments. The five primary and seven secondary recommendations were published online recently in Annals of Emergency Medicine.
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Where big data falls short

Posted on Aug 10, 2015
By Jack McCarthy, Contributing Writer
Big data and analytic tools have not yet been harnessed to bring meaningful improvement to the healthcare industry.
That's according to a new report from the National Quality Forum outlining the challenges to making health data and analytics more usable and available in real time for providers and consumers.
Whereas big data has supported improvement in certain settings, such as reducing ventilator-acquired pneumonia, data analytics has been largely overlooked in the area of healthcare costs, even though this data can inform and assess efforts to improve the affordability and quality of care.
What's more, effective data management is necessary for the success of other incentives to enhance care, such as payment programs, as providers need timely information to understand where to improve and track their progress.
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Individual stories show impact of health information theft

August 10, 2015 | By Katie Dvorak
As the theft of health information continues to rise, so, too, will the impact it has on the lives of patients who no longer have control over their personal health information.
An article in the Wall Street Journal examines several individual instances of medical identity theft and the resulting fallout on those effected.
One such victim, Kathleen Meiners of Kansas City, began receiving hospital bills last year from Centerpoint Medical Center in Missouri for treatment of a leg injury her son Billy never suffered.  
Meiners fought for months to stop the collection notices and fix her son's medical records, according to the article. But after the grueling and time consuming process of clearing up the confusion, Meiners never found out how the theft of her son's identification occurred.
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New algorithm can help detect sepsis earlier

Written by Heather Punke (Twitter | Google+)  | August 07, 2015
A computer algorithm developed by researchers from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore could correctly predict septic shock in 85 percent of cases without increasing the number of false positives, according to a study published in Science Translational Medicine.
"The critical advance our study makes is to detect these patients early enough that clinicians have time to intervene," Suchi Saria, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of computer science and health policy and the study's leader, told Hub.
Researchers created an algorithm that determines a Targeted Real-time Early Warning Score based on 27 factors which measure a patient's risk of septic shock. To do so, researchers used electronic health records of 16,234 patients admitted to intensive care units at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 2001 to 2007.
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Class action sought by lawsuits in massive Indiana health care data breach

August 07, 2015
by Thomas Dworetzky , Contributing Reporter
A pair of lawsuits in a massive Indiana health care records hacking case is just the latest turmoil for health care providers facing an ongoing onslaught of black-hat thieves targeting the rich lode of EHR data.
The suits, filed in federal court, seek class action status over a digital break-in that exposed the private information of 3.9 million people's data, which was compromised by Medical Informatics Engineering, through its NoMoreClipboard subsidiary, and discovered in May, according to the firm.
The compromised information includes patients' names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and addresses, the Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne reported.
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How To Conquer Digital Innovation Inertia in Health Care

by Fard Johnmar Monday, August 10, 2015
The current state of digital innovation in global health can be described using two words: excitement and frustration. 
On the one hand, StartUp Health, a global entrepreneurship development company, reports that more than 7,600 startups around the world are "developing solutions in digital health." In addition, during the first half of 2015, investors poured more than $2.8 billion into companies creating and scaling digital solutions.
On the other hand, there is great disappointment among medical professionals, executives and others about the current state of digital health technologies. For example, physicians are greatly frustrated with electronic health records. And some doctors loudly complain that many innovations do nothing to aid clinical practice and in fact impede their ability to serve patients. Other executives are frustrated that many digital tools are not yet capable of solving the biggest problems in health, such as preventing non-communicable diseases and modifying negative health behaviors over the medium- and long-term.
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Enjoy!
David.