February 2009

Guest Article: Getting beyond the hype and hyperbole – what is clinical interoperability?

There is so much hype around healthcare and clinical data interoperability – I get emails all the time asking about what all of it means and the comments I received on the recent articles about it have been great. I’ve posted about interoperability before but I thought I’d reach out to Charlie Harp to see [...]

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A great visual for healthcare IT interoperability

Bart Collet posted a comment to Dr. Rowley’s recent guest article on interoperability – he said the following diagram is a great way to show how inflexible many healthcare IT systems are these days: I love the picture, thanks Bart. Too many of our healthcare IT systems look like the device on the bottom – [...]

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HIPAA violations are finally starting to be punished

AP reported this morning that CVS is settling patient information investigation with HHS and FTC to the tune of $2.25M. Here’s the gist of it: Employees at CVS pharmacies left the labels and other items in open trash bins outside stores, according to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Health and Human Services. [...]

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Guest Article: The challenge of interoperability across local and hosted solutions

Dr. Robert Rowley is a practicing family physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has been using electronic medical records systems for 10 years. Recently he joined Practice Fusion as its Chief Medical Officer where he helps build a hosted web-based EMR free to physician end users. Dr. Rowley has written regularly in print [...]

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Evidence over Eminence in Medicine and Healthcare

Recently I’ve been sitting in many meetings in which I am amazed as to the lack of science and evidence when it comes to ideas in medicine and healthcare in general and healthcare IT specifically. It’s mind-boggling sometimes that people can nod their heads in agreement with a well known expert or authority in a [...]

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CouchDB could be a viable alternative to relational databases for storing patient data

A while back I wrote the Data Models in Healthcare series of articles. Beyond relational databases, which is of course my primary storage platform, one of my favorite techniques for managing the structured and semi-structure databases is to use XML. XML is a great persistence model for storage of schema-free data (and sometimes schema-fixed data). [...]

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Usability Guidance for EHRs and Personal Health Records

My last posting on healthcare IT application UI complexity was quite popular and got many comments both online and via email (thanks everyone). Readers were wondering if there are other sites or reports available to help improve usability. The folks at User Centric, Inc have a nice practice around exactly this kind of guidance.  Two [...]

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Explaining Healthcare IT application UI complexity

A friend of mine sent me this drawing a little while ago. I have performed many usability analyses on healthcare IT software and I usually end up writing many pages of a “summary report” which should probably include the diagram shown above. It crystallizes the reason why HISs, EMRs, and other healthcare IT software gets [...]

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Health Wonk Review at Health Business Blog

The latest  Health Wonk Review, the healthcare policy and technology blogosphere’s carnival, is now up at David Williams’ excellent Health Business Blog. Check it out. Share this:EmailFacebookLinkedInSharePrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

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