The Healthcare IT Guy

HHS conducted it’s first-ever HIPAA audit in March. ComputerWorld reports on the The 42 questions HHS might have asked. It’s worth watching closely.

Source: Fred Trotter through a link he saw on David Harlow’s healthcare law blog.

Tim Gee wrote recently about eDrugSearch.com’s Healthcare 100 ranking of the world’s top English language blogs in health care and medicine. I was happy to see quite a few healthcare IT blogs (including this one, Tim’s, and a number of others that are in the HITSphere). The algorithm eDrugSearch.com uses is a mixture of Google PageRank, Bloglines Subscribers, Technorati Authority Ranking, and their own proprietary point system.

A buddy of mine, Andy Glover, recently sent me a link to an SDTimes article (see page 3) which asks the question “are there real differences between methodologies, or is it just marketing?”. The article by Jennifer DeJong is pretty good but the pleasantly surprising part was that she picked my “Resume-driven Development” post. She wrote:

Another variant of the “driven” theme is resume-driven development, or RDD. RDD is all about choosing a language not because it’s well suited to a particular project, but because acquiring skills in that language will help a developer bolster his or her resume. “I’ve seen it many, many times,” said Netspective CEO Shahid Shah, who coined the term RDD in a blog entry earlier this year. “Resume driven development tactics [let developers] pad their resumes so that their next job is easier to get.”

Glad to see that the general development press is reading healthcare blogs, too.

I’ve personally thought for months that Google was working on a medical search portal and mini PHR and some of those thoughts were confirmed when Fred Trotter sent me this link. Fred noted that Google became more specific regarding its healthcare plans and, in what should be surprise to no one, it sounds like they are planning a PHR.

A buddy of mine told me about this product which seems to take the pain out of technology integration for telemedicine needed in remote healthcare visits. I like the idea a lot because it combines video, audio, and healthcare diagnostics into a single special purpose device with custom software to tie it all together. Here’s what they say about the offering:

Televisit™ is a managed network that provides healthcare professionals with Telemedicine services that are quick to set up, easy to use, and require minimal capital investment.

Televisit securely combines high quality videoconferencing and real-time physiological data with a managed network application that controls session connections, scheduling, and data management. The web-based technology can be run on either pre-configured Televisit terminals or standard desktop and laptop computers. Medical devices such as blood pressure monitors, electronic stethoscopes, microscopes, and pulse oximeters can be connected to the Televisit terminals, enabling healthcare professionals to provide remote services to a wide spectrum of patients.

ICERx.org (In Case of Emergency Prescription Database), an online resource that provides licensed prescribers and pharmacists caring for disaster victims with secure access to a patient’s comprehensive medication history, has just been lanunched. ICERx.org (www.icerx.org) is a public service initiative created by AMA, Informed Decisions, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS), the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA), RxHub and SureScripts, as well as state Medicaid and other government agencies.

Through ICERx.org, authorized physicians and pharmacists who are assisting disaster-affected individuals can obtain the medication records of evacuees. The prescription history information is pooled from a variety of sources participating in ICERx.org, including the nation’s community pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers and state Medicaid programs.

This is an excellent use of healthcare IT and is a step forward in my own call for a Disaster-time Health Record (DHR).

Dr. Subrahmanyam Karuturi has put up a nice list of Online Social Networking Sites for physicians. I had hear of Sermo a one or two others but the list is actually longer than I expected it to be. I wonder if anyone’s done any research on the value of these networks to physicians and see where there is more demand. Online sites like these are so easy to create these days that if we can get our tired and overworked physicians online to give them some relief it would be a good thing. Of course, if the sites simply mean they have to read more and get less done that might be a new problem!

Shahid.

The Center for American Progress released a new report about how to improve the American health care system through the use of health IT. Nothing ground-breaking but there are some good ideas expressed in a way that’s easy for policy officials to understand the importance of IT in healthcare. Of course, there’s little mention of the real barriers to use of IT in the healthcare industry, which is poor or non-existent incentives for practitioners.