They are inviting thought leaders to explore questions such as:

• What effect does consumer-driven healthcare have on leveraging technology resources?
• What are the strategies behind unleashing the true power of technology innovation in health care?
• What do patients really want tomorrow and how can technology respond?
• What effective models foster academic and industry collaboration in consumer-driven healthcare IT innovations?

These all seem like great questions and well worth putting together a special conference to discuss them.

See you at the conference.

As most of us in healthcare realized long ago, pen and paper is a very difficult technology to replace and compete with. It doesn’t matter how fancy our computers get, how nice tablets become, or how good the voice recognition features are, most healthcare workers spend a majority of their time on paper.

The IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe is probably the closest device I’ve seen that may allow doctors to switch to a non-traditional pen/paper technology. The device captures/digitizes your handwriting on almost any normal paper surface and then allows it to be saved on to your computer. You can also hook the Mobile Digital Scribe directly up to your computer and record your handwriting in real time.

By the way, Office Max has the IOGEAR Mobile Digital Scribe for $60 until October 18th so it’s cheap enough for anyone to try out. Give it a shot.

If you’ve already tried it, share your thoughts about it here. What other tools like this do we all we use that others might not know about?

Until there is a single, interoperable system in wide use, EMRs will never have the portability and versatility of paper. Just imagine the chaos that would result if doctors’ offices used 8.5-in by 11-in paper for their charts, but hospitals all used legal-sized paper; labs reported their results on 4-in by 6-in cards, and x-rays were reported on 5-in by 8-in slips. Trying to keep all of those different sizes and shapes of paper together in 1 folder would be a nightmare. Now multiply that several hundred-fold.

He’s certainly right and I like his explanation of lack of interoperability; in fact, it’s one of the best analogies I’ve read. He goes onto say:

The fragmented market of EMR suppliers isn’t just as simple as PC vs Mac; there are hundreds of vendors selling different systems, each of which works differently and none of which are capable of interacting with each other. The only way to transfer records from one system to another is to print it out on paper and then scan or manually re-enter the information into the other.

This is where I disagree — the reason that systems aren’t interoperable and can’t interact with each other is because customers are willing to accept vendors who don’t work well with each other. It continues to surprise me how easily healthcare IT customers accept mediocrity from their vendors and sign contracts and make purchases that are only good for vendors.

With HL7 we have some a "good enough" interoperability solution and there are tons of tools and many vendors out there that will connect disparate systems.

How many of you out there are being held hostage by their healthcare IT vendors?

Healthcare IT does not necessarily make life easier for primary care physicians, says a leader in the movement to make medicine more efficient and patient-centered.

"When you put an EMR into a primary care practice, your life is hell for the next year," said L.Gordon Moore, MD.

"EMR vendors aren’t really giving us what we need. We have to make a distinction between a robust EMR with decision support tools, and one that is just being marketed as a way to improve coding. And we really need to get out of the E&M coding game."

Yikes. I’ve been in the healthcare IT market for a while and that’s probably one of the strongest anti-EMR statements I’ve seen publicly.

I know I have many readers who are physicians — how many of you concur with Dr. Moore?

It’s a good, but at times too high-level and could have been a bit more substantive in terms of real problems and potential solutions (but I suspect this was "landscape" summary so I can’t fault them too much). It talks about what is an EMR, EHR, and PHR from a definitional perspective and goes on to give a good summary of how often each term is used (with Google stats) and why vendors are still calling themselves EMRs.

I think the general debate of whether it’s an electronic health record (EHR) versus an electronic medical record (EMR) or a personal health record (PHR) is really silly. It’s like saying that your bank records kept at the bank versus the copy they give you at home via online banking versus what you see at the ATM versus what you put into Quicken are all somehow different records — they are not. They are the same financial record (yours!).

EHRs, EMRs, PHRs, are all views of a single person’s health record that doesn’t really exist anywhere in totality — they are simply slices. Thinking that we’ll ever have a comprehensive record for anyone is like saying there’s one comprehensive financial record for a person that would include their taxes, bank statements, 401k statements, etc. There are aggregators like Mint.com and Yodlee.com that do financial data aggregation because there is no single source for a financial record and there never will be (too many players).

Healthcare data is far more detailed and even more volumnious and far harder to aggregate. Good luck trying to unify these definitions.

Seems like a good start. I’d like to see more "calculators" and tools added (like how much time should be spent on specific ailments, how often there should be doctor visits, a scheduler that might send out reminders, etc). I think the eldercare industry is going to explode and Caring.com seems to be in a good position to take advantage of the opportunity to help.

Imagine texting your plan for an immediate response on:

• Your deductible
• Your FSA balance
• Your copay on a specific drug
• Whether a provider is in network
• The status of your prior authorization
• A list of formulary alternatives

Neil Versel recently wrote about Medicine 2.0 here and here. Check out the postings, it looks like there was some nice stuff going on there.

The proceedings of the conference are freely available.