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@ShahidNShah

Free and Open Source Healthcare IT unconference in Houston this summer

Fred Trotter, one of the most influential and outspoken voices for free and open source solutions/software (FOSS) in healthcare, just announced that he’s helping put together the FOSS in healthcare unconference. An “unconference” (in case you’re not familiar) is a meetup or gathering of people in which the participants themselves (not the conference organizers) run the conference and decide on the topics and facilitate the conversations. Unconferences don’t have high fees and don’t usually have sponsored presentations like most conventional conferences do.

Shahid N. Shah

Zotero can help with medical research and daily healthcare Information Management work

Most of us in the healthcare industry are constantly doing research of one kind or another (doctors have to keep up with new procedures and the latest research, nurses have to keep up with latest techniques, etc). Most of us just end up using simple but inefficient tools like files on our desktop, folders on a USB drive, MS Word for editing, printouts for clippings, etc. Dr. Rich Olson, a surgeon friend of mine, pointed me to the Zotero Firefox plugin this weekend.

Shahid N. Shah

Astronauts have checklists, why not surgeons?

The debate around checklists for physicians in general and surgeons specifically has raged for decades. When a task becomes sufficiently complex (like astronauts controlling spacecraft or pilots flying aircraft) it has been shown that simple multi-step checklists, that professionals are required to document completion of, can significantly reduce risky procedures and work. Astronauts are pretty bright, why do they need checklists but surgeons don’t? According to the New England Journal of Medicine, a safety checklist in the operating room has the potential to reduce complications and improve survival rates of patients after surgery.

Shahid N. Shah

Nice new web-based physician Marketing and Social Networking site

The folks at Phyzoom have recently released a social networking site for physicians that adds a nice twist – it’s helpful for marketing services between physicians and other parts of their healthcare ecosystem (insurance, hospitals, etc). I’ve seen and reviewed a number of physician-oriented social networking sites (like Sermo and Ozmosis) but Phyzoom seems to be the first one looking to help doctors with marketing and increasing patient visits. It’s an excellent idea.

Shahid N. Shah

Free e-Prescribing with NEPSI and Integration Challenges

Many Physicians have been asking me for what my suggestion is for e-prescribing both now and in the future. My simple answer for them is that unless you have an EMR fully functional and working in your practice and e-prescribing is built-in, you should give the NEPSI guys a shot: they are offering free and pretty decent e-prescribing nationwide to any Physician willing to sign up. If you’re a NEPSI user, help out your fellow physicians and tell us:

Shahid N. Shah

Clinical trials Patient Recruitment done right with Web 2.0 and Social Networking

One of the biggest challenges in conducting clinical trials is recruiting the right patients. It’s an often expensive, time-consuming, and difficult process where you usually need contract firms or other specialists to do your recruitments. This week I learned about a New York based healthcare IT startup, TrialX, which is doing some pretty innovative stuff around patient recruitment by using Google’s and Microsoft’s personal health platforms to help match patients with specific trials.

Shahid N. Shah

Healthcare IT spending is not dead in Hospitals (yet)

The nice folks at NAHIT sent out a note about their new survey of about 144 CIOs that captured technology executive’s views on healthcare IT spending. The report’s key findings include (these are direct quotes from the report): More than half of the CFOs/VPs Finance (55%) are experiencing slight or significant delays in accessing capital and expect the financial crisis to last another 12 to 24 months.**** CFOs/VPs Finance are delaying or lengthening timeframes for completing new facilities or facility upgrades (74%,) deferring IT equipment purchases (57%) and delaying or lengthening timeframes for implementing health IT initiatives (52%).

Shahid N. Shah

iPhone and iPod Touch Medical Applications

Dr. Joshua Schwimmer wrote an article earlier this year called The New 3G iPhone, Doctors, The App Store, and Medicine in which he tried to predict what kinds of iPhone (and of course iPod Touch) applications would be available once Apple opened up the platform to 3rd party programmers. This week he posted an update called Medical Applications in the iTunes App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch in which he highlights some of the almost 100 medical apps available for the Apple mobile platform.

Shahid N. Shah

AMIA report on Open Source Implementations of Healthcare Software

Fred Trotter sent out a link today to the new AMIA report entitled Free and Open Source Software in Healthcare 1.0. Fred reminded us that this is the first time he’s seen a serious count of installations of open source software in non-government institutions. ClearHealth seems to be the leader with over 3 million patient records managed at over 830 sites. Not exactly taking the world by storm but certainly good news that free stuff is being used to do important healthcare data management.

Shahid N. Shah
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