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@ShahidNShah

How to Select the Right EMR, a must-get eBook

John Lynn and I spent a few hours together at HIMSS this past week and he gave me a preview of his new How to Select an EMR eBook. When he first told me about it, I figured it was yet another how to go guide with generalities and high level advice. However, as he and I walked through the various sections I became more and impressed to the point where I now recommend it as a must-read for anyone that’s looking to purchase an EMR and wants to know how to make sure they don’t get sold a lemon by a vendor.

Shahid N. Shah

Understanding the 12 major application clusters in mobile health (mHealth)

The nice folks at the mHealth Initiative invited me to join their merry band of mobile phone-based healthcare applications proponents at a conference they held in DC last month. Claudia Tessier kicked off the conference with this great presentation that describes major mobile phone application clusters. It describes mobile phone usage in patient communication, point of care documentation, disease management, body area networks, education programs, pharma/clinical trials, professional communication, public health, emergency medicine, and financial applications.

Shahid N. Shah

If you sell health IT products, be sure you know about Regional Extension Centers

One of the interesting things funded by the HITECH Act was the creation of the Health Information Technology Program. That program invests in Regional Extension Centers to offer consulting and technical support to help accelerate meaningful use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). All told there are likely going to be 70 (or more) regional centers across the country. One of the major tasks of a Regional Extension Center is to provide guidance on which products to buy.

Shahid N. Shah

Innovation in healthcare IT is dead (hopefully only temporarily)

Ok, maybe not dead but certainly in a coma and on life support. I just got back from HIMSS ’10 in Atlanta. While the energy was great, the people I met were very cool, and the venue and staff made the event quite enjoyable, I left underwhelmed by the substance of what’s being offered and a little worried about one of my favorite industries (health IT). Since I spend plenty of time outside of healthcare IT doing technology strategy work in the financial, web 2.

Shahid N. Shah

The lessons our EMR industry can learn from past failures in the CRM industry

A few days ago I received a great question about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) from a reader via e-mail: In a recent post you made reference to the similarities with CRM and SFA. I was and have been following that topic, like you, for the last decade. My question for you is, do the primary drivers for this come from the same places with different names, or from different places.

Shahid N. Shah

More HIMSS tips for HIT vendors looking to make their case

James Gibson over at Gibson Consultants (a specialized executive search firm targeting healthcare solutions providers and the payor market) saw my recent posting about John Moore’s tips for HIT vendors presenting to us analysts at HIMSS and sent me a note about guest posting on his blog that talks about a similar subject. I wanted to thank James for pointing me to his Tips from a media coach: how to do a trade show right article.

Shahid N. Shah

Thank goodness, the FDA could start regulating healthcare IT systems

A few years ago I wrote that the FDA should be paying closer attention to healthcare IT systems and consider regulating those systems the same as any other medical devices. After all, some healthcare IT systems can kill just as easily as medical devices. I hate quoting myself, but here’s what I wrote back in 2005: If the FDA were paying attention, they would see that lots of hospital information systems, especially those making it over to the clinical side through clinical decision support, should really be regulated.

Shahid N. Shah

Tips for HIT vendors speaking to analysts at HIMSS

John Moore over at Chilmark Research is one smart cookie; in addition to being a world expert on PHRs , he’s a great analyst on general healthcare IT (HIT) topics, too. With HIMSS coming up next and analysts like myself and John being requested to review firms and their products, John has done a great public service (and personal service to me) by posting his Top 5 Do’s & Don’ts for Speaking with Analysts at HIMSS.

Shahid N. Shah

Physician Office Usage of Electronic Healthcare Records Software

SK&A recently surveyed 180,000 medical sites as to their current usage of EHR. That’s one of the largest national surveys I’ve seen — the numbers are about what we expect but it’s great to see that someone actually spent the time doing real research instead of just quoting other smaller surveys. Seems like the SK&A guys are serious about healthcare data. Nice work.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Human Centering in Healthcare IT

I’ve been spending a lot of time on human-computer interactions in healthcare technology these days (both hardware and software). It’s a very hard problem to solve, especially with complex systems like EMRs. To help talk more about how to better design patient-centric healthcare technology, I’ve reached out to Steven Deal, Vice President and systems engineer for Deal Corp, a Dayton-area engineering research firm that specializes in this kind of work. Steven is also volunteer secretary for the Center for Innovation in Family and Community Health, a non-profit organization in the Dayton area so he knows about healthcare technology. Here’s what Steven had to say about human centering of healthcare IT: One approach to reining in healthcare spending is the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH). The PCMH model is intended to reinvigorate primary care by focusing on patient needs and desires. Primary care reduces costs by systematizing healthcare delivery; it counters the piece parts (specialist-driven) approach that results in redundant, costly, and often unnecessary, procedures. The PCMH delivery system is said to be patient centered, but just what does it mean to be “centered?” Requirements for centering preferentially address the needs of one or more of a system’s stakeholders. Alternately, a system could be centered on a particular enabling technology. For example, personal computer systems were built around the enabling technology of microprocessors. So if you are patient centered, you are first and foremost addressing the needs of patients. This approach seems like a no-brainer, since healthcare, or more correctly medical care, is all about addressing patient needs? What else would you center it on? There are actually many options and a lot of them are being implemented today. For example, healthcare could be centered on doctors, on payers, on medical schools, on hospitals, on the government healthcare systems (Medicare, Medicaid), on insurance companies, on research, on pharmaceuticals, or on information technology. If you look closely at the principles of PCMH, it’s not too hard to see that it is really partially doctor centered and partially payer centered. The tug-of-war that is the Washington healthcare-reform debate is really about which stakeholder will come out on top.

Shahid N. Shah
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