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Biomedical Ontology in Action

A call for papers went out for an interesting workshop being held in Baltimore later this year. The Biomedical Ontology in Action event, organized by the National Center for Ontology Research (NCOR) and the Working Group on Formal (Bio-)Medical Knowledge Representation of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), seems like a great gathering of ontology experts. Here’s how they describe their goal: This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from a broad range of fields that are related to formal ontology and medical informatics.

Shahid N. Shah

New York’s MIT Enterprise Forum hosting “Connected Healthcare” on May 4th

The MIT Enterprise Forum, a great organization that knows how to put together very useful events related to new business opportunities, recently announced the Connected Healthcare gathering to discuss medical technology and communications. Here’s how they describe the event: The newly coined phrase “Connected Healthcare” — and the related concept “Healthcare Unbound” — refers to communication and medical technology in, on and around the body that enables healthcare professionals to monitor and care for patients outside of the clinical setting.

Shahid N. Shah

Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture & Technology Reference Architecture

One of my readers, Ed Dodds, introduced me to the Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture & Technology reference architecture initiative known as C.O.M.B.A.T. It seems they are currently cooperating with the OMG (HL7-OMG Healthcare Services Specification Project workgroup) and various open source health initiatives (Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework, OpenEHR). He said that they anticipate a medical banking grid which would connect Healthcare Savings Accounts, portalized Electronic Medical Records, real-time remittance, and integrated charity care eligibility where medical data is expressed via cell phones, web tablets, and IPTV set top boxes (interactive home healthcare servers) as well as integrated remote disease management.

Shahid N. Shah

The downside of health IT: seeing fewer patients

Military.com posted an interesting article last week on how the Defense Department’s electronic medical record-keeping system,AHLTA, has reduced patient access to many military outpatient clinics and has lengthened workdays for many doctors. A few notable quotes from the article: “It takes on average two to four times more time to document in AHLTA than it did when we used paper,” Nelson said. “For a simple visit like pink eye, patient time can take as little as three to four minutes to diagnose and explain to parents.

Shahid N. Shah

Health IT systems and medical devices should learn about CAP

The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) are two standards that have been promoted by organizations that need to transfer information to each other during times of emergencies (natural disasters, terrorist incidents, etc). There are lots of vendors supporting CAP but I haven’t seen much use within health IT or medical devices so I thought I’d blog about what CAP and EDXL are so that our CIO and CTO readers out there can help their own teams understand why it might be important to learn about the standards.

Shahid N. Shah

Ken Kizer, CEO of Medsphere and former top VA official, pitches open source medical software to Congress

Kenneth Kizer spoke to the Ways & Means Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives last week. He pitched the virtues of electronic medical records but focused on open source. He suggested that Congress make the selection of open source software the default mode for federal funds. Here’s what he said specifically: Open source software is less well developed in health care than for some other enterprises, but open source software solutions for health care are now rapidly evolving.

Shahid N. Shah

Healthcare Blogs: The Authoritative Guide

Over the past several months, I’ve had the pleasure of participating in a special project that Fard Johnmar of Envision Solutions has been involved in. He first contacted me in early January about an interview I participated in with John Cass of Backbone Media. In that interview I spoke about the fear pharmaceutical companies have of the blogosphere and why they should be embracing this medium rather than avoiding it. Fard told me that he was working on a report on healthcare blogging and I agreed to be interviewed for it.

Shahid N. Shah

The Connecting for Health Common Framework

The Markle Foundation recently unveiled their Common Framework on the Connecting For Health website. Here’s how they describe the project: The Common Framework provides an essential set of technical and policy resources for private and secure health information sharing among existing and developing health information networks. All of the Connecting for Health Common Framework resources are available here at no cost. The Common Framework includes 16 technical and policy components developed by experts in information technology, health privacy law, and policy, and tested since mid-2005 by Connecting for Health prototype teams in Indianapolis, Boston, and Mendocino County, California.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Beware of NULLs in healthcare databases

Many readers have been asking for more “practical” advice on their database models so I’ve asked a fellow healthcare data architect to lend a hand. Tom Maloney is a Senior Data Architect for Stockamp and Associates with over 25 years of experience and knowledge working with and designing databases for most industries. Tom has done a lot of freelance contracting through his own company where he lives and breathes data modeling.

Shahid N. Shah

XML data models are viable alternatives to relational data models in healthcare systems

I have received many comments on my recent Data Models in Healthcare series of articles and all of them have been pretty good. One of the more detailed and thoughtful responses came from Daniel Essin, a physician who is the Director of Medical Informatics at Los Angeles County Hospital and CTO of ChartWare. He wrote about using XML data models for clinical data management and in general I agree that XML is a viable persistence model for the use case he refers to.

Shahid N. Shah
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