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IEEE, AMA, and 8 other associations join forces to work on standards to accelerate HIT adoption

Before you roll your eyes at YASE (yet another standards effort) take a look at this article at IEEE: Medical Records: From Clipboard To Point-and-Click. I’m biased (I run a local IEEE Computer Society chapter) but I think this effort might have some legs. The official word is that the IEEE has joined forces with eight other medical and engineering societies to form an umbrella consortium, the Biotechnology Council. The council’s primary goal is to standardize everything from medical terminology to networking protocols so that medical records can be stored electronically and sent instantly anywhere in the world — all with absolute privacy, security, and understandability.

Shahid N. Shah

Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design

There’s been a lot of discussion on various blogs about the Cerner CPOE article (where there’s a claim about increased mortality rates because of it). Jakob took a stab at tackling medical software usability in Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design. It’s not terribly informative nor is there much new in there (the main information comes from a JAMA article), but at least it’s a start. I’m thinking about doing a usability study on existing medical and health IT software.

Shahid N. Shah

What’s wrong with health care IT

Matthew’s got an interesting article on What’s wrong with health care IT. I’m not sure I completely agree that just because there are 45 other options out there that the 46th one won’t be useful, but it’s true that we in health IT do sometimes like to reinvent the wheel. And, it’s not always bad — sometimes the reinvention process does create something useful. I don’t recommend building technology instead of buying for hospitals but given that there’s no such thing as a thoroughly succesful PHR we can hardly blame people for thinking they could do it better.

Shahid N. Shah

Phreesia is a great example of consumer driven healthcare technology done right

One of my favorite pastimes as a health IT pundit is reviewing new technology before it hits the streets or becomes popular. Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with the founders of Phreesia, a company focused on improving the patient experience in Doctors’ offices waiting rooms. The idea is simple but effective: instead of reading a magazine while they’re waiting, healthcare cosumers (some people call them patients) are handed a free Phreesia WebPad where they can provide their demographics, chief complaints, and other very basic registration information and based on what they tell the WebPad it will show them web pages and drug information related to their symptoms.

Shahid N. Shah

Tracking of HIPAA complaints filed

A reader e-mailed a question this morning: Do you know where I can find up-to-date data on HIPAA complaints filed? I’m trying to research current Privacy complaints submitted by category and resolution. I spoke with my friend Bob Burns, who’s about as knowledgable a health IT expert there is, and he said that the original HIPAA law did not mandate any enforcement (although it did specifiy penalties) so there is no real HIPAA enforcement bureau yet.

Shahid N. Shah

Splunk for Healthcare is making more sense

A little while ago I wrote about using Splunk, a nice IT systems log aggregator and search engine, in the healthcare sector. I just spoke with the product manager in charge of the tool at Splunk and I liked what I heard even more: they have a solid design, good APIs, and an open approach to accepting almost any kind of ASCII data and creating a searchable index and relationships between data.

Shahid N. Shah

Increased mortality reported after CPOE implementation

Scary article of the week: Increased Mortality after CPOE Implementation. It concluded the following: We have observed an unexpected increase in mortality coincident with CPOE implementation. Although CPOE technology holds great promise as a tool to reduce human error during health care delivery, our unanticipated finding suggests that when implementing CPOE systems, institutions should continue to evaluate mortality effects, in addition to medication error rates, for children who are dependent on time-sensitive therapies.

Shahid N. Shah

Is there a Healthcare IT bubble?

I’m not sure that it’s ever possible to have a health IT bubble because the money amounts are so tiny in comparison to other bubbles; however, Tim Gee posits some good points about it in his post from today.

Shahid N. Shah

We need a Central Bank and credit reporting bureau equivalent for healthcare

Investors Business Daily reports a cure for health IT woes. Yes, the previous statement is a bit sardonic but it’s interesting that IBD would even mention a “cure” for what plagues the HIT industry. They start the article with: …when it comes to health care, most people suffer a system rife with antiquated record-keeping, slow communications and costly manual labor for mundane tasks. It’s a pain for patients, doctors and insurers alike.

Shahid N. Shah

Could everybody’s ADT system use the same database schema?

Tim at HISTalk poses a poingnant question: Could Everybody’s ADT System Use the Same Database Schema? Some excerpts: What I was really thinking about is the idea that the database design tells you how the application works. If that’s true, then what technical functions of the vendor add the most value? Is it database design, GUI design, algorithms, content, or something else? If our vendor’s competitor got a copy of the schema I was looking at, would it really reveal any proprietary secrets or otherwise turn on their lightbulbs with great ideas to change their own app?

Shahid N. Shah
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