Opinion

Digitally managed clinical trials have the potential to accelerate results report and reduce costs but workflow questions and regulatory questions remain. In many facets of our lives digital data collection has improved services, eliminated errors, and reduced waste in time and resources. Think about the ticketing and check-in process at airports ten years ago vs. today: when airlines put the information in our hands we were able to do the check-in, seat selection, and other work for them. ...

_It was evident from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month that there’s a great deal of interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) in general and for Health IoT in particular. Given that interest I thought I would reach out to a couple of experts to help explore the IoT landscape. Murali Kurukunda is_ Director of IT and Lead Architect at _Medecision and Dr. Peter L. Levin, is CEO at_ Amida, director of _ConversaHealth, and a father of the BlueButton initiative (which he helped launch as CTO of VA)_. ...

The nice folks at Ingenious Med reached out to get my opinion on the recent ICD-10 transition. They summarized my thoughts in a recent post on their blog. Their questions reminded me of similar ones I’ve been recently asked so I thought I’d elaborate them here. Q: How will the additional specificity required by ICD-10 pose a challenge for clinicians and the way that they currently track patient information? A: For clinicians with “simple” requirements – such as specialists or those that don’t perform too many different diagnoses or procedures the transition will be annoying but not catastrophic. ...

Last week I wrote about how federated groups of investors help de-risk innovations in the Venture Development Lifecycle (VDLC). Yesterday I elaborated on how entrepreneurs can understand risk through various funding cycles. One of the most important investors we didn’t talk about in the VDLC was the strategic investor (what I like to call the mission-driven investor) . Mission-driven strategics view risk differently and entrepreneurs should create investor journey maps to take them into account. ...

The folks from HP Matter digital magazine wanted to know where I thought digital health startups, product innovators, and venture capital investors should be pointing their attention in 2015. These are some of my technology and healthcare predictions: CMS’s request for information (RFI) on new primary care models bears innovative fruit. Interoperability will move beyond talk and into sustainable business models and real technology. The healthcare ecosystem should be able to create lasting patient benefits. ...

These days I’ve been getting an increasing number of questions from some very smart readers of this blog about whether or not graduate degrees or technical (HIT-specific or otherwise) certifications are worth the effort. I’ve written a few posts recently on similar topics and those are worth reviewing: Check out these videos if you’re looking for healthcare IT jobs The realities of getting a job in healthcare IT How to get a job in healthcare IT when you don’t have specific experience My view on HIT (or other technical) certifications The last post in the list above goes into specific detail about what I think about certifications but I didn’t talk much about graduate degrees so I’ll elaborate a bit more on that here. ...