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@ShahidNShah

Neat little wallet-sized “Smart PHR” card

The health IT industry has been working on personal health records (PHRs) for a while and I suspect it will take years before they really take off in a big way. PHRs are likely not to become prevalent at least until the ambulatory care market starts to recognize their utility and doctors convince patients to use them. I just ran across this new device: MiCard. MiCARD is the size of a credit card (just a bit thicker) and you load your medical record onto it.

Shahid N. Shah

Locking down browsers in healthcare settings to prevent staff misuse

More and more healthcare applications are being re-platformed to run as web applications. While it’s good for ease of deployment, this means that staff that had no business using web browsers before now have valid work reasons to run browsers. This may lead to “unofficial” use of office browsers for non-healthcare use such as shopping, reading the news, playing on FaceBook, or other types of misuse. While some misuse may be acceptable because all it does is waste time, other types of misuse like downloading files, playing music online, etc will cause viruses to enter the network or may take up valuable network bandwidth.

Shahid N. Shah

LinuxMedNews interviews new Medsphere CEO Michael Doyle

Those of us pursuing open source in healthcare IT always like to keep our eyes on what’s going at Medsphere and WorldVistA. It was great to see this interview with the new CEO of Medsphere. These were my favorite questions: LMN: It has been said that: “Medsphere could have been the “RedHat of Medical IT” that our community desperately needs. Instead they are the “Enron of Medical IT”.” because of the lawsuit against its founders Scott and Steve Shreeve.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Rich Internet Applications for Improved Healthcare App User Experience

I’m a huge fan of thin-client systems but the thinner the client, the less functionality it seems to support. A pretty smart colleague of mine, François Jean, is an engineer at Cardinal Health working on a bed side information system and he has some suggestions for healthcare IT systems that need to stay thin for deployment but remain just as functional as a desktop app. François has more than 10 years of experience in the computer science field and is interested in simplifying and improving the quality of software for a faster time to market while maintaining a stellar customer experience.

Shahid N. Shah

Request for Introduction to Healthcare Technology/IT Resources

As a health IT blogger I’m often asked about books and articles that can introduce the general topic of technology (and IT) in healthcare. One of the nicest free resources is available at NIH. It’s called HTA 101: Introduction Health Technology Assessment. It’s worth reading much of the document but there’s a section on fundamental concepts and issues that’s really useful. It’s not specific to IT and the document is more about assessing technology than using it but it’s a good introductory document.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: What Jenny McCarthy can teach us about behavior change and data

As all you probably already know, I’m a follower of healthcare startups and am a sucker for new ideas and smart people. I was recently introduced to Joshua Rosenthal, Ph.D. and when I found out he’s a Fulbright recipient whose work focuses on behavior change I knew I had to get him to share his thoughts about how IT can help. He recently worked with a small team creating clinical facts systems and data architectures for a disease management company with about 20 million members and a multi-dimensional database for a large health plan, tying together disparate data sources (service center calls, web sessions, claims, lab, Dartmouth Atlas, census, consumer/commercial marketing data, etc.

Shahid N. Shah

Microsoft releases new PHR

Microsoft just unveiled HealthVault, the first personal health record (PHR) designed with an ecosystem in mind. I created mine online and it’s a bit sparse but a good start. Anyone who’s doing anything in the consumer space needs to pay attention to HealthVault because Microsoft threw down a pretty good gauntlet that Google will be matching soon. HealthVault has basic record management and simple document management capabilities. It would be great if practice management systems and hospital systems started to connect and share information with HealthVault to make it even more valuable.

Shahid N. Shah

Personalized drug safety alerts

Medication errors account for a larger portion of deaths than they should. As part of my work for various firms I’ve been involved in designing, architecting, and installing drug safety systems in hospitals and IT systems. Reducing medication errors is a big goal for everyone these days but it’s not easy for a patient to do much about it on their own. Until now. I was pleased to learn about iGuard.

Shahid N. Shah

Professional Social Bookmarking can provide real value

I got a note recently from Scott McQuigg, CEO of PeerClip, about their new social bookmarking tool. At first I thought “oh, no – not another ****bookmarking site.” But, I’m a sucker for any new startup in the Health 2.0 space so I took a look. It is one of the first bookmark sharing sites I’ve seen designed for specifically for physicians; I thought it was a great idea. Today, all social bookmarking tools are peer generated content.

Shahid N. Shah

Hospital Rankings Visualized

Naoum Issa at Medical Resource Group showed me a neat little tool at NetDoc which is basically a mashup of Google Maps and HHS hospital database. It uses publicly available data from the Department of Health and Human Services, and displays a summary of the information on a GoogleMap. Although the information shouldn’t be see as canonical, it’s a quick and easy way to access hospital quality data by locale, and the ability to drill down for more detail if necessary.

Shahid N. Shah
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