Understanding healthcare technology and clinical systems challenges

There’s some nice content at Health Care Technology. It’s really about healthcare best practices but with an emphasis on how technology can help implement those best practices. Their description of their site: The white papers and solution profiles are a collection of viewpoints on the practices, tools, technologies, and trends that affect health care today. These include patient safety issues, efficiency gains in administering care, and improvements on labor issues by increasing time with patients versus time spent on paperwork, all of which ultimately improve patient care and the financial cost of providing that care.

The University of Maryland’s Center for Health Work Force Development says we will be short 1,000,000 nurses by 2015. The causes for the shortages are well known and documented; however, the solutions are not very forthcoming. I’ve been involved in projects that tried to bring in nurses from foreign countries like Phillipines, Pakistan, and India through the U.S. Immigration’s H1-B program but that’s not a complete solution either. Although nursing is a service sector that we can’t automate ourselves out of, are there any ideas that you’d like to share for specific technologies or solutions that may help relieve the nursing shortage pressure?

One of my favorite bloggers, Tim at HIStalk, has blogged about the healthcare IT sales process from a vendor perspective. I’ve been involved in the sales side as well as the technology side for some time and I agree with most of the stuff the guy Tim interviewed had to say. On selecting which customer to concentrate on: My biggest indicator of a person’s influence in the deal is their level of honesty in the dialog.

I’m often asked by people in non-healthcare IT fields about where health and medical IT is headed. With all the publicity health IT is getting these days, lots of my friends want to get into the field but aren’t sure where to start. In case some of you missed the article from earlier this year, Healthcare Informatics talked about that particular topic in Nine Tech Trends, Healthcare IT advances are pulling together to manage an expanding universe.

Healthcare Informatics has a good article on HL7 3.0. Many people think that HL7 3.0 is about “XML enabling” HL7 but it’s actually much more than that, especially if you’re interested in semantic integration of healthcare data. From the article: The limitations of HL7 V2.x … and thus the overarching motivations for the HL7 Version 3 framework, can be summarized as unpredictable message semantics and a consequent lack of scalability, particularly across inter-enterprise boundaries.

A few readers wanted some additional details about how to specifically address information security for healthcare IT based on my HIPAA article yesterday. It seems I forgot to mention that we should all review the guidelines provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its HIPAA Resource Guide. It’s specific and actionable so it’s a great place to start. Keep in mind though that these standards are very high-level and do not deal with specific security issues for specific systems.

Tony’s starting a great new weekly series entitled Hospital Impact Weekly News, which he says is “a quick rundown of the 5 most impactful news stories for hospital executives for that week.” I think it’s a great idea.

A student working on a Ph.d thesis on IT security sent me an email last night asking about interesting problems and industry directions for computer security in healthcare IT. He’s interested in applying his knowledge to this area and was asking specifically about privacy and confidentiality. I figured other students or readers might be interested in my answer so I’m answering the question here and others can comment if they can help out further.

John Eberhardt of DecisionQ Corp will be presenting a tutorial entitled Use of Bayesian Networks to Classify Complex Pathologies at NIH tomorrow. If you’re in the DC area, it might be worth attending. Here are the details: DATE & TIME: Thursday, November 10, 2005, 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. LOCATION: NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Medical Board Room (Room 2C116) SUITABLITY: Anyone interested in the subject matter. NIH CONTACT: Jim DeLeo, 301-496-3848, jdeleo@nih.

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