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Consolidating and serving live data from medical devices

Tim at Medical Connectivity talks about the state of the market of medical device connectivity providers. It seems lots of folks have forgotten about the IEEE 1073 standard since it’s not getting a whole lot of press these days, but perhaps discussion about the standard needs to get resurrected so that it starts to show up in proposals and RFQs more often than it does. For a more detailed overview of the state of medical connectivity see Tim’s earlier article.

Shahid N. Shah

Two of history’s worst software bugs reported to be in medical software

Wired magazine’s History’s Worst Software Bugs article shows two of them were created by the medical software community. Getting on this top 10 list is not exactly a badge of honor, but we can certainly learn from the failings of the past. Wired says the first one occured between 1985 and 1987: Therac-25 medical accelerator. A radiation therapy device malfunctions and delivers lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities. Based upon a previous design, the Therac-25 was an “improved” therapy system that could deliver two different kinds of radiation: either a low-power electron beam (beta particles) or X-rays.

Shahid N. Shah

It’s a good time to be in healthcare IT

I’ve been in the healthcare IT industry for a little over 10 years now and I’ve noticed that 2005 feels alot like 1999 in terms of healthcare IT mindshare, reporting, and investments. I think much of the reason for the resurgence in health IT these days is due to President Bush’s Spring 2004 call for the creation of electronic medical records (EMRs) for most American’s within 10 years. I was a co-founder of a healthcare dotcom that started in ’98 and was sold back in 2001 (we ran out of money).

Shahid N. Shah

Buyer beware: encryption does not mean application security

It’s funny that most of my time during a review or evaluation of web based healthcare IT systems when I bring up the issue of security the salesperson almost always says “yes, we use SSL.” There’s a great of deal of growth in EMRs, EHRs, and other healthcare applications that will be web hosted over a WAN like the Internet or via a VPN. One thing that all IT community members and architects should be very clear about in our world is that SSL (encryption) is not the same thing as application security.

Shahid N. Shah

Open Healthcare Framework

The Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project was proposed back in June and seems to be a worthy undertaking. They describe the project as: The goal of the Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) is to extend the Eclipse Platform to create an open-source framework for building interoperable, extensible healthcare systems. We also intend to develop a complementary set of exemplary tools. OHF will enable software providers and integrators to cost-effectively create customized offerings for healthcare delivery organizations that comply with government regulations and industry standards.

Shahid N. Shah

Disease-specific blogs may be good for patients, providers

Patients have been using consumer-oriented healthcare IT for some time now through popular sites as WebMD and search engines for looking up information. While many of the healthcare websites have forums and chats for patient-to-patient communications, physicians and nurses should try to turn their patients onto disease-specific blogs as a simple way to help their patients stay informed. Here are a few examples, please comment if you know more. Diabetes Mine The Skin Cancer Blog Autism Alzheimers Simple tip for doctors or nurses trying to help their patients with chronic or long-term diseases: invite them to do a search for their specific disease using the Technorati blog search tool (just enter the name of the disease or common diagnosis terminology in the search box).

Shahid N. Shah

Attitudes of Americans Regarding Personal Health Records

The Markle Foundation recently released the Attitudes of Americans Regarding Personal Health Records and Nationwide Electronic Health Information Exchange research report. It’s numbers are bit lower than the numbers from the 2004 Harris survey regarding interest in personal health records. I didn’t find the new Markle report terribly revealing nor actionable but I am glad to see that Americans would start to use personal health records if all the stars were aligned properly.

Shahid N. Shah

Should we care about EMRs?

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are getting much press these days, especially since the Bush Adminstration is pushing them as a core of the NHII (National Health Information Infrastructure) in the second term agenda. HHS set aside $50 million for EMR projects in 2004 and included $100 million for such projects in its 2005 budget. Everybody seems convinced that we could save billions of dollars and thousands of lives if only we had electronic medical records in place.

Shahid N. Shah
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