Uncategorized

A collection of 155  Posts

Join me for a free webinar on “Understanding the Escalating Data Challenges of Meaningful Use” on Thursday, April 7th

I’ve been doing a good deal of coaching and consulting on what Meaningful Use really means to technology professionals lately so I was pleased to accept an invitation by Informatica to lead a webinar on that subject for a data management audience. Data management professionals and the executives that they report to have now had enough time to learn how difficult meeting the escalating requirements for MU actually is; most are reporting that it’s been more work than they thought.

Interesting news this morning from the Wall Street Journal: Some managers believe Mr. Page will eliminate or downgrade projects he doesn’t believe are worthwhile, freeing up employees to work on more important initiatives, these people said. One project expected to get less support is Google Health, which lets people store medical records and other health data on Google’s servers, said people familiar with the matter. The statement above comes from WSJ’s article “At Google, Page Aims to Clear Red Tape” in which the reporter, Amir Efrati, lays out the case that Larry Page (the CEO that will take over April 4) is looking to streamline Google to act a bit more like a startup than the 24,000 person behemoth that it is.

The Center for Business Innovation (TCBI), run by my friend Satish Kavirajan, is currently organizing the Business Intelligence & Analytics for Healthcare Conference & Exhibition: Managing Data to Drive Quality, Financial Performance & Accountable Care, to be held in San Diego on July 11-12, 2011. I’m an advisor for the conference, will be speaking on several topics, and will be co-chairing. Satish puts together some great conferences because he focuses on specific topics and gives plenty of time for networking and one-on-one learning plus some very decent deep-dive workshops.

Patricia Walling, a graduate student who has both professional and volunteer experience in a hospital environment, reached out to me via e-mail recently about some of her ideas of how physicians can communicate with their patients through social networking. I liked her ideas and invited her to put together an guest posting on the subject. Most healthcare professionals are already busy doing a hundred things a day and connecting to patients via social networks is probably the last thing on their minds; however, if patients are online they may have no choice but to meet them on the sites they frequent.

In my previous posting I wrote “You will be better off waiting until FY 2012 on Meaningful Use.” I received a bunch of questions via e-mail about that so I thought I would clarify my recommendations. I agree, based on Protima Advani’s evidence cited at iHealthBeat, that waiting until 2012 for attestation (registration, etc.) for Meaningful Use makes more sense for almost everyone since there’s no reduction in the incentives, there’s more time to implement your processes and procedures, and lower risk of how fast you must move to stage 2.

Anthony Guerra pointed me to an article by Protima Advani at iHealthBeat which contains some very important advice about whether you should consider attesting to Meaningful Use (MU) and go for incentive money in 2011 or 2012. Here is what Protima writes (bold, emphasis mine). The registration process and reporting period for the meaningful use incentive program officially commenced on Jan. 3. More than 21,000 health care providers have registered to date and many more are ramping up efforts to meet meaningful use criteria and collect federal incentives in fiscal year 2011.

Today, Wil Yu (Special Assistant, Innovations) over at ONC wrote about a new innovation challenge that is giving out money to developers who can create micro apps that run in the new SMART architecture containers. If you’re not familiar with SMART and want a technical introduction, head over to the SMART Wiki; if you just want a quick overview from the business side, check out the home page. I personally love the idea — it’s basically a medical apps centric version of the FaceBook platform.

I spend a lot of time talking with CEOs, CIOs, and other senior executives about what HIPAA security and HITECH privacy policies really mean. I hear a lot of naive talk about how systems are secure because “we use SSL encryption” or “we’re secure because we have a firewall”. Anybody who’s been security and privacy work for more than a few months would know how false those statements are. Security (whether it’s for HIPAA, HITECH, or banks) starts with secure operating systems, databases, and other infrastructure elements like proxies and firewalls and the depth of security is really controlled by system admins.

With tons of money coming into the healthcare IT ecosystem, it’s become vogue to build healthcare IT and EHR applications. When an engineer new to healthcare looks at a typical health application they think they can throw something quickly and sometimes bad advice is being given to business people who are budgeting for new projects. I’m often asked “What human capital does it take to develop healthcare IT and EHR apps?

Medigy Innovation Network

Connecting innovation decision makers to authoritative information, institutions, people and insights.

Medigy Logo

The latest News, Insights & Events

Medigy accurately delivers healthcare and technology information, news and insight from around the world.

The best products, services & solutions

Medigy surfaces the world's best crowdsourced health tech offerings with social interactions and peer reviews.


© 2025 Netspective Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Built on Mar 12, 2025 at 5:07am