Medigy Logo The Healthcare IT Guy
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@ShahidNShah

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A collection of 155  Posts

Is speech enabling your clinical app or EHR in a day really possible?

I spoke at length today with the nice folks from Nuance Healthcare and John Vasicek, Senior Engineering Director, sold me on their new Speech SDK (software development kit). Called “Speech Anywhere,” the SDK is part of the new Nuance Healthcare Development Platform which will hit the street by the end of the month. I’ve been a long-time user of Dragon Naturally Speaking and I’m continuously amazed as to how much better their recognition is for medical / clinical speech vs.

Shahid N. Shah

What can cause medical device and health IT projects go from “best case” to “worst case”

We always go into our medical device and healthcare IT projects with the best of intentions and the grandest of hopes. However, these are complex undertakings with patient safety and mission critical statuses in all but the most trivial cases. If you’re leading or participating in these projects you’ll be asked for launch estimates — I recommend that you never give one answer. Try and give a “best case” (where everything goes right), “nominal case” (the likely scenario), and “worst case” (where lots of mistakes are made).

Shahid N. Shah

Consider MySQL ‘Archive’ storage engine to store large amounts of med device structured or waveform data

I’ve been working on med device integrations for the many years now and one of the most common questions that arises when doing those integrations is “what’s the best way to save sensor waveform and analog to digital values?” Given the complexity of medical devices, there’s no single or simple answer but one approach that’s worked well for me in the past is to assume that whatever the data is, when it comes into digital format, it’s likely structured in some manner.

Shahid N. Shah

How to leverage Web 2.0 through content management systems for hospitals and practice websites

Most hospitals today have static (basic content) websites and many physician practices are putting up a static web presence as well. The more sophisticated health systems and practices, though, are building their sites on dynamic platforms that allow Web 2.0 functionality like social networking and online communities. IBM developerWorks recently asked me to talk about this trend so I wrote an article on how to develop content management systems for hospitals and leverage social Web 2.

Shahid N. Shah

How to develop lightweight ancillary tools connected to electronic health records systems

We’re already familiar with the HITECH Act and how it offers money to physicians, hospitals, and multi-hospital systems to become “meaningful users” of certified electronic health records (EHR) systems. Since most hospitals and large providers who are going after stimulus money will need to install an EHR, it’s important to choose one that allows great integration so that the investment can be realized for many years to come. Because most EHR vendors are focused on their own specific certification requirements (and not your specific enterprise needs), it’s important to have a strategy for how to extend EHR systems.

Shahid N. Shah

The Case for Regulating EMRs and the New FDA MDDS Rules

My friend Tim Gee has two great posts covering a couple of very important and timely topics. If you haven’t seen them, check out the following: The Case for Regulating EMRs In this article, Tim articulated the following: In testimony at the Health and Human Services’ Health Information Technology Policy Committee, Adoption/Certification Workshop held on February 25, 2010, CDRH Director, Jeffrey Shuren, gently articulated FDA’s intent to regulate EMR applications.

Shahid N. Shah

It’s HL7: What Can Go Wrong?

These days I’m getting lots of questions about medical connectivity, health data integration, and system interfaces. There are many options for custom clinical data integration but the best is of course HL7 because it’s ubiquitous. People that aren’t experienced with health data interfaces often think that since we have HL7 interfaces we basically have a standard that we can apply equally to all problems. Given that’s not the case I asked Glenn Johnson, a 25-year veteran of the software industry with good healthcare experience and a senior vice president with Magic Software Enterprises Americas, to give us some advice about what can go wrong with HL7 interfaces and how to avoid some of the pitfalls.

Shahid N. Shah

HL7 Interface Documentation: 6 Questions Hospital CIOs and IT Directors Should Be Asking Vendors

With healthcare IT integration tasks finally taking off because of Meaningful Use and other care collaboration requirements, HL7 interfaces will become even more important. After being involved in dozens of interfacing efforts over the past decade or so, I have found one of the most time-consuming aspects of integration is HL7 interface documentation: nobody has time to do it and it’s almost always treated as a “nice to have”. Given my experience I was thrilled to find that someone was finally putting together some solutions to make conformance specifications easier to document.

Shahid N. Shah

What kind of business model does your bright health IT idea have?

I speak regularly (and write irregularly) about the importance of iterating through to a solid business model before you get too far with your great healthcare IT product idea. Whatever new idea you have in health IT has likely been tried before and if it failed it was likely not because the tech didn’t work but they probably didn’t understand the difference between the payer of a system, the user of a system, and a benefiter of the system (what I call my “PBU” circle).

Shahid N. Shah

Fred Trotter’s Patient Centered Health Internet Makes Sense

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, check out Fred Trotter’s Patient Centered Health Internet article. He elegantly explains the simplicity of the Direct model vs. the the more complex (but ultimately still necessary) NHIN national model (read my article on NHIN at IBM if you’re not familiar with all these terms). There really isn’t a competition between the two models long-term because we’ll need both but the new Direct Project is coming along quickly enough that I recommend small offices and health systems really start to take a look at in 2011.

Shahid N. Shah
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