Here is a fabulous ACLU movie on ordering a pizza in 2010 and the inherent violations of privacy that will be involved. The’ve got the date for the all the medical data far too early though (most stuff will still be on paper then), and actually most of that data use is banned already–unless it’s really for medical uses. Plus there will not be a national healh plan by 2010, even if most lefty ACLU supporters (like me) would favor that! The risk is far greater that employers and their private health plan agents will be "suggesting" that their employees agree to these restrictions (in fact last week one employer added an extra charge for smokers to their health premium)

But you can see where we’re headed without some real safeguards built in, which is why the Health Privacy Project gang are doing such good work. (Even if I diss them from time to time).

I was somewhat doubtful about the Harris Poll on abstinence last week. (Non)-Volvo-driving, latte-drinking Jonathan Cohn actually knows something about abstinence. Not that I’m sure what that says about Harvard in the early 1990s but here’s what he told me.

Derek Lowe has an intelligent post on the Pargluva mess, which is essential reading if you care about the FDA and big pharma and transparency — and you should.

Don’t get too used to an unregurgitated Marxist like me saying this, but you should listen to a radio station called 960The Patriot this weekend, as Eric Novack has Alain Enthoven on his show on Sunday from 3-4pm Arizona time. This may be the first time that Eric’s had anyone on who disagrees with him, and I’m looking forward to hearing it. It’ll be in the archives section on Eric’s site later.

Here’s what I wrote about Enthoven and his quarrel with the CDHP crowd.

(I wrote longer wittier stuff in an earlier version of this but Typepad ate it, so I’m giving up for the afternoon. See you Monday!)

Now that I’ve upset every young liberal in America, here’s a blog that I was pointed to by Ezra Klein. It’s called I am Stella, by Kate who is a young health policy wonk in waiting with her own tale of woe of being a patient.  She has a very interesting post on the private vs public cost control issue (although there is a slight flaw in her portrayal that her commenters have noticed–so no cheating before you see what you think).  She also has an excellent post on the Phantoms in the Snow article on cross-border medicine which I was in at the start of, but ducked out of too early to get any credit for….(and which probably improved the credibility of the article!)

Those of you who want to really get into the Canada issue can look here.

We like MrHISTAlk over at THCB, even if he has a bit of a tendency to mouth off like the southern redneck he may be. So go read his thoughts on clinical information systems and CPOE in an article called Thoughts on Clinical Systems: introduction.

Now I’m 42 and never been married, so I don’t agree with most Americans about the very last question on this new Harris/WSJ survey.  But the rest of it shows that we’re a damn site more of a liberal nation than our leaders in DC and on Fox News would have us believe.

On the other hand there is some chance that one day we’ll have universal health insurance, which is not the case for abstinence before marriage, whatever 62% of Americans believe. How many hypocrites are in that number?

Last week’s PHR conference that I didn’t go to (cos they held it in DC and I’m too cheap to fly there by myself) now has an available transcript. (All big PDFs–you have been warned).

The intro is long but good. It has a talk from Carolyn Clancy (AHRQ chief) then a quick 3 person panel on PHRs from CapMed, Brown and Toland (using Medem’s iHealthrecord) and Cleveland Clinic (similar to the PAMF system Paul Tang spoke about). Finally it has a tour de force from Newt Gingrich, who explains exactly what we should have all have a personal health record and gives me no clue as to why we’ll get there. But that doesn’t stop companies giving him $200K a year to join his Center for Health Care Transformation–purely because they are interested in his words of wisdom; sure, yup that’s all they’re interested in!

I haven’t got to this yet but here is the Intel lunch talk, and here’s the last session with Esther Dyson et al

Thanks to John, the tech traumas are over and when you go to www.thehealthcareblog.com you end up in the right place, and it looks like it’s really on a standalone domain although it actually lives on typepad, yet you can get away from there to other sites. Very clever (although for those of you who care apparently TypePad’s instructions are wrong!)

Yesterday’s the AHIMA meeting morning presentations were excellent. The presenters were all on their game, and were also relatively amusing (especially Mark Frisse). But although I know a lot more about the DC based machinations of the national health initiative after this and the Brailer talk yesterday, I’m still of the opinion that there’s less there than meets the eye.

Carole Diamond runs the Markle Foundation and their Connecting for Health Program with the help of David Lansky, who used to run the Foundation for Accountability which Markle has swallowed (more or less) whole. In her speech she talked about Connecting for Health

Connecting for Health cares about

1 Tech standards and adoption

2 Policy framework for successful EMR/PHR/RHIO implementation

3 The consumer

Continue reading “TECH: Privacy, standards, certification and RHIOs–more from AHIMA”