The conference has a series of  little demo sessions which look at new tools for Ix

Medseek. Spend the last ten years building web portals and content management systems for hospitals. Their 4 audiences are patients, consumers, employees and providers/physicians.

Their aim is for personalized, targeted in time and documented. What they have put into the eVisit is delivery of written documentation but done through the web. Henry Ford has implemented the MyHealth personal health site relevant to their site. They have inbox for messages, different transactions and different personalization. All this is within Medseek’s tech world (which lies ontop of their home grown EMR) or adjacent to it.

For the eVisit they first present them with a billing set-up and then a profile creation site (very similar)—then patient is matched to a record number in the HFHS EMR. Then they select their physicians—may have been instructed to do this by their physician, and might be able to tell their usual complaint or introduce a new one. Then they go through a clinical questionnaire of 15–25 minutes (like an instant medical history). Then that is all signed off one and sent to the physician. Typically at HF the doc is in the EMR when they get this and they can see the patients questionnaire. They review it as a clinical note (like a SOAP note).

Then the doc can respond within the work flow. They can either send a (secure) email back to the patient (and keep a thread of the message). The physician can end the visit with a diagnosis and a treatment, which involves entering billing and ICD9 codes. The system can add information content (e.g. Healthwise) to the doctor. That is then all documented as part of the encounter in the EMR.

At the moment HF is not really integrating this with the EMR fully (in terms of giving a health history) but this can be done.

Do already do appt requests, Rx refills. Use a CRM system to manage and mine that, and find that the most profitable patients are their online patients. Around 75,000 appt requests. generated $20m from appointment requests.

For these visits instead wanted to not do unstructured text messages (as a doc). Want instead to get the structured history (which is a version of Primetime’s).

Are not charging if they are a HAP plan member (that’s the captive plan of HFHS) but it’s going to be $20 for others.

As an extension of this HF is doing a study. 50K patients already on the portal and now releasing it for 3 clinics (out of 24) Goal is to have 12 using eVisits, 12 are a control. In a 3 year study want to look at outcomes, work days lost, etc. So we’ll let you know in 3 years.

Enhanced Medical Decisions. Has a new product called DoubleCheckMD

Most drug errors are between drugs that should be taken together, but don’t work for those patients. So they’ve built an online system that can match drugs and symptoms and figures out all the various permutations. Essentially a drug-drug-symptom interaction checker system….that can take consumer data (including OTC weird foods, herbals, grapefruit juice)

Also now are adding more than symptoms—e.g are now reading what lab tests that you should have. Here are the symptoms that you should be looking for.

Interesting product gives you back a list of symptoms from drugs, interactions, next steps and information.

Intended to be an early warning for the consumer (not a provider view) which then tells them to how to work with their physicians. Very early days and not on the web yet but well worth watching.