Don’t forget that there’s a Health 2.0 Show, our free online hour long show at 10 PST/1pm EST. Today (Thursday). Register here for FREE.
We’ll be taking a look back at some highlights from the Health 2.0 Spring Fling, and have brought back some live product demos:
Health 2.0 is supporting and I’m attending The Health Data Initiative Forum on June 9, 2011 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, and you should too. The Forum aims to accelerate momentum for the public use of data and innovation to improve health as part of The Health Data Initiative, a collaborative project of the Institute of Medicine and the Department of Health and Human Services. The Forum will feature more than 45 fast-paced demonstrations of cutting-edge health apps that developed using health data, a series of panel discussion sessions on important health topics, and a data and apps expo. You’ll be able to interact with developers, as well as investors, venture capitalists, and federal, state and local government officials. A provisional agenda is available online. Space is limited and the registration is filling up fast! Take a moment to register today, and let me know if you have any questions….and yes this was written by an IOM PR person not me, but it’s all true!
PatientsLikeMe has, since before we first featured them at Health 2.0 in 2007, been the patient online community continually pushing the boundaries for patients with rare diseases. It started with MS, ALS and Parkinson’s and slowly moved towards mental health. And along the way PLM developed some of the most unique reporting tools both for patients and for third party (read: pharma) researchers. However, it always stayed away from the really big disease categories, like diabetes. No longer. As of today anyone can start a community for any condition at PatientsLikeMe. As of right now there are 182 patients with type 2 diabetes. Of course this is minuscule compared to Diabetic Connect or dLife, but given PLM’s reputation and press coverage, the gloves are well off in the patient community contest.
This was sensational when I saw it live at TEDMED and it’s even more amazing second time around. Sekou & Steve do 18 minutes of beat poetry & intensity–“we know when life ends, but when does death begin!
It’s been a couple of months since we moved THCB to WordPress and added the channels you see at the top. As you may have noticed there have been some teething troubles, and for all its power WordPress does have some problems. We’re still working on fixing the right hand columns. However, we’re able to do some things that we couldn’t before–including this little mini-blog microbrew that allows me (Matthew) to write little pieces that I like without having to write enough for a whole post. WordPress also does much better on spam trapping;I literally just went through 1,000 spam comments and only 3 were false positives. If youve had problems posting comments try taking OUT any links (that tends to trigger the spam filter).
But overall you can expect more and better from THCB in the coming weeks…and we’ll be keeping you updated.
This week I spent quite a bit of time at the very new and very fancy Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health in Washington DC. It’s next door to a very large medical office building (110+ docs) in which KP is showcasing its current integrated care model, and how far its come in its mid-Atlantic region. The Center is a pretty fascinating place–part tech and idea showcase and part meeting room. Certainly no other health care organization that I’m aware of has spent so much on a place designed to stimulate the imagination and enhance conversation–under the nose of the folks on Capitol Hill. I won’t get into here whether this is how money should be spent in health care but on balance I’m a fan. (FD KP is a sponsor of the Health 2.0 Conference I co-run). Instead I want to try to give you a feel for the place, and why it fits their vision and what it’s trying to demonstrate.
I took a tour with some colleague journo/blogger types led by the always expressive Robbie Pearl (CEO of the Permanente Groups in N Cal and now DC too–the airlines thank him!) and with Phil Fasano, CIO of the whole organization. Robbie is not shy in voicing his opinions (as you’ll see) and Phil occasionally trots out the voice of caution to reel in Robbie’s vision a tad. It was great fun.
What was also fun was the cocktail party at the grand opening. There I met three of my favorite DC-based ladies in health: Deven McGraw, Regina Holliday & Cindy Throop. So we’ll start with that fun video, and then there’s a whole lot more from the tour of the center after the jump. All these videos are pretty short.
After that fun and games, lets head to the tour. This is a series of videos of me and a few others testing out the displays, and listening to Pearl & Fasano, as well as asking them a couple of pointed questions.
But I’ll take the tour in order….after a quick thanks to Holly Potter, Danielle Cass, Ravi Poorsina & center boss Julie Norris who with a ton of their colleagues worked their butts off keeping hundreds of visitors informed and entertained.
First up, Robbie Pearl on the current state of the KP.org health record and why we shouldn’t have to put up with less; what he called the 19th century state of medicine. And I can assure that is on display in my wife’s OBGYN office every time I visit.Continue reading…
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A recent front-page article [1] in the New York Times conveyed grim news about patient safety. The first large-scale study [2] of hospital safety in a decade concluded that care has not gotten significantly safer since the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 estimate [3] of up to 98,000 preventable deaths and 1 million preventable injuries annually.
What for me struck a particularly jarring note was not just the absence of improvement, but the reluctance of the health care leaders interviewed to speak candidly about why progress has been so slow. Instead, they offered nostrums about the need to “do more” or opined that “openness” or better “coordination” would somehow turn the tide.
But tucked in the actual study’s conclusions section, between bland boilerplate about “further study” and a “refocusing of resources,” some carefully worded candor cautiously peeked through: “[T]he absence of large-scale improvement is not evidence that current efforts to improve safety are futile,” wrote Christopher Landrigan and colleagues in the Nov. 25 New England Journal of Medicine. “On the contrary, data have shown that focused efforts to reduce discrete harms, such as nosocomial infections and surgical complications, can significantly improve safety.”
In plain language, we know how to prevent many of these patient deaths, but we don’t. That makes, “Why?” a lot tougher question.
A while ago at an IOM meeting I mis-spoke and called Geisinger, “Kaisinger” and it kinda sounded right. Well now those two Epic users with another similar Epic user (Group Health) have teamed up with Mayo (home grown IT) and InterMountain (3M + homegrown + GE) to share patient data. Now it hasn’t happened yet — this is the announcement of what is to come (although KP is inter-operating with the VA in San Diego). But they’re going to use NHIN standards. My understanding is that they’re going to start with moving data using CCD (a subset of the records) and then move to access full patient data via common medical identifiers. Of course while this is great news, the chances of a typical California Kaiser patient showing up in rural Pennsylvania isn’t that high. But if they can do it across the country, why can’t they and others do it across the street? In other words resolve what Jonathan Bush calls the Paper Aeroplane method of interoperability. After all that type of random showing up–even for Kaiser patients in a Sutter run ER–is a big deal. Let’s hope this announcement is a big spur, and allows others to join.
Today’s been a big day in Health IT. First Kaiser Permanente has opened a very flashy Center for Total Health in DC. I took a tour today and lots of it is focused on the use of and extension of their Epic-based medical record (including adding lots of applications to that platform). But it’s open in DC in order to show the DC crowd what can be done. Meanwhile if you don’t have $6 billion lying around to put in a medical record, perhaps spending nothing may be a better option. And today free EMR “vendor” Practice Fusion got $23m in venture funding which will help them give away a whole more EMRs which will soon have a whole lot more applications attached to that EMR.
I’m not quite as convinced as some that there’s too much difference in the amount of consulting being requested and required by health systems now compared to in years past. After all it wasn’t so many years ago that APM made every hospital in America buy physicians one year and sell them the next. And there’s been plenty of cash poured down the drain of Meaningful Use and EMR implementation. But this WaPo article manages to quote 2 of the 3 best known health futurists (FD I know them all well!) not to mention a bunch of others, on the topic of consulting being demanded in the ramp up to ACOs. So while journo Bara Vaida got quotes from Ian Morrison & Jeff Goldsmith, I’m concerned–couldn’t she find Joe Flower’s email?
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