Author Archives

Matthew Holt

Is REC a Future Train Wreck?

Sep 30, 2010• 7

By JOHN MOORE

Yesterday, HHS’s ONC announced the final two Regional Extension Centers (RECs), one in California and the other for the state of New Hampshire. Much like the Land Grant College Program and the much smaller Sea Grant Program, the HHS RECs have been established to assist in the appropriate adoption and use of technology, in this case EHRs. Since the passage of the HITECH Act, there has been concern that harried physicians in small practices will struggle to take advantage of the HITECH Act and the incentives therein for the adoption and meaningful use of certified EHRs. (Geez that’s a mouthful). State RECs, staffed with IT specialists will be charged with venturing forth into the countryside and cities to help physicians adopt those EHRs and get those HITECH incentive payments.

Chilmark has some very strong reservations about the success of the REC program. Well, we’ll go even farther to say that it is destined to go over the proverbial bridge, plunging into the abyss of failed federal/state programs.

Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Winners/ Code-a-thon /Conference

Sep 30, 2010

By Matthew Holt

Some of the first six winners will be announced later today….hang tight! Here are the Challenges

Meanwhile any developers or people who want to meet developers, or who want to play with some really cool government data sets OR data drug data from First Data Bank and amazing health survey data from Gallup/Healthways, should sign up for the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Code-a-thon at Google this coming Saturday. Not a bad place to come network, but a great place to get coding.

Oh, and today is the FINAL day you can get the regular rate to the Health 2.0 Conference before the price goes up! Conference is next Thursday & Friday, October 8–9

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Sep 29, 2010

Unconscious in the Emergency Department

Sep 29, 2010• 9

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

As State Health Information Exchanges and Federal efforts (NHIN Connect/NHIN Direct) implement the data sharing technology that will enable all providers in the country to achieve Meaningful Use Stage 1, I’m often asked “but when will this healthcare information exchange technology be able to retrieve all my records from everywhere when I’m lying unconscious in the Emergency Department and cannot give a history?”

Here are my thoughts about the trajectory we’re on and how it will lead us to supporting the “Unconscious in the ED” use case.

Meaningful Use Stage 1 is about capturing data electronically in EHRs. Getting healthcare data in electronic form is foundational to any data exchanges. By 2011 we should have medication lists, problem lists, allergies, and summaries available from EHRs.

The data exchanges in Stage 1 are simple pushes of data from point A to point B – from provider to public health, from provider to provider, and from provider to pharmacy. There is no master patient index, no record locator service, and no centralized database containing everyone’s lifetime health record.

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Sep 29, 2010

Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Winners/ Code-a-thon /Conference

Sep 28, 2010

By Matthew Holt

Some of the first six winners will be announced later today….hang tight! Here are the Challenges

Oh, and today is the FINAL day you can get the regular rate to the Health 2.0 Conference before the price goes up! Conference is next Thursday & Friday, October 8–9

ClearPractice’s Nimble brings a comprehensive EMR to the iPad

Sep 28, 2010• 19

By HENRY LI

While over 500 medical apps have been created for the iPad since its launch in April of this year, few attempt to bring an entire electronic medical record system onto the device. Today, St. Louis-based medical software company ClearPractice is releasing Nimble, which the company says is “the first comprehensive EMR solution developed in iOS to run natively on the iPad”.

With Nimble, ClearPractice aims to use the iPad to address several commonly cited issues about EMRs. They emphasize the iPad’s potential for removing barriers in EMR use and physician workflow by integrating the device and software in the care delivery process. The hope is that the iPad’s portability and accessibility will allow it (and thus Nimble) to be present wherever the doctor is—from the clinic to the hospital to the home—and make having an EMR more appealing, especially to doctors in small practices. Given that the app was built as a native iPad application, it attempts to take full advantage of the iPad’s unique interface and user experience.

Another Devastating Diagnosis to Face

Sep 27, 2010• 7

By JESSIE GRUMAN

I have stomach cancer and will undergo surgery to remove part or all of my stomach today.

While a truly expert blogger would have documented the facts and his perceptions from the moment of discovery, I have been preoccupied with absorbing the shock, weighing my options and managing the logistics. I have been short on insight, long on anxiety.

But I have regained some composure since finalizing the plan for my immediate future, so I thought I’d try to capture some of my observations about this wild period this time around. After all, I listen all the time to people talk about how they experience these few weeks between a serious diagnosis and the beginning of treatment and, having gone through it repeatedly myself, I have a lot to compare it to.

A little background: This is my fourth different cancer-related diagnosis. My stomach cancer was discovered due to the vigilance of my primary care doctor who treats adult survivors of childhood cancer and who leaves no symptom – regardless of how minor – unexplored. I had dismissed my insignificant symptom once it disappeared after a few days. However, my doctor didn’t, and it turned out to be a small gastric tumor, probably a result of the high doses of radiation that were the standard of treatment for my stage of Hodgkin’s disease in the early 1970s. The tumor will be removed Monday, along with as much of my stomach as is necessary to prevent its recurrence. While the size of the tumor and its staging leave me optimistic that I won’t need chemotherapy and radiation, I won’t know for certain until a week after surgery.

Consumer Groups Shut Out of Comparative Effectiveness Board

Sep 27, 2010• 4

By MERRILL GOOZNER

The Government Accountability Office last week appointed two “faster cures” patient advocates and a former insurance company executive now on the AARP board to the three slots reserved for patient and consumer representatives on the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute board, which will oversee comparative effectiveness research under health care reform.

The reform legislation passed last March gave GAO the job of appointing the 17 public members, which also includes five representatives of private payers, five physicians, and three industry representatives (one each for drugs, devices and diagnostic manufacturers). A full list can be found here.

The three “patient and consumer” representatives are:

Ellen Sigal, chair, Friends of Cancer Research.

Sigal is an outspoken advocate for more money for cancer research. Her board is comprised largely of fellow executives in the research community, including staff from the American Cancer Society, Research America!, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which represents cancer docs. She serves on numerous non-profit boards, including the Reagan-Udall Foundation set up by the Food and Drug Administration to expedite drug development; and has served on numerous Institute of Medicine panels investigating new ways of conducting cancer research that can lead to faster access to new medicines.

The History and Future of Medical Technology

Sep 26, 2010

FILED UNDER: THCB CLASSIFIEDS

If you are curious about how the amazing technologies found in modern hospitals and clinics came about, check out Ira Brodsky’s entertaining new book, The History and Future of Medical Technology. The hardback tells the story of the people behind each technology—their dreams, their struggles, and their lucky breaks.

Told in you-are-there fashion, it gives you a front row view of the discoveries and inventions that led to today’s imaging systems, implants, prosthetics and more. The book also covers pioneering work in areas including personal health technology, robotic surgery, nanomedicine, and brain-computer interface chips.

The book contains fourteen chapters: Better Living through Biomedical Engineering / The Hidden World / Medicine’s First Power Users / Fantastic Voyage / Human Electricity / The First Cyborgs / Wireless Chemistry / The Nuclear Option / Listening to the Body / Repair or Replace? Part I / Repair or Replace? Part II / The Vision Thing / Technology with Real Teeth / Bodies in Cyberspace.

The History and Future of Medical Technology is 321 pages and includes 26 illustrations. Published in May of this year, the book is available from Amazon and other resellers. For more information, including sample pages, visit the publisher’s website: http://www.telescopebooks.com.

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