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Implementing a Modern Hospital Website

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By JOHN HALAMKA

Over the past two years, I’ve witnessed a transition in modern website design from plain text and static  information to multimedia centric and interactive. I’ve written about the new BIDMC website we implemented to meet patient expectations for a modern website.

Many healthcare organizations I work with are considering content managed, new media, highly interactive web 2.0 sites. I thought it would be useful to describe how we approached the BIDMC website so you can leverage our experience.Picture 1

Content Management – BIDMC has a great
deal of .NET expertise, so we wanted a content management system that worked well in our .NET/SQL Server 2008 environment. SiteCore has been ideal for us, providing content templates, distributed content management, and publishing workflow in a load balanced, secure, virtualized environment. At HMS we use Drupal and WordPress for content management. They also work well for hosting institutional web sites.

Interactive features – The Corporate Communications folks at BIDMC really wanted to highly improves interactivity. We built and bought the components they needed as follows:

  • Blogs – Uses a SiteCore provided blogging module
  • Chat – a commercial application called Cute Chat from CuteSoft.
  • BIDMC TV (news and information videos produced by BIDMC)- Hosted by BrightCove.
  • Medical Edge (videos about innovation produced by BIDMC)- Hosted by BrightCove.
  • Podcast Gallery – Hosted on BIDMC servers.
  • Health Quizzes – created using a commercial application called SelectSurvey.NET from ClassApps.
  • Social Networking – entirely hosted by outside service providers (Facebook/Twitter/You Tube).
  • Secure patient web pages for communication with their families – a commercial application provided by CarePages.
  • Conditions A-Z – a web-based encyclopedia branded for BIDMC using commercial reference provided by Ebsco.
  • Search Engine – We’re using a Google Appliance

Thus, the combination of SiteCore plus purchased interactive applications and externally hosted streaming video has worked very well to provide our patients with an information rich, interactive experience.

I hope this is useful to you as you implement your own hospital websites.

The Myth of Prevention and EHR’s?

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By SCOTT SHREEVE6a00d8341c909d53ef010536f31133970c-pi

I was just referred this article which I found to be thoughtfully crafted. Abraham Verghese is a Professor and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. I found the article interesting, by somewhat anachronistic in terms of his perception of prevention and electronic medical records.

First, he raises an important point about the many overstatements as they relate to prevention. When we talk about how effective screening programs could be in identifying people for early interventions we have to realize what we are saying and what tools we are using for identification. Some tools can be too blunt, and not find the people we are looking for (false negatives), while other tools can be too sensitive and capture too many who actually may not have the disease (false positives). This is brought home in the example Dr. Verghese uses around the pitfalls of new diagnostic imaging equipment (and the situation is much worse with genetic testing at this point in time!).Continue reading…

Unions May Get a Pass on Health Care Benefits Tax

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By ROBERT LAWSZEWSKI

6a00d8341c909d53ef01157023e340970b-pi There is a major bipartisan effort going on in the Senate Finance Committee to reform the health care system.Reportedly, one of the elements of that effort may be a tax on "gold plated" health insurance benefits
above a certain threshold–$17,000 for family coverage is one option
being discussed. The new tax could raise close to $300 billion over ten
years to help pay for a health care bill.

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The Message Is The Medium

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By MERRILL GOOZNER

GooznerEmory University psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen in the weekend Washington Post offers a troubling view of the public’s role in health care reform. While reform’s reality involves complicated technical issues like insurance exchanges, public plan governance, physician and hospital payments and who will pay higher taxes, the public’s understanding of these issues is virtually non-existent, Westen assumes.

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The EHR TimeBar: A New Visual Interface Design

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By RICK WEINHAUS, MD

The EHR TimeBar functions as a high-level overview of the patient record, as a query device, and as an intuitive navigation tool.  Each EHR file (event) for the patient is represented by an icon. The set of icons and their labels are displayed in column format on the right side of the screen.

EHR TimeBar -- JPEG

The icons are connected to the TimeBar by vertical lines. Because the vertical lines accurately position each event on the TimeBar, the date of each event is usually omitted in order to reduce clutter.Continue reading…

Data to the People

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By GREGORY PARK

I have been a strong proponent of the creation of a National Health Record (NHR), but will it increase the quality of care for each citizen? Without 100 percent compliance by all healthcare providers the establishment of the NHR will bear little fruit for its expense. Proponents of a NHR site the achievements of the VHA. VHA patients include highly mobile active and inactive soldiers. Ubiquitous methods for viewing clinical data are critical, however Joe Outpatient doesn’t move around in this manner nor does he stray far from the facilities where he receives care.

 

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