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With CDC Seasonal Flu Data Unavailable, An Electronic Medical Record Offers a Glimpse of Early Activity Levels

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By Iyue Sung

As Washington remains deadlocked on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the US government’s shutdown has resulted in the furlough of nearly 70% of the Centers for Disease Control‘s (CDC’s) workforce. CDC Director Tom Frieden recently shared his thoughts in a tweet. We agree whole-heartedly.  Although it’s all too easy to take the CDC staff for granted, they are the frontline sentinels (and the gold standard) for monitoring disease outbreaks.  Their ramp-down could have serious public health consequences.

We are particularly concerned about the apparent temporary discontinuation of the CDC’s flu surveillance program, which normally provides weekly reports on flu activity. Although flu season typically begins in late fall, outbreaks have occurred earlier in previous years. In 2009, flu cases started accumulating in late summer/early fall.  And given the potential for unique variants, such as the swine or avian flu, every season is unpredictable, making the need for regular CDC flu reports essential. We therefore hope to see the CDC restored to full capacity as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we would like to help by sharing data we have on communicable diseases, starting with the flu.


Because the athenahealth database is built on a single-instance, cloud-based architecture, we have the ability to report data in real time. As we have described in earlier posts, the physicians we serve are dispersed around the country with good statistical representation across practice types and sizes.

 

To get a read on influenza vaccination rates so far this season, we looked at more than two million patients who visited a primary care provider between August 1 and September 28, 2013 (Figure 1).  We did not include data on vaccinations provided at retail clinics, schools or workplaces.

This year’s rates are trending in parallel to rates over the last four years, and slightly below those of the 2012-2013 season. However, immunizations accelerate when the CDC, and consequently the media, announce disease outbreaks and mount public awareness campaigns.

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Washington In Crisis: ONC Announces That It Will Not Tweet Or Respond to Tweets During Shutdown

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By THCBist

The U.S. government shutdown continues to claim victims.

The latest is HealthIT.gov, the website designed to help doctors and hospitals make the transition to electronic and make better use of health information technology – a key component of Obamacare’s drive to transform healthcare.

The Health Information Technology Office of the National Coordinator posted a brief announcement on the site informing visitors to HealthIT.gov that “information … may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations have been enacted.”

Officials also sent a tweet saying that the ONC regrets to inform us that while the shutdown continues it will “not tweet or respond to tweets.”

This struck THCBist as slightly odd.

After all, if you’re looking for an inexpensive way to communicate with the public in a pinch, Twitter seems like the perfect choice.  We get that government websites are ridiculously expensive things to run. Blogs are considerably cheaper.  Operating a Twitter account — on the other hand — is almost free.  Our brains were flooded with scenarios.  How much could the ONC possibly be spending on Twitter? And for that matter, didn’t the Department of Defense originally invent the Internet to allow for  emergency communication during times of national crisis? Doesn’t a fiscal insurrection by cranky Republicans qualify?

Fallout for the National Health IT Program

While federal officials have issued repeated assurances that the shutdown will not impact the Obamacare rollout, it does look as though there will be a fairly serious impact on the administration’s health IT program.  If HHS sticks to script, only 4 of 184 ONC employees will remain on duty during the shutdown. That makes it sound like activities are going to have to be scaled back just a bit.

If you’re counting on getting an incentive payment from the government for participation in the electronic medical records program, you may be in trouble — at least until the stalemate is settled.  Although ONC has not yet made an official statement,  presumably because the aforementioned Twitter channel has been disabled, leaving the agency unable to speak to or otherwise communicate with the public, going by the available information in the thirteen-page contingency plan drafted by strategists at HHS, it is unclear where the money will come from.

This could be bad news for electronic medical records vendors counting on the incentive program to drive sales as the Obamacare rollout gets officially underway.

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Understanding the Hospital Consolidation Numbers: The Centrality of Data Quality

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By Bruce Levinson

Is hospital consolidation creating new efficiencies or does it give health care providers clout over health care insurers?  A well-publicized study published in Health Affairs last year by Robert Berenson, Paul Ginsburg, et. al said the latter:  hospital consolidation has resulted in “growing provider market clout.”

The Berenson study’s key conclusion is that growing hospital clout has resulted in insurers not aggressively containing their claims payments, a view that will stun every patient who has had a health insurance company deny coverage for a procedure, prescription or preferred health care provider.

Because the Berenson study’s finding are counterintuitive to consumer experience, and because they have been widely discussed in publications ranging from Forbes to National Journal, the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a regulatory watchdog with extensive experience in analyzing federal health policies, undertook an analysis to see if the study complied with the Data Quality Act (DQA).

The DQA, administered by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sets standards for virtually all data disseminated by the agencies.  Under the DQA, agencies may not use or rely on data in federal work products (reports, regulations) which don’t comply OMB’s government-wide Data Quality standards. Thus, unless the Health Affairs study complies with federal Data Quality standards, it is useless to Executive Branch policy officials.

The primary data source cited by the Berenson study as the basis for their conclusions regarding trends in relative clout between hospitals and health insurers is a well-respected, longitudinal tracking study which included interviews with heath care leaders from insurance companies, hospitals, and academia.   The health care interviews, however, were only conducted in a single year following a change in longitudinal study’s methodology.

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What the Recent Data Breach Says About the State of Health IT

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By David Do, MD

Recently officials at Oregon Health Sciences University discovered that residents in several departments were storing patient information on Google Drive, and had been doing so for the past two years. They treated this discovery as a breach of privacy and notified 3000 patients about the incident.

While I don’t condone the storage of patient information on unapproved services like Gmail or Google Drive, this incident pretty much highlights the sorry state of information systems within the hospital and the unfulfilled need by physicians for tools that facilitate workflow and patient care.

It says something that the Oregon residents felt compelled to take such a drastic action. I don’t know what punishment – if any – those responsible were given by administrators for their “crimes.” I’ll leave it to readers to make up their own minds about the wisdom of the unauthorized workaround and the appropriateness of any punishment. But I do know that the message the incident sends is a very clear one.

We’re screwing this up. There is really no earthly reason why it should be any more difficult to share a patient record than it is to share a Word doc, a Powerpoint or yes, even a cloud-based Google Drive spreadsheet.

Why the Breach Happened

What’s going on here? Let’s say I admit a patient to the hospital.  Our friend was hospitalized here just last month, and like many patients, he has dementia or is poorly educated, and does not know the names of the medications he takes. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to see what he takes or how he was treated during the prior admission because the records in the computer are there for documentation’s sake and don’t contain any meaningful information. This is clearly a problem for me.

Therefore I will spend time calling outside facilities to gather information and repeat several tests and imaging procedures.

Medical care has become a team sport, and residents have developed systems for keeping track of their patients and communicating to other physicians. It takes some time to think about and process each patient that comes in, to consolidate all the information. Ultimately, I need to boil that information down to a five-minute description on the patient, their problems, the status of their current admission, and what needs to happen before they go home.  We do this in the form of a signout document.

Figure: The signout document has four to five columns and includes the To Do list for each patient.

The EMR does not have a good way to store information in this format, and  additionally I have no way of editing this in real-time to communicate with my
coworkers what still needs to be done. That’s why residents were storing their  signouts in Google Drive.

What providers need here is simple data management. We need to store and access this list from different computers. We need the ability to enter a subset of those data  using a custom form, and the ability to print subsets of those data to create a To Do lists, rounding sheets, or progress notes.Continue reading…

#Dataviz + #Design + #Diabetes: The Beginning

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By Joyce Lee, MD

I love interactive data visualization (#dataviz).  It is one of the things that I definitely wanted to explore when I came out to the Bay Area on sabbatical, because I believe that it has great potential for helping both patients and clinicians with diabetes management.  The sheer volume of numbers available for this disease is overwhelming; we need #dataviz tools that can help us achieve greater understanding and make actionable clinical decisions to improve health.

This is what we usually see in clinic: numbers written down on a piece of paper.

Yes there are computer systems that link to blood glucose meters, but there are a number of complexities with the downloading of blood sugar numbers in clinic (which deserves an entire blog post sometime in the future).

You can see there is some visual analysis and annotation that we do perform, albeit primitive.  The circles represent high blood sugars (>150 mg/dl)and the triangles represent low blood sugars (<70 mg/dl). This is almost better than the cave painters don’t you think?

But even the minority of patients who download their BS to the computer, are viewing dashboards like this.

Pie charts, need I say more? I can extract some useful insights from these charts, which improve over the previous one I showed, but a few things strike me: (1) some of the scatter plots overlay weeks of data, which I don’t find helpful because you can’t tell how BS on a given day are responding and relate them to life events; (2) some visualizations show a lot of numbers in many of the sections, and it just becomes onerous to go through them and find trends; (3) many provide statistics (area under the curve, MAD%) which I think only a minority of families and children really understand; (4) although some of the software programs do provide interactivity and let you see the data at different time scales (day, week, month), if you change to a different view, you are stuck trying to remember in your head what you saw on a previous screen because you can’t see the multiple levels at once; (4) finally, I find that the user interface and design could use major improvement.

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The IRS Scandal: Implications for HIPAA and the Affordable Care Act

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By Dr. Wes

As my head reels at the implications of the IRS scandal mushrooming in Washington, the IRS’s recently disclosed ability to access e-mails without warrant, the intricacy of the NSA PRISM wiretap techniques that includes their ability to acquire tech firms’ digital data, and even the Justice Department’s ability to secretly acquire telephone toll records from the Associated Press, I wonder (as a doctor) what all this means for the privacy protections afforded by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) in our new era of mandated electronic medical records.  Are such privacy protections credible at all?

It doesn’t seem so.

Now it seems everyone’s health data is just as vulnerable to federal review as their Google search data.  This is not a small issue.  We have already seen that discovering “leaks” of personal health information has produced some very handsome rewards for the feds, so it is not beyond reason to think that HIPAA might also be a funding tool for our government health care administration disguised as a beneficent effort to protect the health care data of our populace.

But even more concerning is the role the IRS scandal has for America’s health care system.  After all, the Affordable Care Act is ultimately funded by the IRS by administering some 47 tax provisions.  These include the right to levy a penalty against businesses and individuals who don’t provide or acquire insurance and determining how to distribute annual subsidies to 18 million people who make less than $45,000 a year and thus qualify for subsidies in buying health coverage. In addition, the agency will collect taxes on medical devices and a surtax on people making more than $200,000 a year, as well as conducting compliance audits of tax-exempt hospitals.

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What Do Patients Really Think? A Report From the Third Annual Health Privacy Summit

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By Andy Oram

Health reform activists and privacy mavens have been at loggerheads for years. Those touting health reform complain that an oversensitivity to privacy risks would hold back progress in treatments. Running in parallel but in the opposite direction, the privacy side argues that current policies are endangering patients and that the current rush to electronic records and health information exchange can make things worse.

It’s time to get past these arguments and find a common ground on which to institute policies that benefit patients. Luckily, the moment is here where we can do so. The common concern these two camps have for giving patients power and control can drive technological and policy solutions.

Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist who founded Patient Privacy Rights, has been excoriated by data use advocates for ill-considered claims and statements in the past. But her engagement with technology experts has grown over the years, and given the appointment of a Chief Technology Officer, Adrian Gropper, who is a leading blogger on this site, PPR is making real contributions to the discussion of appropriate technologies.

PPR has also held three Health Privacy Summits in Washington, DC, at the Georgetown Law Center, just a few blocks from the Capitol building. Although Congressional aides haven’t found their way to these conferences as we hoped (I am on the conference’s planning committee), they do draw a wide range of state and federal administrators along with technologists, lawyers, academics, patient advocates, and health care industry analysts. The most recent summit, held on June 5 and 6, found some ways to move forward on the data sharing vs. privacy stand-off in such areas as patient repositories, consent, anonymization, and data segmentation. It also highlighted how difficult these tasks are.

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Knocking the Palooza Out of the Data

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By Jonathan Bush

Just back from the Health Datapalooza confab that took place last week – an event now in its 4th year hosted by the federal government. I had a few lingering thoughts to share. First, on the event name: I’m guessing it came out of my old business partner and current national CTO Todd Park’s experience in Washington, where trying to get any single distinct thought through “the interests” could knock the “palooza” out of a grown stallion.

You’d think the federal government would be the last ones to host a Datapalooza, but the fact is NO ONE ELSE has stepped up!

So they did.

And complain as I might about the G-men and G-women being industry conference conveners (makes me want to bathe with a wire brush) they pulled it off pretty darn well. The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) attracted hundreds of serious entrepreneurs… and hundreds more wannabes (who real entrepreneurs desperately need in order to feel cool).

And boy were there some great bloopers…

Kaiser came blistering onto the scene with an open API—to the location and hours of operation of its facilities! Kinda sounds like Yelp to me…I’d be surprised if developers will come a runnin’ to that one. Kaiser’s CIO (a very cool guy whom they or anyone in health care would be lucky to get) broke this news in a two-minute keynote speech. Imagine President Obama announcing, in a State of the Union address, that the green vegetables in the White House cafeteria were now much crunchier!

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius applied similarly excessive fanfare announcing the release of cost data for 30 ambulatory procedures. The whole idea that Toddy (Park) was trying to get going with this Palooza was not to release REPORTS on things but to release the SOURCE data so that anyone with proper security and privacy clearance could INVENT a million reports that no one had ever conceived before!

So here are my thoughts on all of this, some of which I shared at the conference in my way-longer-than-two-minute keynote:

1. Release the data!! Secretary Sebelius announcing the release of cost data for 30 ambulatory procedures during her keynote felt like the Secretary of Energy serving up a can of 10W30 to oil companies to drill into.

Her words were great. To wit: “The fact that this [unlocking the data] is growing by leaps and bounds is a good indication that we can leapfrog over years and decades of inaction into an exciting new future.” YES! GO GIRRRL!  OK, so…where’s the data?

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Datapalooza Report on Data Economics and a Call for Reciprocity

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By Adrian Gropper, MD

Uwe Reinhardt said it perfectly in a Tuesday plenary but I can only paraphrase his point: “health information is a public good that brings more wealth the more people use it.” Or, as Doc Searls puts it: personal data is worth more the more it is used. Datapalooza is certainly the largest meeting of the year focused on health data, and our Health and Human Services data liberation army was in full regalia. My assessment is: so far, so good but, as always, each data liberation maneuver also reveals the next fortified position just ahead. This post will highlight reciprocity as a new challenge to the data economy.

The economic value of health data is immense. Without our data it’s simply impossible to independently measure quality, get independent second opinions or control family health expenses. The US is wasting $750 Billion per year on health care which boils down to $3,000 per year that each man, woman and child is flushing down the drain.

Data liberation is a battle in the cloud and on the ground. In the cloud, we have waves of data releases from massive federal data arsenals. These are the essential roadmap or graph to guide our health policy decisions. I will say no more about this because I expect Fred Trotter (who is doing an amazing job of leading in this space) will cover the anonymous and statistical aspects of the data economy. Data in the cloud provides the basis for clinical decision support.
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Health Datapalooza Day One: How Will We Grow Data for Improving Health?

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By Andy Oram

An unfathomably complex entity such as a health system grows over time like a city. Right now, communications and data usage in the US healthcare system is a bit like a medieval town, with new streets and squares popping up in unpredictable places and no clear paths between them. Growth in health information has accelerated tremendously over the past few years with the popularity of big data generally, and we are still erecting structures wherever seems convenient, without building codes.

In some cities, as growth reaches the breaking point, commissioners step in. Neighborhoods are razed, conduits are laid in the ground for electricity and plumbing, and magnificent new palaces take the place of the old slums. But our health infomation system lacks its Baron Haussmann. The only force that could seize that role–the Office ofthe National Coordinator–has been slow to impose order, even as it funds the creation of open standards. Today, however, we celebrate growth and imagine a future of ordered data.

The health data forum that started today (Health Datapalooza IV) celebrated all the achievements across government and industry in creating, using, and sharing health data.

Useful data, but not always usable

I came here asking two essential questions of people I met: “What data sources do you find most useful now?” and “What data is missing that you wish you had?” The answer to first can be found at a wonderful Health Data All-Stars site maintained by the Health Data Consortium,which is running the palooza.

The choices on this site include a lot of data from the Department of Health and Human Services, also available on their ground-breaking HealthData.gov site, but also a number of data sets from other places. The advantage of the All-Stars site is that it features just a few (fifty) sites that got high marks from a survey conducted among a wide range of data users, including government agencies, research facilities, and health care advocates. Continue reading…

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