John Lumpkin – The Health Care Blog

Lightning Strikes Datapalooza

Jun 6, 2012• 3

By Michael W. Painter

It didn’t appear on the lightning strike map, but lightning did indeed strike a young medical student inside the Washington Convention Center right in front of about 1,500 amazed spectators on the first day of The Health Data Initiative Forum III: The Health Datapalooza. Everyone is fine—though our medical student may never be the same again.

Actually, this story began long before Datapalooza, of course. Fourth-year medical student, Craig Monsen, and his Johns Hopkins Medical School classmate, David Do, started collaborating on software applications soon after they met in first-year anatomy class. Craig graduated from Harvard with degrees in Engineering and Computer Science and David from University of Minnesota in Bioengineering.

They’re not quite Jobs and Wozniak—neither dropped out of anything—yet—although Craig, at least, is planning to skip or delay residency. You see, after seeing the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Aligning Forces for Quality Developer Challenge last year—they got very serious about bringing to life their vision of new applications that could help patients and consumers make great health care decisions.

Visualizing the Threat Posed by Antibiotic Resistance

Mar 4, 2011• 18

By JOHN LUMPKIN and RAMANAN LAXMINARAYAN

For the first time, researchers and policymakers can visually track the rise in “superbug” infections over time and identify regions of the country with rapidly spreading rates of resistance.

Researchers at Extending the Cure, a nonprofit project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, have developed ResistanceMap—an online tool that tracks changes in resistance levels. These maps show us how the problem of antibiotic resistance has gotten worse–with some regions of the country experiencing a significant and worrying increase in drug- resistant microbes.

Infections like those caused by MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) kill an estimated 100,000 people in the United States each year. Progress toward solving this emerging public health crisis has been slow, an important reason why the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has funded this research through its Pioneer Portfolio. We share a common view that the best way to prevent an epidemic from occurring may lie in dramatically reframing how we approach the problem.

This is exactly what Extending the Cure has done with ResistanceMap, a web tool that presents scientific data in a user-friendly way, allowing policymakers and researchers to quickly identify regions in urgent need of better infection control, enhanced surveillance, more vigilant antibiotic stewardship, and comprehensive methods to curtail the spread of resistant microbes.Continue reading…

Catalyzing the app store for EHRs

Jun 4, 2009• 13

By STEVE DOWNS and JOHN LUMPKIN, SVP, Health Care Group, RWJ Foundation

Dr. Lumpkin serves as director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Group, where he is responsible for planning and program management. Prior to joining RWJ, Dr. Lumpkin led the Illinois Department of Public Health for 12 years. As assistant vice president, Downs plays a leading role on the Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio team. During his tenure at the Foundation he has created, developed, or overseen the Foundation’s investments in such key initiatives as Project HealthDesign, InformationLinks, the Health e-Technologies Initiative, the Public Health Informatics Institute, Connecting for Health, and Common Ground. His writings may be found at Pioneering Ideas, where this post first appeared.

Recently, Steve posted about the idea, floated by Ken Mandl and Zak Kohane, that EHRs (or health IT more broadly) could move to a model of competitive, substitutable applications running off a platform that would provide secure medical record storage. In other words, the iPhone app model, but, for example, you could have an e-prescribing app that runs over an EHR instead of the Yelp restaurant review app on your iPhone. We’re thinking about the provider side of the market here, as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are already doing this on the consumer side.Continue reading…