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TECH/HEALTH 2.0: Eliza & Silverlink, strategic healthcom 2.0

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So the gang is all in San Diego getting ready for the Health 2.0 conference which starts Monday (gulp, that’s today!) Feverish last minute preparations are apace. 

I spent some time on Saturday morning talking to two people at the forefront of the communications revolution on the telephone. Alex Drane, President of Eliza, and Stan Nowak, CEO of Silverlink.  We had a fascinating
interview. See if you can spot the moment when Stan invented a new term which Alex trademarked before he’d finished speaking. (Hey at least the lawyers are making money!)

TECH: Drugs & technology–Allscripts and SafeMed

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To finish off the last but not least of my HIMSS interviews, here are two companies that both announced being part of the Google ecosystem on the Thursday of HIMSS. One is well known and a leader in ePrescribing and EHRs (even though it’s had a tough year on Wall Street and won the HISSIE for most likely to be acquired!) That’s Allscripts of course, and I was able to grab a quick chat with head marketing honcho Dan Michelson and Jamie Stick, IS Director from one of their star clients, Central Utah Clinic in Provo, Utah.

They also have a very cool video called Paper Free health care (I spot some inspiration from the Health 2.0 video!)

I also got the chance to meet a much smaller company called SafeMed. Rich Nossfinger & Ahmed Ghouri hasve built a very very sophisticated rules and processing engine which can interpret drug data and embed that decision support into patient specific indications. Very intriguing stuff and you can learn more by listening to this interview (although they weren’t allowed to let me tell the world in advance that they are one of the first partners in the Google ecosystem. Here’s the SafeMed interview.

TECH: Location tracking, RadarFind’s view

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I’m still hot on location tracking. The idea is that if you can locate devices like pumps and wheelchairs and eventually staff and patients, hospitals should become much more operationally efficient.

But this market which is now 4–5 years old has yet to take off. Part of the reason is that WiFi based systems don’t seem to work as well as advertised, and infra red or others that need new networks are too expensive. Stephen Jackson is CTO of RadarFind, which has a new system which plugs into the electrical system and uses that to move its tracking data around. It seems cheap, easy and effective. Too good to be true? Let Stephen convince you in this podcast.

TECH/PODCAST: Microsoft speaks health care

Microsoft has made some big strides in health this past year. You can easily argue that a) its search has outpaced Google (following the acquisition of Medstory), b) that it’s making strides in the provider market with the renamed Amalga (although that’s leading to a strategic question about whether they’re really going to be a serious player on the inpatient EMR side there) and c) finally that HealthVault legitimizes the whole PHR market. Microsoft will be at pains to tell you that HealthVault is not, though, a PHR. What is it? Ad what about the rest of those questions?

Listen to my interview with Chris Sullivan (US Provider Solutions) and Grad Conn (HealthVault) to find out…

TECH: Interview with Newt Gingrich

The controversial and not-shy-with-his-opinions former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been very active in recent years promoting the automation of health records and EMRs. But he’s never been a great pains to stress how that would get done from a policy perspective.

I was glad to get a few minute with him because I was able to get straight to that question. And on that topic it appears that Newt has become a fan of government mandates and directed government spending. I think you’ll find this podcast fascinating, although it’s short.

TECH/PODCAST: ICW’s Jeremy Coote

ICW is a German-based  consumer facing record company, that is dominant in Germany and several Eastern European countires. Over here they decided that their skills lie in integrating data from disparate systems, very much a Health 2.0 trend (which is why they’re a Health 2.0 Conference sponsor).

They also announced a major open source initiative with Agfa and Sun this morning–which will hopefully give a boost to open source in health care (which thus far has been a somewhat small and lonely community)

I spoke to ICW America CEO Jeremy Coote today.

More on Google and the Cleveland Clinic

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For a start, as I said in my last post  and many times, and at least one of these commenters has written at length, the benefits of sharing health data in clinical situations massively outweigh the risk. So that should be the focus of the discussion.

I am NOT saying that there shouldn’t be privacy protections and there is no reason in my mind why, for all HIPAA’s flaws, it cannot be extended to PHR providers as covered entities.

However, as far as I can tell nothing that is happening here violates HIPAA. Showing you keyword based advertising may not to everyone’s taste, but it does not mean your private health data is being transferred to anyone. And presumably your data will only end up in these services if you give them permission to accept it, which will include consent to provide whatever services and advertising you’ll see.

And that’s assuming that either company does advertising based on records rather than search terms (which is Google make that 98% of their money).

But exactly where are Microsoft and Google suggesting that they’re going to be selling private identified data? Nowhere. Microsoft has bent over backwards to demonstrate that they have no intention of allowing themselves or anyone else to access your health records without permission. And Google will likely do the same when it announces its plans officially.

Continue reading…

TECH: HIMSS Today

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Today it’s HIMSS. Yesterday I spoke to the CHIME CIOs and had a good time. Today I’m talking to the Cisco Community for Connected Health and the rest of the time I’ll be accosting people with a microphone. Come back over the days to come to see.

TECH: Google to Store Patients’ Health Records

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The AP has announced that Google’s first step into the world of storing health records will be in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic—which of course already has a boatload of patients using EMRs and PHRs on the Epic MyChart system. The idea (presumably as this is a leak from within Cleveland Clinic not an official announcement) is that those records can be stored in Google, and presumably will be transportable—somewhat similar to what Microsoft and Dossia are promising. Nothing earth-shattering yet, but an interesting beginning.

And of course we’ll hopefully get some more details next week at the HIMSS conference where Google CEO Eric Schmidt is speaking, and the Health team is having a party to which they kindly invited me (Thanks, Missy!)

Google has been much criticized for its slow pace in health. But speaking as one who now runs big components of our little business on Google via Checkout (and integrates it with rival services like WuFoo and TypePad) — I think that this (and HealthVault et al) is a small step towards a much bigger online future for health care transactions. At least, I hope so!

TECH: Beating up on Maggie’sFarm Blog

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Maggie Mahar’s blog HealthBeat is so good that I’ve been itching to find something wrong over there to criticize! (That’s a British trait of criticizing your heroes; sorry!). And finally I have. Her co-conspirator Niko Karvounis wrote a piece on eVisits that’s so off the mark I had to go off in the comments over there. 

The rest of you go there and take a look at what Niko said about The Downsides of Virtual Medicine and at my comment. And of course pay more attention to the fantastic stuff Maggie (and usually but not in this case, Niko) writes there—as well as here….