There’s a certain fast growing practice management company with a very outspoken CEO, who has a very famous last name. I poked fun about their sorority-crowd employees at HIMSS. But I didn’t know the type of scrutiny that they’d have had to come through. Look at this as part of their employment application agreement:

I understand that the Company reserves the right to require me to submit to a drug test at any time and also reserves the right to require me to submit to an alcohol test and/or medical examination to the extent permitted by applicable law. I authorize the Company to investigate my driving record, my criminal record (Federal, state and local, as well as any record of health care fraud and abuse or other offenses retained by the OIG or other regulatory agencies), and my credit history, and I understand that an investigative consumer report may be prepared whereby information is obtained through personal interviews with neighbors, friends, and others with whom I am acquainted. This inquiry would include information as to my character, general reputation, personal characteristics, and mode of living. (THCB emphasis added) I understand I have the right to make written request within a reasonable period of time to receive additional information about the nature and scope of this investigation.

Well they wouldn’t give me a job! Nor basically anyone else in San Francisco. Then it hit me; what a tradition said company is joining. There’s Henry Ford who sent his minions out to investigate his employees behavior, and then more recently someone else equally outspoken and equally paranoid also started a pretty big health care IT firm and put lots of conditions on his employees behavior too. So I suspect this pretty much guarantees AthenaHealth’s success…..

This is the transcript from the podcast with Bob Lorsch at mymedicalrecords.com. You’ll note that at the end Bob offers you a free trial of his system by going to the site, www.MyMedicalRecords.com and sign up for an account, putting in promotion code "TryMMR". You’ll receive a 90 day free account and you can find out for yourself and get your own phone number and your own lifeline. If you want to listen to the audio, that podcast is here. For the words, and a little fesitiness (but not alot) about whether his model and his company has a shot, read on.

Matthew:   Bob Lorsch is the chairman and CEO and founder of MyMedicalRecords.com. We had quite an interesting discussion yesterday. MyMedicalRecords.com is a personal health record company that has what I’ve described as pretty much the standalone model. Any reader of the blog knows that I’ve been pretty negative about the prospects for that kind of thing, and we had a rather interesting discussion. I thought we’d continue online today. So Bob, thanks for chatting with me.

Bob Lorsch:  Hey, it’s my pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to making you a believer.

Matthew:  Right. So, let me get to the heart of the matter. Correct me if I’m wrong, MyMedicalRecords.com is what I would call primarily a sort of vault system where it’s got a very sophisticated way of allowing people to fax in information and submit information which it then stores in kind of a templated document management fashion. Is that roughly accurate?

Bob:  It’s roughly accurate, yeah. I would describe it more as a fully functional online life storage system. Founded because of the boom in electronic medical records, but it’s really the kind of a product that will store medical records, insurance information, financial information, advanced directives, any document or information that would be necessary to an individual in an emergency from anywhere in the world, seven days a week, 24 hours a day over any Internet‑connected computer. The unique thing about MyMedicalRecords is it works off dumbed‑down existing technologies. For example, it doesn’t require interface with an EMR system. An individual who cares about their health or cares about their medical record storage can have a MyMedicalRecords account and with a fax machine and a plain old ordinary Internet connection, they can have a complete document management network of patient charts, X‑rays, film, important documents, advanced directives, wills, policies, whatever information they want to have online.

Matthew:  Now that’s really the crux of the matter here. I’ve always argued that in the personal heath records space—and we’re obviously talking about a business which has yet to take off—In the personal health records space it’s going to become more like online banking. People are going to essentially get information that’s already in the system and just use their personal health records as a vehicle with which to view it. If people could watch, say, what WebMD is doing, or where Intuit is going, all they’re discussing is basically a product that’s attached to a large health plan or provider system, which is also what the companies are using Epic are doing. You know, it’s a view into other data.So you’re taking a very different approach and obviously  it has yet to be resolved as to which one works.

Why do you think people would actually go the trouble of doing all that when they could get to their health plan or go to their provider at some point? Most of them are going to be offering a personal health record where they can view most of their information there, rather than why would they go to a standalone entity which they’re going to have to go to the trouble of inputting their own data and collecting information and then sending it in?

Continue reading…

This is the transcript of the Podcast from last week with Ken Lynch of Pango, a company playing in the location tracking space.  If you read this, you should understand a little more about how complex it all is!

Matthew Holt:  It’s Matthew Holt, with The Health Care Blog. And one of my last interviews of the day today, on Tuesday, which is the second day of HIMSS. I’m with Ken Lynch; Ken is in marketing at Pango. And Pango is in the RFID asset location and tracking business. They make little tags, you’ll see the photo on this site, and various other things. And the more I’ve looked at this business, the more complex it’s become. Because there are so many different parts in the application layer, the middle ware, the tags themselves. And so many people competing and cooperating in the system that I’m already confused. But that is why I’ve got Ken here, he’s going to explain to us today what it all works out, what Pango does, and what its various competitors and corporation partners do. So Ken, thanks for talking to me.

Ken Lynch:  My pleasure.

Matthew:  All right, so let’s start at the beginning. What does Pango do within the world of asset tracking? And whom do you work with, and what other parts do you need?

Continue reading…

My crack sources tell me that you can soon get your fill of webinars from AHRQ on matters near and dear to a HC IT wonks heart. On Mar 15 there’s a webinar about Model Contract Language for Health Information Exchange. On Mar 28 there’s a webinar about (get this mouthful) the Socio-technical Aspects of Health IT and on April 10, there’s a webinar about the Massachusetts eHealth Evaluation (starring David Bates). If that lot doesn’t get you going, then nothing will!

Those of you who’ve been listening to the podcasts I’ve been doing and reading the blog will notice quite how excited Cisco’s Jeff Rideout is with the Health Care Interpreter Network, which is a video over IP based network currently being used to share translation services in several safety net hospitals in California. Of course moving human translators by the magic of video telephony is a great advance over waiting for them to show up from wherever they are, and when providers have to deal with patients speaking as many languages as a typical Bay Area, LA, New York or similar facility sees, avoiding getting lost in translation is pretty critical.

But of course this being America there’s another way, and it too is pretty damn clever. I was shown a demo by a company called Spoken Translation which has an English-Spanish automatic medical translation tool. Here’s a cut from their blurb (as I’m too lazy to describe it all) but I’ve seen it and it works as advertised.

Converser for Healthcare provides 24/7 live interpreting. Its initial product will be targeted to the healthcare market and is a Spanish to English, English to Spanish translation. The system allows people who do not speak the same language to hold broad health-related conversations in real time, without a human interpreter.

 Converser represents a fundamental advance in Machine Translation (MT) technology. No other system on the market today can provide reliable, bi-directional, real-time, wide-ranging translation via multiple interface modalities including speech recognition. Never before has a commercial product for conversational translation enabled a user to verify in real time that the translation is accurate, and, if not, to correct it on the spot. While Spanish is first out the door, other languages are planned for release later this year. Chinese is planned for the healthcare market, while German and Japanese are currently under development for other markets. Converser can run on Tablet PCs or laptops (full-size or ultra-portable), and release is planned for numerous handheld devices.

The tool allows input via typing, onscreen keyboard, voice (using Dragon Nat Speak 9) and handwriting recognition. It’s a touch cumbersome in that of course each phrase needs approval and potential correction (in case of possible English/Spanish ambiguities) but it appears to be damn clever, and at $1500 a seat, a darn site cheaper than having a human sitting around.

Now, if they just make one in Arabic, that’ll solve a wee problem the US military has in another part of the world.