The Health Care Blog – Page 461 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

SENSING XCHALLENGE, with Google Hangout Wednesday at 10 PST

Oct 21, 2014• 5

By Matthew Holt

Yesterday XPRIZE announced the 11 finalists for the second phase of the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE. This is a $2.25m prize competition to advance the ability to use sensors to measure and manage health, and it’s something that we’re fascinated by at Health 2.0. You may recall that the first round’s winners were unveiled live on stage at the 2013 Health 2.0 Fall Conference by our friends at XPRIZE and Nokia.

UPDATE–The hangout is embedded above. To find out a little more, please come to a Google Hangout at 10 am Pacific/ 1pm EST Wednesday where I’ll be chatting with Dr. Erik Viirre, Medical and Technical Director of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE and the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE; Jonanthan Linkous, Chief Executive Officer of the American Telemedicine Association; Jon Dreyer, President of Health IT Strategic Partners; Dr. Manas Gartia from team MoboSense, a Distinguished Award winner in the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE Competition #1; and Dr. Marc Bailey from Nokia Technologies.

You can also see videos of the finalist teams and their breakthrough technologies can be viewed and voted on beginning today through October 30 at http://www.nokiasensingxchallengevoting.org. More on the teams below the fold:

The Antifragile CDC

Oct 20, 2014• 9

By SAURABH JHA, MD

Some years ago I was in Australia’s Northern Territory. The intrepid explorer that I was, I was croc-spotting from the comfortable heights of a bridge over the East Alligator River. The river derives its name because it is east of something. And because it’s croc-infested.

I was reading a story about a German tourist (it’s usually a German) who was attacked by a saltwater crocodile in the vicinity (1). The story concluded to reassure that one is more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a saltwater crocodile.

I imagined what the apotheosis of a left brain thinker, the data-driven Renaissance man, might have done with that statistic. Might he have peeked in to the East Alligator River looking for a vending machine and seeing none, jumped right in?

This empirical fact is useful if you suffer from croc-phobia and live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the biggest voyage you ever plan to undertake is to the Hamptons. But it’s not terribly useful, and marginally harmful, if you’re deciding whether to kayak rivers in Northern Australia.

The vending machine has reared its deadly head again. It seems that more Americans have been killed by vending machines than have died from Ebola. Well let’s head to Liberia for the winter, because there are fewer vending machines there.

Sorry, I jest. But this is not a joke. Some actually think this is a relevant statistic to put Ebola in perspective. And some are actually reassured by it!

Connecting, Reflecting and Projecting with American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg

Oct 20, 2014• 1

By MICHELLE RONAN

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In an exclusive interview with Matthew Holt, American Well President and CEO Roy Schoenberg, MD shrugs off the threat of emerging competitors, predicts that United Healthcare will own a telehealth company within the next 12 months, and reveals that his company has “turned the corner” in terms of generating revenue from telehealth services. Schoenberg also shares details of the company’s recently announced integration with Apple HealthKit and the growing use of scheduled telehealth visits to treat chronically ill patients.

Throwing the EHR Under the Bus …

Oct 19, 2014• 59

By JOHN IRVINE

Given what is now known about how the case of Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian was handled, the attempt to blame the hospital’s electronic health record for the missed diagnosis sounds pretty lame.

But people are still doing it:

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Critics of electronic medical records have found a case they will be talking about for years.

Consider this argument from Ross Koppel and Suzanne Gordon:

While it is too early to determine what precisely happened in this case, it is not too early to consider the critical issues it highlights. One is our health care system’s reliance on computerized technology that is too often unfriendly to clinicians, especially those who work in stressful situations like a crowded emergency room. Then there are physicians’ long-standing failure to pay attention to nurses’ notes. Finally, there is the fact that hospitals often discourage nurses from assertively challenging physicians.

Long promised as the panacea for patient safety errors, electronic health records, in fact, have fragmented information, too often making critical data difficult to find. Often, doctors or nurses must log out of the system they are on and log into another system just to access data needed to treat their patients (with, of course, additional passwords required). Worse, data is frequently labeled in odd ways. For example, the results of a potassium test might be found under “potassium,” “serum potassium level,” “blood tests” or “lab reports.” Frequently, nurses and doctors will see different screen presentations of similar data, making it difficult to collaborate.

Continue reading…

Data for Health: Coming to a Town Near You …

Oct 16, 2014• 13

By MICHAEL PAINTER, MD

We have some questions for you—questions, that is, about health information. What is it? Can you get it when you need it? What if your community needed important information to make your town or city safe or keep it healthy? How about information about your health care? Can your doctors and nurses get health care information about you or your family members when they need it quickly?

I came across a recent Wall Street Journal article about a remarkable story of health, resilience and survival in the face of an unimaginable health crisis—a Liberian community facing the advancing Ebola infections in their country got health information and used it to protect themselves. When the community first learned of the rapidly advancing Ebola cases coming toward them, the leaders in that Firestone company town in Liberia jumped on the Internet and performed a Google search for “Ebola”.

Statement from the Dallas Nurses

Oct 16, 2014• 4

By NATIONAL NURSES UNITED

When Thomas Eric Duncan first came into the hospital, he arrived with an elevated temperature, but was sent home.

On his return visit to the hospital, he was brought in by ambulance under the suspicion from him and family members that he may have Ebola.

Mr. Duncan was left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present.

No one knew what the protocols were or were able to verify what kind of personal protective equipment should be worn and there was no training.

Subsequently a nurse supervisor arrived and demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit– yet faced resistance from other hospital authorities.

Lab specimens from Mr. Duncan were sent through the hospital tube system without being specially sealed and hand delivered. The result is that the entire tube system by which all lab specimens are sent was potentially contaminated.Continue reading…

Angry Nurses Tell of Ebola Patient’s arrival at Texas Hospital

Oct 15, 2014• 125

By THCBist

A group of nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian has come forward with a very different picture of what happened when Liberian Ebola patient Thomas Duncan arrived at the hospital with Ebola-like symptoms on September 28th. If true, the allegations are certainly unsettling.

In an unusual move, the nurses spoke anonymously to the media, conducting a blind conference call in which none of the participants were identified.

After arriving at the emergency room with a high fever and other symptoms of the disease , the nurses said the patient was kept in a public area, despite the fact that he and a relative informed staff that he had been instructed to go to the hospital after contacting the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to report a possible case of Ebola.

Viewics: Changing the World of Health Care Data

Oct 15, 2014• 1

By Prerna Anand

Viewics is a health care data analytics company that uses a cloud-based SaaS model to provide health care organization with solutions to improve their operational, financial and clinical outcomes. Viewics raised $8M in additional funding today, in a round led by Canvas Venture Fund. This is the second funding round for the company this year. Earlier this February, it raised an undisclosed amount from a group of savvy Silicon Valley investors, including Morado Ventures’ Farzad Nazem, who also is the former Yahoo CTO, and AME Cloud Ventures, a venture capital group led by Yahoo’s founder and former CEO, Jerry Yang.

Viewics’ flagship product, Viewics Health Insighter (VHI), allows health care organizations to have a standardized suite of analytics tools to aggregate, extract and share insights from the vast amounts of data in their information systems. It eliminates the hassle of developing an internal business intelligence infrastructure. Viewics has over 100 hospitals and laboratories as its customers, and processes data for 20 million patients across multiple departments and visits. The VHI data aggregation platform enables clinical analysis on a database representing 650 million tests.Continue reading…

Getting Your Own Health Records Online: The Good and the Not So Good

Oct 14, 2014• 27

By LYGEIA RICCARDI

Making Sense of Blue Button, Meaningful Use, and What’s Going on in Washington …

At the recent Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, co-chair Matt Holt expressed frustration about the difficulty of getting copies of his young daughter’s medical records. His experience catalyzed a heated discussion about individuals’ electronic access to their own health information. Many people are confused about or unaware of their legal rights, the policies that support those rights, and the potential implications of digital access to health data by individuals. The Health 2.0 conference crowd included 2000 entrepreneurs, consumer technology companies, patient advocates, and other potentially “disruptive” forces in healthcare, in addition to more traditional health system players.

Why is this topic so important? Until now, most people haven’t accessed their own health records, whether electronically or in paper, and I believe that making it easier to do so will help tip the scales toward more meaningful consumer/patient engagement in healthcare and in health. Access by individuals and their families to their own health records can empower them to coordinate care among multiple healthcare providers, find and address dangerous factual errors, and take advantage of a growing ecosystem of apps and tools for improving health-related behaviors, saving money on health services, and getting more convenient, personalized care.

A shorthand phrase for this kind of personal empowerment through access to digital health data is “Blue Button,” which is also the name of a public-private initiative in which hundreds of leading healthcare organizations across the US participate. The Blue Button Initiative is bolstered by the electronic access to health information requirements for patients in the “Meaningful Use” EHR Incentive Program, which is administered by CMS (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) with companion standards and certification requirements set by ONC (the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology).Continue reading…

It Takes More Than A Village To Improve Community Health

Oct 14, 2014• 1

By SUSAN DENTZER

If it takes a village to raise a child, what would it take to improve health and health care across a huge and diverse metropolitan area?

The answer: a multi-stakeholder effort, such as the Atlanta Regional Collaborative for Health Improvement, or ARCHI. Launched in 2011, the collaborative has brought together local government officials, philanthropies, health care systems, public health authorities and others to chart a strategy that could lead to lasting improvements in the community’s health.

ARCHI has big plans: to improve the quality and efficiency of the local health care system; lower the rate of growth of overall health care spending; and redirect the savings to other purposes that could lead to a growing economy, and, in turn, better health of the population. Although a long road lies ahead, ARCHI nonetheless offers a template for other communities that want to take collective action to improve health.