4 ways to make IT clinician-friendly. It is no secret that there is a swarm of health IT in the marketplace, all vying for a larger user base. However, at what point does technology become more of a hindrance than a help? Doctors and nurses who are burdened with clunky or inefficient systems run the risk of becoming less effective instead of more. Joe Condurso, president and CEO of PatientSafe, spoke to Healthcare IT News about a few key factors in designing technology that aligns with the workflows of clinicians. "In order to get compliance of this technology you need to get those at the point of care, nurses, lab directors," says Condurso, speaking to the aims medical technology needs to adopt to succeed.
"They have to really love and embrace the systems and the devices and the workflow. " 1. 2.
Crowdsourcing flu. 18 November 2011Last updated at 14:48 By Brian Wheeler BBC News, Washington Millions of people around the world are bracing themselves for their annual battle with flu. Could new crowdsourcing software be the answer to their prayers? There doesn't seem to be any way out of it. As the person next to you on the bus sneezes and you visualise tiny droplets of the virus spiralling towards you, you just know that, sooner or later, it will get you.
It seems unlikely that a smartphone application, as opposed to more tried-and-tested methods like vaccination or a face mask, could help you avoid going down with a dose of the flu this winter. But that is what the creators of the website Sickweather, which launched this week in the US, claim. Health professionals around the world already use online tools, such as Google Flu Trends, Health Map or Global Public Health Intelligence Network to track the spread of infectious diseases. Continue reading the main story Flu facts "The information is there. New international computerized medical information systems research project. Public release date: 17-Nov-2011 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Ilan Yavelbergdover@univ.haifa.ac.il 972-528-666-404University of Haifa University of Haifa leads a new international computerized medical information systems research project, funded by the EU with total budget of €6 million Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is the chief technological partner.
The project's main goal is to enable chronic and other patients, who require close monitoring, to undergo real-time monitoring and receive decision support in their home environment, delivered to their mobile phones or accessed via web browsers; and to assist medical teams in providing treatment according to state-of-the-art clinical guidelines via the computerized system, thereby minimizing the need to hospitalize patients for monitoring sessions. "Most of the technological components of the system already exist, but until now they have not been integrated and personalized for patient context and use.
IBM Boosts Health Analytics With 'Watson' Supercomputer Capabilities - Healthcare - Clinical Information Systems. Physicians Say IT Is Still The Enemy - Healthcare - Clinical Information Systems. Keas Is Like FarmVille for Coorporate Wellness. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Keas Quick Pitch: Keas turns office fitness into a game. Genius Idea: Using addictive social games for a productive purpose. Before Adam Bosworth co-founded Keas, he led a project at Google that aimed to organize, track and monitor health information.
The idea had potential to help people better manage their health, but it never caught on, and Google Health will shut down as of January 1, 2012. Bosworth immediately created a startup with similar goals. “As valley people, we like information and we like data,” he says, “so we built a Mint.com for health.” Unsurprisingly, this too failed to take off.
Keas is now a social game that operates a bit like FarmVille, and it has raised $16.5 million to date, $6.5 of which it announced Tuesday. HR departments don’t invite employees to sign up. It pays to be healthier. Public release date: 21-Nov-2011 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Joan Robinsonjoan.robinson@springer.com 49-622-148-78130Springer Financial incentives work for doctors. Could they work for patients, too? Following the proliferation of pay-for-performance programs for health care providers, the application of the same principles for individual behavior change is becoming an attractive option. They found that the effectiveness of incentives depends on the types of behaviors targeted. Financial incentives are also more likely to work with socially disadvantaged groups, particularly when the incentives address real barriers to change such as transport, medication and child-care costs.
However, there is currently little evidence for long-term behavior change with one-time incentives. Reference Lynagh MC (2011). The full-text article is available to journalists on request. [ Print | E-mail AAAS and EurekAlert! Life Game™ | Mindbloom. Mindbloom Helps You Grow Your Tree of Life. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Mindbloom Life Game Quick Pitch: Mindbloom creates interactive software designed to help you stay engaged with and top of your goals for living well. Genius Idea: Stay inspired to improve your life holistically via daily reminders and a progress-charting game-like interface. Mindbloom co-founder Chris Hewett acknowledges that the online health space has several interactive tools.
But he says most of those share a couple of faults: they narrowly focus on one area of life, for example physical fitness, and their interactive elements are often narrowed to simple things like leader boards and merit badges. And that, in part, is why he and business partner Brent Poole started Mindbloom in 2008. "It's really these small steps that keep people feeing successful," Hewett says.
Resources. BNF.org. NeLM - National electronic Library for Medicines. Adoption of a wiki within a large internal medicine residency program: a 3-year experience -- Crotty et al. A global travelers' electronic health record template standard for personal health records -- Li et al. 19 (1): 134. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Associationjamia.bmj.com 2012;19:134-136 doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000323 Brief communication + Author Affiliations Correspondence to Professor and Dean Yu-Chuan Li, Graduate Institute of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan; jaak88@gmail.com Received 21 April 2011 Accepted 6 July 2011 Published Online First 17 August 2011 Abstract Tourism as well as international business travel creates health risks for individuals and populations both in host societies and home countries.
Footnotes Funding This study is partly funded by Project number DOH100-TD-C-111-008. Who is sick? Track the Spread of Sickness and Disease at GermTrax. Dr. Watson I Presume. Little over a month ago, IBM and WellPoint announced an agreement wherein WellPoint will deploy IBM’s latest and greatest super computer and artificial intelligence mega-mind Watson. Watson’s claim to fame was its ability to beat the human Jeopardy champions much like Big Blue beat reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Since that Jeopardy match, IBM has been quite vocal about its desire to apply Watson in the medical arena, we’ve been buried in press releases and briefings, but the WellPoint announcement is the first one of any real consequence.
Having interviewed both IBM and WellPoint, following is our review and assessment. Background: Watson is a relatively new form of artificial intelligence, based to some extent on neural networks. What is unique about Watson is that it has been developed (trained) to understand the nuances of language. WellPoint is the largest payer in the US with some 34.2M members and 14 Blues across the country. Dr. HealthCyberMap. Sickweather. African e-health 'moving in wrong direction' [NAIROBI] Importing or copying the latest 'e-health' technology from developed countries may not be the best way forward for health services in Africa, a conference has heard. A focus on high-tech healthcare solutions could come at the expense of basic prevention such as access to clean water and sanitation, good nutrition and hygiene, and health education, said experts at the AfriHealth conference in Kenya, this week (30 November–1 December).
In a continent where 80 per cent of illnesses stem from preventable infectious diseases, this is a move in the wrong direction, said Yunkap Kwankam, executive director of the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth. "While we have a lot to learn in this field from practitioners in the developed world, we must take utmost care not to lose sight of the health needs of our people, as we seem to be doing now," said Kwankam. "E-health in Africa is often practised by non-professionals such as ICT technicians and nurses," said Kwankam.
Health IT Leaders Launch Info-Sharing Website - Healthcare - Clinical Information Systems. Founded by clinicians, site called Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Health Care encourages the medical community to share its EHR successes, complaints. (click image for larger view) Slideshow: 17 Leading EHR Vendors A group of physician health IT leaders has launched a nonprofit website for doctors that's designed to promote the transformation of healthcare through the use of information technology.
Although not directly aligned with the federal government's Meaningful Use program, the website, Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Health Care also could help physicians achieve Meaningful Use by aiding them in implementing electronic health records. Funding is coming from the Chan Soon-Shiang Family Foundation, the Optum Institute for Sustainable Health, and Siemens Healthcare. . [ Electronic health records are the wave of the near future.
See EHR Adoption To Reach 80% By 2016. ] In the process, the site might help some clinicians overcome their resistance to Meaningful Use criteria. Using Xbox technology to further medicine. MADRID--One of the biggest challenges facing doctors and nurses in the OR and around the hospital is maintaining sterility. TedCas uses Kinect touch-free technology to completely avoid a large cause of contamination: the computers and scans doctors have to reference during procedures. "It's the touch-screen you don't need to touch," said Paloma Fuentes, chief operating officer of TedCas. The original idea was to use it in surgery. Doctors often need to reference patient files, scans and x-rays during procedures. The doctors either need to remove gloves to use the common touch-screen computers and then need to re-sterilize before continuing the procedure, or they have to have a nurse do if for them.
With the TedCas technology, doctors can search through and bring up a patient's file, manipulate scans and scan in and out where necessary. "During almost all medical processes, sometimes the doctor wants to check information," Fuentes said. TedCas is also part of Telefonica's Wayra project. HealthTap raises $11.5M in Series A Funding to grow their interactive health network #mhs11. HealthTap, the interactive doctor-patient health education network, announced at last week’s mHealth Summit that it has secured $11.5M in Series A funding led by Mayfield Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The company will use the funds to accelerate growth, recruit top talent, and engage more physicians and patients in the vibrant online HealthTap community. HealthTap’s network is built to allow patients to ask health questions online via a mobile app and quickly receive credible answers from top US physicians across 100 specialties, for free. HealthTap was launched just two months ago, but has quickly grown with more than 6,000 leading physicians and 500 top healthcare institutions currently participating.
“We are excited to partner with a serial entrepreneur such as Ron Gutman whose passion, track record, and team will help realize HealthTap’s grand vision,” said Mayfield Managing Director, Tim Chang He added: To dictate or not to dictate? Public release date: 21-May-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Marjorie Montemayor-Quellenbergmmontemayor-quellenberg@partners.org 617-534-2208Brigham and Women's Hospital BOSTON, MA—Could the quality of care you receive be affected by how your doctor takes notes? According to a new study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), doctors who dictated their patient notes appeared to have worse quality of care than those who used structured documentation. The study is published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The researchers evaluated 18,569 visits by 7,000 patients with coronary artery disease and diabetes to participating physicians in a regional healthcare delivery network in eastern Massachusetts. Dictation was done via telephone and transcribed and uploaded to the electronic health record (EHR). The main outcome measures were 15 coronary artery disease and diabetes measures assessed 30 days after primary care visits.
Parts of healthcare are moving to the cloud. Healthcare providers are increasingly required to do more with less. Regulations, HIPAA, Meaningful Use, recovery audit contractor (RAC) audits and decreasing revenues are motivating providers to consider cloud computing as a solution to potentially help them cut costs, maintain quality, meet regulations, and increase productivity. Some electronic health record (EHR) vendors are offering solutions as a cloud-based offering. This offers an approach intended to help providers better manage the IT investments that need to be made to support EHR implementations.
And just as we’ve seen in other industries, there is an ongoing debate within healthcare as to the viability of cloud-based solutions given the care needed for patient privacy and sensitive personal information. Providers’ trust in the public cloud is still relatively weak, but increasing numbers are considering using private clouds. However, EHR applications hosted in the cloud do seem to be gaining traction. Related: Gamification. Recently, I've met with several internet startups, web thought leaders, and venture capitalists. There's one word that's come up in every conversation and it's not Plastics . It's Gamification Gamification, described by Wikipedia is applying gaming principles to non-gaming applications and processes, "in order to encourage people to adopt them, or to influence how they are used.
Gamification works by making technology more engaging, by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors, by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, by helping to solve problems and not being a distraction, and by taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. " Whenever technologists create a cool new application, they often focus on the innovation necessary to solve a hard engineering problem rather than the user experience or how to ensure the ongoing use of the software.
We're in the midst of a redesign of the BIDMC Personal Health Record, Patientsite. Visualizing wellness for 2012. TedCas. Pointofcare_grantees_en | Grand Challenges Canada | Grands Défis Canada.
Roundup: Predictions for digital health in 2013. 5 ways voice recognition tech cuts costs. Rise of the Digital Natives: The future of the NHS.