EHR Promises Yet to Be Realized
December 1, 2015
Electronic health records (EHRs) were to bring us reductions in cost and, just as importantly, seamless record-sharing between health-care providers. “Epic Fail” at Mother Jones explains why that has yet to happen. The short answer: despite government’s intentions, federation is simply not part of the Epic plan; vendor lock-in is too profitable to relinquish so easily.
Reporter Patrick Caldwell spends a lot of pixels discussing Epic Systems, the leading EHR vendor whose CEO sat on the Obama administration’s 2009 Health IT Policy Committee, where many EHR-related decisions were made. Epic, along with other EHR vendors, has received billions from the federal government to expand EHR systems. Caldwell writes:
“But instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can’t be assured that their records—drug allergies, test results, X-rays—will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. But it also means we’re all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly seven years ago, when the federal government poured billions of dollars into digitizing the country’s medical records. ‘Within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,’ he announced in January 2009, when visiting Virginia’s George Mason University to unveil his stimulus plan. ‘This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.’ Unfortunately, in some ways, our medical records aren’t in any better shape today than they were before.”
Caldwell taps into his own medical saga to effectively illustrate how important interoperability is to patients with complicated medical histories. Epic seems to be experiencing push-back, both from the government and from the EHR industry. Though the company was widely expected to score the massive contract to modernize the Department of Defense’s health records, that contract went instead to competitor Cerner. Meanwhile, some of Epic’s competitors have formed the nonprofit CommonWell Health Alliance Partnership, tasked with setting standards for records exchange. Epic has not joined that partnership, choosing instead to facilitate interoperability between hospitals that use its own software. For a hefty fee, of course.
Perhaps this will all be straightened out down the line, and we will finally receive both our savings and our medical peace of mind. In the meantime, many patients and providers struggle with changes that appear to have only complicated the issue.
Cynthia Murrell, December 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hire Watson As Your New Dietitian
August 4, 2015
IBM’s supercomputer Watson is being “trained” in various fields, such as healthcare, app creation, customer service relations, and creating brand new recipes. The applications for Watson are possibly endless. The supercomputer is combining its “skills” from healthcare and recipes by trying its hand at nutrition. Welltok invented the CaféWell Health Optimization Platform, a PaaS that creates individualized healthcare plans, and it implemented Watson’s big data capabilities to its Healthy Dining CaféWell personal concierge app. eWeek explains that “Welltok Takes IBM Watson Out To Dinner,” so it can offer clients personalized restaurant menu choices.
” ‘Optimal nutrition is one of the most significant factors in preventing and reversing the majority of our nation’s health conditions, like diabetes, overweight and obesity, heart disease and stroke and Alzheimer’s,’ said Anita Jones-Mueller, president of Healthy Dining, in a statement. ‘Since most Americans eat away from home an average of five times each week and it can be almost impossible to know what to order at restaurants to meet specific health needs, it is very important that wellness and condition management programs empower smart dining out choices. We applaud Welltok’s leadership in providing a new dimension to healthy restaurant dining through its groundbreaking CaféWell Concierge app.’”
Restaurant menus are very vague when it comes to nutritional information. When it comes to knowing if something is gluten-free, spicy, or a vegetarian option, the menu will state it, but all other information is missing. In order to find a restaurant’s nutritional information, you have to hit the Internet and conduct research. A new law passed will force restaurants to post calorie counts, but that will not include the amount of sugar, sodium, and other information. People have been making poor eating choices, partially due to the lack of information, if they know what they are eating they can improve their health. If Watson’s abilities can decrease the US’s waistline, it is for the better. The bigger challenge would be to get people to use the information.
Whitney Grace, August 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Behind The Google X Doors
May 18, 2015
Google X is Google’s top-secret laboratory, where the company develops new, innovative technology projects. The main purpose behind Google X is to make technology more adaptable, useful, as well as improve people’s lives. The Google Glass was one of their projects, so is Project Loon, where giant, high altitude balloons are released into the sky to bring Internet services to rural areas. Also do not forget the driverless car. EWeek has listed “10 Bold Google X Projects Aiming For Tech Breakthroughs,” exploring the new wonders that could eventually be available to your or me.
Are you interested in cleaner, renewable energy? So are the folks at Makani Power, a Google X project that builds wind turbines and then makes them airborne using kites. The wind turbines make energy for human consumption. While energy is important for modern human life, health is a big issue too.
Google X has four projects dedicated to learning more about the human body and disease. One is a contact lens measure glucose levels in tears, so diabetics will not have to prick themselves with needles to measure their sugar levels. The Baseline Study project analyzes medical information and uses genomics to define what the human body actually is. This project’s goal is to predict major diseases before their onset. Life Labs, acquired in 2014, invented a spoon device that counteracts Parkinson’s disease. The most astounding is something out of a science-fiction novel:
“Google X is in the nanoparticles business. The company in October unveiled a platform that uses nanoparticles to detect disease. In January, it followed that up with the announcement of the creation of synthetic skin as a proof-of-concept to show what nanoparticle technology might achieve in human biology and health.”
Nanoparticles? Self-driving cars? Wind turbines on kites? What will Google X work on next?
Whitney Grace, May 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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