Category: analysis
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The new Face(Time) of telemedicine and telehealth?
As someone interested in innovation in health care, I’m very much excited about Apple Inc‘s FaceTime feature announced earlier this year with iPhone 4. Â FaceTime is a video calling protocol that can be used by iPhone 4 users. Apple has indicated that they will be releasing the FaceTime protocol as an open standard. The iPad…
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CCHIT certification of EHRs
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) is the body responsible for certifying electronic health record systems in the US since 2006. However, their role may be changing given some of the recent announcements. Chris Thorman has an excellent piece analyzing the situation and how CCHIT’s influence might change in the future. He’s titled…
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Securing health data – just another challenge in moving towards a modern health system
Not sure if this is news to people regularly involved in IT, but securing the increasing amounts of electronic health information will be a major issue as organizations move to adopt electronic health records (EHRs). The scary thing is that the perception is that health care organizations are behind the current best practices (yet again)…
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Interactions with the health care system – a visit to the doctor’s office
I was doing some exercises Monday night and I tweaked my wrist during a moment when I lost my focus (and balance). After a night of discomfort and pain, I decided to try and see my doctor to rule out anything serious. I did some searching on the internet and found a good article titled…
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Lessons from my father…
My father’s most recent health experience and his visit to the ER has highlighted a few things about health and managing one’s care. Here are some things to take from my dad’s experience: eHealth Can Improve Coordination of Care: In this case, having a single care record could have prevented this mis-hap. Our family doc…
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ehealth’s elusive return on investment
Government Health IT published an interesting article titled, "The quest for value". The author, Nancy Ferris, reports on some of the challenges, difficulties, and frustrations with trying to demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) or tangible cost savings when using information technologies within health care settings. My own research and experience in this area has…
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A new architecture for EHRs?
Amidst the efforts to develop the elusive electronic health record (EHR) and to modernise our health care systems are many technical challenges that need to be addressed. One significant challenge is integrating information from a variety of difference sources (i.e., lab systems, pharmacy systems, scheduling systems, directories, nursing and physician notes, etc) and to present…
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A voice against irrational exuberance in ehealth
For those interested in a somewhat contrarian viewpoint about ehealth, I suggest you check out Scot Silverstein. I just recently came across his site documenting some "common examples of health care IT difficulties". You can also listen to his interview available via the Government Health IT site – an excellent site. In his interview, Dr.…