The Health Care Blog

Implementing a Modern Hospital Website

By JOHN HALAMKA Over the past two years, I've witnessed a transition in modern website design from plain text and static information to multimedia centric and interactive. I've written about the new BIDMC website we implemented to meet patient expectations...
June 30, 2009 in Hospitals, Technology | Permalink | Comments (7)

The EHR TimeBar: A New Visual Interface Design

By RICK WEINHAUS, MD The EHR TimeBar functions as a high-level overview of the patient record, as a query device, and as an intuitive navigation tool. Each EHR file (event) for the patient is represented by an icon. The set...
June 26, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, evidenced-based medicine, Policy, Policy/Politics, Technology, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (6)

A Declaration of Health Data Rights

By Matthew Holt THCB & Health 2.0 are happy to be a small part of a very important declaration, made today by a mix of patients, physicians, technologists and concerned citizens. It's a Declaration of Health Data Rights, and it's...
June 22, 2009 in Consumers, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (16)

Matthew went to Redmond, Pt 4: Nate McLemore

By Matthew Holt My final interview from my trip to Microsoft was with Nate McLemore, who is Director of Business Development for the Health Solutions Group and also involved in Microsoft’s policy & lobbying work. Nate talked about Microsoft’s role...
June 18, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

Meaningful meaning? (with UPDATE)

By Matthew Holt The first draft of “meaningful use” came out early yesterday, and I was struck by two things. First, probably influenced by the NCVHS recommendations and the Consumer Partnership for e-Health (See Update), the work-group included a lot...
June 18, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Journal of Participatory Medicine

By Matthew Holt ePatientDave and Giles Frydman have been working on the Society of Participatory Medicine for a while and Alan Greene MD will be the first President. Now there’s a editorial board for the Journal of Participatory Medicine. The...
June 17, 2009 in Annals of Journalism, Consumers, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2)

Decoding “The Social Life of Health Information”

By SUSANNAH FOX The Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation report, The Social Life of Health Information, is packed with new findings from a survey of 2,253 adults, including 502 cell-phone interviews, conducted in either English or Spanish. We spent a bundle...
June 16, 2009 in Online Communities, Susannah Fox, Technology | Permalink | Comments (8)

Video: Matthew went to Redmond, Part 3: Mike Raymer, Amalga

Continuing my series of interviews from my trip to Microsoft the week before last (before their conference) I met with Michael Raymer. Mike is a long time health IT veteran who's been at Microsoft for about six months and is...
June 15, 2009 in Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Canadians? Not as good as us!

By Matthew Holt Several of my friends in the blogosphere are getting very excited because eHealth Ontario has pissed away a few million dollars and the now fired CEO got more bonus than was seemly. So she gave Accenture and...
June 10, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, International, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3)

Matthew went to Redmond, 2--Bert van Hoof, HealthVault & devices

By Matthew Holt Continuing my tour around Microsoft’s HealthVault team I met with Bert van Hoof. Bert is the devices guy who showed me lots of ways to get data into HealthVault. If you’re interested in how a power user...
June 10, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthew went to Redmond, part 1-- Bill Reid, Healthvault

By Matthew Holt Last week I went to a search summit in Seattle where Microsoft told us all about Bing, their latest attempt to do something about Google’s Windows-like market share in search. After a quick chat with Health search...
June 10, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

American Well gets busy with guidelines, Optum

By Matthew Holt Our friends over at American Well have two announcements today. First, they’re releasing what they call Online Care Insight, which is essentially the integration of care guidelines into their online care system. We saw a glimpse into...
June 3, 2009 in Health 2.0, Health Plans, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3)

Launch! Healogica--Clinical Trials Recrutiment service

By Matthew Holt Healogica was one of the companies that presented at Launch! at the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference in Boston in April. I felt that the quality of the Launch! companies as so strong that they all deserved...
June 2, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cool Technology of the Week

By JOHN HALAMKA In my recent blog about the Red Flags rule, GreenLeaves commented that biometric checking would help reduce errors by establishing identity and uncovering fraud. Using biometrics to verify identity seems like a good idea, so I met...
May 31, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (6)

Certifying Health IT: Let’s Set the (Electronic Health) Record Straight

By MARK LEAVITT The Stimulus bill catapulted health IT – previously the domain of clinicians with a passion for applying technology to improve healthcare – onto the national stage. When you inject billions of taxpayer dollars, politics inevitably comes with...
May 26, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (66)

Beyond Wikipedia

By NAOMI FREUNDLICH No surprise, these days more and more doctors are searching online for medical information. What is surprising, however, is that in a recent study, nearly 50% of physicians indicated that they use Wikipedia—the open-access encyclopedia that allows...
May 23, 2009 in Physicians, Technology | Permalink | Comments (19)

More on HITECH , Microsoft mea culpas, Google, et al

By Matthew Holt I draw your attention to a troika of articles, all of which show how things can be slightly misinterpreted. First, who knew that Blackford Middleton was either the most influential health policy wonk out there, or single-handedly...
May 19, 2009 in Google, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2)

An Open Letter to the New National Coordinator for Health IT: Part 3 -- Certification As The Elephant in Health IT's Living Room

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER In the first and second parts of this series we talked about how and why there is no universal definition for the term "EHR." Instead there is a legitimate, growing debate about the...
May 8, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Obama administration, Online Communities, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, Technology, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (19)

Op-Ed: Patients first. Doctors second.

By Arun Mohan, MD, MBA and Gordon Moore, MD As part of the recently enacted stimulus bill the federal government is spending $19 billion to promote the adoption of electronic medical records by physicians. Yet, with all the focus on...
April 30, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (10)

Medicine's Missing Foundation for Health Care Reform

By LAWRENCE L. WEED & LINCOLN WEED Preface by Michael Millenson: Lawrence L. Weed published a seminal article in the Archives of Internal Medicine on using the medical record to improve patient care back in January, 1971. To give you...
April 28, 2009 in Medicine, Technology | Permalink | Comments (12)

A.D.A.M., Inc Launches New iPhone Application, Medzio

This past week at the Health 2.0 conference, A.D.A.M., Inc demoed their recently launched iphone application Medzio, which connects users with a network of healthcare services and free expert health advice. It's a very cool application and an exciting new...
April 28, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Roni Zeiger on what Google Health is doing next

By Matthew Holt For those of you who weren't at Health 2.0 Meets Ix to hear from the mouths of the four horsemen (Halamka, Sands, Zeiger & deBronkhart) here is Google's Roni Zeiger’s version of what went wrong with the...
April 28, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Technology, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (9)

Mayo & Microsoft--a big name collaboration, with even more potential to come

By Matthew Holt Mayo Clinic and Microsoft are today launching a combined product called the Mayo Clinic Health Manager (and they’ll be showing it Thursday 23rd at the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference). What this product does is essentially combine...
April 21, 2009 in Physicians, Technology | Permalink | Comments (7)

Surface--eye candy or really useful clinical tool?

By Matthew Holt Microsoft Surface is relatively cheap for what appears to be a too-cool-for-school new technology. They quoted me about $12,000 for a unit. It may look like a huge immobile iPhone, but it has not only a wow...
April 21, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

Health 2.0 Meets Ix, and other gossip

By Matthew Holt The Health 2.0 team is in Boston, and we’ve been prepping with our friends from Information Therapy. The Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference is coming up on Wednesday and Thursday 22nd & 23rd April. We have a...
April 20, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rich Noffsinger, AnvitaHealth

By Matthew Holt AnvitaHealth, recently changed its name from SafeMed. It's been one of the more interesting companies using its technology to personalize drug interaction and guideline data to individuals based on their clinical data. Why the name change and...
April 20, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

NaviNet (nee NaviMedix) explains all

So now I really am playing catch up from last week at WHCC and the week before at HIMSS. At both places was (appropriately enough) a company that connects health plans and providers. Like AnvitaHealth it too has changed it's...
April 20, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the skeptics who think Health 2.0 tools don't matter...

By Matthew Holt Read this
April 15, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (5)

American Well bags BCBS Minnesota

By Matthew Holt American Well, who were big stars at (and sponsors of) the recent Health 2.0 Hawaii symposium have announced the second big Blues to sign on to use their service. It's Blues of Minnesota, who Health 2.0 watchers...
April 13, 2009 in Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cats and dogs on film--Tullman, Leavitt, Bush

By Matthew Holt Anyone who’s been following along on THCB will realize that there’s a huge divide about whether the HITECH act should pay for and dictate a specified, certified type of EMR product use OR pay for data and...
April 13, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Matthew Holt, Policy, Policy/Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Continuity of Care Record Gains Ground As A Standard

By BRIAN KLEPPER We live in a time of such great progress in so many arenas that, too often and without a second thought, we take significant advances for granted. But, now and then, we should catalog the steps forward,...
April 10, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Consumers, David Kibbe, Electronic Medical Records, Google, Health 2.0, Personalized Medicine, Policy, Policy/Politics, reform, Technology, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (20)

It's, err, gulp, HIMSS time

By Matthew Holt Yes, the annual cavalcade of boat-show sized booths and late night partying—interspersed with frequently mind-numbing presentations that most people skip— is on. In Chicago in a snowstorm! I touched down on Sunday midday and managed to compound...
April 6, 2009 in Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2)

Andy Slavitt, Ingenix

By Matthew Holt So we're going to start with one of the more controversial people I'm meeting at HIMSS, Andy Slavitt the CEO of the newly discovered and reviled by the Senate Ingnix. As you may recall, despite the fact...
April 6, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (8)

Response to "Doctors Raise Doubts on Digital Health Data" S. Lohr NY Times

By STEVE MCKINNEY 1410 Cambridge, England. Minor Canon Thomas Rangle did a final count of the books at Trinity Hall. He counted 122. Most of the books are biblical in nature or celebratory of our good and righteous benefactor Pope...
April 3, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (6)

The Hawaii Health 2.0 Chapter meeting

By Matthew Holt Indu & Matthew traveled to Hawaii (tough gig but someone’s got to do it) to take part in the Hawaii Health 2.0 chapter on Online Care, held on Thursday March 26. The chapter meeting was rather more...
March 27, 2009 in Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bluementhal is new health IT czar

By Matthew Holt David Blumenthal, known slightly more for being a policy wonk than a geek (or perhaps known best for being a wonk about geek issues!), has been appointed the new Director of the Office of the National Coordinator...
March 20, 2009 in Policy, Policy/Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (10)

A Sticky Solution to a Sticky Problem

By ALISTAIR ROCK “Don’t pull the knot tight,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once warned, “before being sure you have got hold of the right end.” Those who hope to sort out the tangle of health care spending would do well...
March 16, 2009 in Health 2.0, Health Plans, Marketplace, Technology, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (23)

Health Affairs is all about IT

By Matthew Holt Most of the Health care geek squad is in DC as I write, at a press conference conducted by Health Affairs which has an entire issue out today about IT in health care. Here’s the table of...
March 10, 2009 in e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (6)

Five Recommendations for an ONC Head Who Understands Health IT Innovation

By David C. Kibbe, Brian Klepper and John Moore. Now that the legislative language of the HITECH Act -- the $20 billion health IT allocation within the economic stimulus package -- has been set, it's time to identify a National...
March 6, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Current Affairs, David Kibbe, Electronic Medical Records, evidenced-based medicine, Health 2.0, Physicians, Policy, Policy/Politics, primary care, public health, Quality, reform, Technology, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (14)

Google Health sharing--simple but potentially important

By Matthew Holt Today late afternoon PST Google flipped the switch on an important change/add to Google Health. Recently they’ve been adding more and more little features, such as printing & graphing, and in the last month getting CVS retail...
March 4, 2009 in Consumers, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Google, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Physicians, Technology | Permalink | Comments (11)

Frances Dare explains HITECH, really well

By Matthew Holt Frances Dare from Cisco is a buddy of mine who has more and more been their student of what's going on in Washington. Given that we just saw the biggest piece of health care IT legislation ever...
March 4, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Physicians, Podcasts, Policy, Policy/Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Health 2.0 more interesting than porn!

By Matthew Holt Last Thursday I gave a talk to a very high powered group, the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. My old colleague Matt Quinn is now working for the soon to be very rich Agency for...
March 1, 2009 in Health 2.0, Policy, Policy/Politics, reform, RHIOs, Technology, User Generated Content | Permalink | Comments (5)

Getting "the CCHIT question" wrong

By Matthew Holt There’s been a lot of blather from one commenter (who may or may not be a front for a group of malcontents) on the WSJ Health Blog and lots of other blogs about CCHIT and whether it...
February 24, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Physicians, Policy, Policy/Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (8)

Betsy McCraker misses the point, again

By Matthew Holt Not content with being the catalyst for the unleashing of a torrent of vitriol in the direction of those Milquetoast individuals who are in favor of better information systems in health care, in the mild expectation that...
February 23, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, evidenced-based medicine, Policy/Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Podcast: Blues VC fund invests in Phreesia

By MATTHEW HOLT I’ve been following Phreesia since it was two guys in an apartment trying to figure out how to make the patient check-in at the doctors office a better and more useful experience. Today they announced an $11m...
February 17, 2009 in Consumers, Health 2.0, Physicians, Technology | Permalink | Comments (7)

Why Clinical Groupware May Be the Next Big Thing in Health IT

By David C. Kibbe What would you call health care software that: Is Web-based and networkable, therefore highly scalable and inexpensive to purchase and use; Provides a 'unified view' of a patient from multiple sources of data and information; Is...
February 13, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (41)

Frances Dare, Cisco's optimist, and KP's Garfield Center

By Matthew Holt From time to time we check in with my pal Frances Dare who is Cisco’s optimist about the impact that IT will have on health care (FD I’ve worked for Cisco in the past). Here’s an interview...
February 13, 2009 in Health Plans, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Shared Roadmap and Vision for Health IT

By John Halamka, Mark Leavitt & John Tooker Today’s economic crisis has highlighted our need for breakthrough improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care. The nation’s business competitiveness is threatened by growing health care costs, while at...
February 11, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (8)

The AMA Wins a Round Against Accountability and Patient Information

By Brian Klepper On January 30th, a 3-judge DC appeals court overturned a lower court decision that would have forced public release of Medicare physician data. Writing for the majority in a split 2-1 judgment, Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson...
February 6, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Consumers, Current Affairs, Health Plans, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, reform, Technology, The Industry, Transparency | Permalink | Comments (12)

A Question For You Privacy Wonks Out There

By Matthew Holt When I read a headline like Privacy advocates hail stimulus bills I immediately wonder which privacy advocates. If it’s Deborah Peel I shudder, as her aim appears to be to shut down any system of electronic health...
February 3, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Matthew Holt, Technology | Permalink | Comments (5)