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What’s Ahead After TEDMED 2013

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Last week, a number of TEDMED attendees and myself participated in a Google+ Hangout sponsored by Xerox to take a look back at our unique experiences at TEDMED 2013. The discussion included the following people:

  • Markus Fromherz, chief innovation officer of Xerox Healthcare
  • Benjamin Miller, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine
  • Nick Dawson, chief experience officer at Frontier Health Consulting
  • John Lynn, editor and founder of the Healthcare Scene blog network

We made it a really focused 15 minute discussion of the key takeaways from TEDMED. Some of the topics we discussed included: healthcare big data, multidisciplinary collaboration, citizen science, patient centered care, and a look at TEDMED topics 5-10 years from now. It was a really great discussion, and I encourage you to watch the TEDMED recap video embedded below.

Read more coverage from TEDMED from Xerox on the Real Business at Xerox Blog and follow @XeroxHealthcare.

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May 15, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: Healthcare  Healthcare Business Intelligence  Healthcare Interoperability  HealthCare IT
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The Rise Of mHealth And EHR Use, And The World Of Telehealth – Around Healthcare Scene

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mHealth is on the rise, and it looks like usage of smart phones among physicians is following that same trend. A recent study shows that usage rose about nine percent in 2012, which shows that it is becoming more accepted in the medical world. It will be interesting to see if it increases even more this year (I have a feeling it might.)

Similar to the increase in doctors using smartphones, there has been a jump in EMR and HIE use as well. A survey from Accenture found that over 90 percent of doctors are using an EMR in either their practice or at a hospital, and over 50 percent are using an HIE. This increase was highest among doctors in the United States. Be sure to read more of the interesting facts this survey found about EMR and HIE use in the U.S., and around the world.

Even though 90 percent of doctors are using an EMR at one point or another, only about 55 percent have actually adopted an EHR into their practice. It can be nerve-racking trying to find the perfect EHR. If you are finding yourself at that crossroad, be sure to read these five tips from ADP AdvancedMD on how to have a successful EHR implementation.

Still, some of you may be hesitant to implement an EHR. You may ask, is it worth it? Does it takeaway from healthcare? There is debate from both sides, each with compelling arguments. John believes that technology is overall positive in any industry, and discusses his thoughts, and some of the challenges that faces the industry.

Telehealth and medicine is so huge, it can be hard to digest. Neil Versel recently attended the American Telemedicine Association’s annual conference in Austin, Texas, and saw just how huge this market was. Be sure to check out this video he created from his experience, and to perhaps get a better idea about the many types of telehealth. Similar to the increase in doctors using smartphones, there has been a jump in EMR and HIE use as well. A survey from Accenture found that over 90 percent of doctors are using an EMR in either their practice or at a hospital, and over 50 percent are using an HIE. This increase was highest among doctors in the United States. Be sure to read more of the interesting facts this survey found about EMR and HIE use in the U.S., and around the world.

With summer quickly approaching, it’s more important than ever to stay hydrated. But if you need a little reminder, be sure to look into the Jomi Band.  It gives you warnings when you might be on the brink of dehydration, and makes it easy to keep track of how much water you’ve consumed in a day’s time.

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May 12, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: EHR  EHR Benefits  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Selection  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare Communication  Healthcare Devices  HealthCare IT  Hospitals  Medical Privacy  Patients  Personal Musings
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EHR Backlash, ACO, and Center of Care – #HITsm Chat Highlights

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Topic One: What’s your take on the emerging #EHRBacklash? A post-Meaningful Use fad, or a movement with actual potential?

 

Topic Two: Will patients ever take their place at the center of the care team? Do they know that they should care about it?

 

Topic Three: What does #ACO mean to you? Does anyone understand what will make them sustainable? Does human behavior even permit such things?

 

Topic Four: Open Forum. What topics are you tuned into right now? #healthIT

 

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May 11, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: ACO  EHR  EMR  Healthcare  HealthCare IT
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National Nurses Day Tribute

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Today is National Nurses Day and this week is a celebration of all the amazing nurses in healthcare. I think nurses are the unsung heroes of healthcare. They do an extraordinary job and get very little recognition.

When I think about EMR in general it impacts nurses as much or more than anyone in the clinic. Yet in most cases, nurses have very little involvement in the EMR purchase process. Sure, most places do some sort of meeting with the nurses and they take a little feedback from them, but from my experience they have little involvement in which EMR is chosen.

This means that most nurses just have to deal with whatever EMR their clinic or hospital chooses. Most of them do it with the grace of a nurse.

My favorite nurse story comes from my experience with this wonderful nurse I worked with named Shelley. She is a vivacious and passionate nurse that loved her job. She wasn’t afraid to tell you what she really thought and had a heart as big as I’ve ever seen. Plus, she gave the best bear hugs!

When it came to the idea of going to EMR, Shelley was one of the biggest critics. She was not looking forward to the change and was vocal about it. Despite her and others fear of EMR, we pressed forward. One of the very first days after we implemented the EMR I came into the nurses station where I saw one of the nurses struggling with some EMR function. Next thing I know, EMR averse Shelley is reaching over the nurse’s shoulder and teaching her how to fix her EMR problem. It became a kind of running joke in the clinic that Shelley could go from EMR critic to EMR trainer.

I think this highlights the beauty of so many nurses. First, the ability to adapt to challenging situations. Second, the concern and care for fellow nurses and patients. Shelley was such a great representative of nursing to me.

On this National Nurses Day, I want to honor my friend Shelley and all the other caring, professional, wonderful nurses out there. This video from RWJF highlights the greatness of nurses.

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May 6, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare  HealthCare IT
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EMR Market Topped $20B Last Year

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As we all know, last year was a huge year for EMR adoption. How big?  Well, according to new data from research firm Kalorama Information, the EMR market hit $20 billion in 2012, driven by health IT upgrades and the desire for Meaningful Use incentive payments.

According to Kalorama, the EMR market was $20.7 billion last year, up 15 percent from the $17.9 billion it reached in 2011.  These numbers include revenue for EMR systems, CPOE systems and directly-related services such as installation, training, servicing and consulting.

Kalorama expects near year to be big as well, as providers implement EMR systems in an effort to avoid government penalties for sticking to paper charts.

More than $12.3 billion in Meaningful Use incentive payments had been doled out to 219,000 eligible hospitals and healthcare professionals as of March 1, 2013, with the incentives largely driving physician adoption of EMRs.

A recent CMS study reported that over 70 percent of physicians have used EMR systems, a huge jump from the 26 percent which had used these systems in 2006.  Hospital EMR installlations, meanwhile,  have been maturing, with 77 percent having reached Stage 3 or higher, compared  with 71 percent in 2011.

Going forward, Kalorama predicts that EMR adoption will continue to increase, that hospital adoption will be more rapid than physician adoption and that hospitals currently at adoption Stage 3 will continue to increase their engagement with their systems. The research firm also predicts that current EMR owners will be upgrading their systems.

Meanwhile, researchers say, the threat of penalties for failing to use EMRs meaningfully will force both doctors and hospitals to make upgrades over the next year or so.

While Kalorama doesn’t mention this, the next year or two is also likely to be marked by “the big switch,” with doctors in particular changing out systems that haven’t proven effective to date.  The likelihood that doctors will be buying new systems is likely to lead to a gangbuster year for ambulatory HIT vendors.

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May 2, 2013 I Written By

Katherine Rourke is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Filed Under: EHR  EHR Stimulus  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Implementation  Healthcare  HealthCare IT  Hospital EHR  Meaningful Use
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Risk Taking in Healthcare and the Foolish

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“You have to take what people think is wrong or even foolish and make the breakthroughs of tomorrow.” – John Kheir, MD

I’m still in awe of the ideas that John Kheir, MD presented at TEDMED around injectable oxygen-filled microbubbles. The concept is fascinating and while I know nothing about the science or medical requirements of what he was doing, I was even more impressed with the challenges that John Kheir faced from “the establishment” when he through out what many considered to be foolish ideas.

This is what make’s Dr. Kheir’s quote above so powerful. The breakthroughs of tomorrow really are often consider foolish ideas today. We see these examples in the tech world all the time. When Google began it was foolish to think that they could index the web and let people search through it. The dominant thinking of the time was that a website like Yahoo would curate the vast amount of web content for the users. Google’s foolish idea has turned out pretty well. It makes me wonder what foolish healthcare IT ideas are out there that we should be embracing and supporting as opposed to suppressing.

When Dr. Kheir had his breakthrough idea of oxygenating the blood through an IV, he started to research whether some sort of micro container existed. He discovered that indeed microbubbles already existed and were used for ultrasound imaging. He reached out to one of the leading experts on microbubbles and asked if they’d been used to oxygenate blood and if not why not. The researchers response was fascinating. He replied, “I didn’t know it would be useful.”

I ask then, are there technologies out there today that we just aren’t using in EMR and healthcare IT because “we didn’t know it would be useful?”

Check out the Looking Ahead After TEDMED hangout I’m doing on Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 2:00 PM EST to hear more discussion about TEDMED.

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April 29, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare  HealthCare IT
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Android Security Risks May Outweigh Benefits

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Not long ago, my colleague John Lynn made a compelling pitch for the Android platform, arguing that it’s likely to take over healthcare eventually given its flexibility.  That flexibility stands in sharp contrast to Apple phones and tablets, which work quite elegantly but also impose rigid requirements on app developers.

That being said, however, there’s security risks associated with Android that might outweigh its advantages. The major carriers are doing little or nothing to upgrade and patch the Android versions on the phones they sell, leaving them open to security breaches.

The Android security problem is so egregious that the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a complaint with the  Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to investigate how AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile handle software updates on their phones.

In the complaint, the civil liberties group argues that the carriers have been engaging in “unfair and deceptive business practices” by failing to let customers know about well-known unpatched security flaws in the Android devices that they sell.

What makes things worse, the ACLU suggests, is that the carriers aren’t even offering consumers the option to update their phones.  Though Google has continued to fix flaws in the Android OS, these fixes aren’t being bundled and pushed out to the wireless carriers’ customers.  As the ACLU rightly notes, such behavior is unheard of in the world of desktop operating systems, where consumers regularly get updates from Apple and Microsoft.

In its complaint the ACLU argues that the carriers must either provide security updates to customers or allow them to get refunds on their devices and terminate their contracts without any penalty. It’s asking the FTC to force the carriers’ hand.

In the mean time, with healthcare requiring strict data security under HIPAA, one has to wonder whether hospitals and medical practices should be using Android devices at all (at least for their work).  Of course, clinicians who are accustomed to using their personal Android phones or tablets will be inconvenienced and probably fairly annoyed too.  But as things stand, hospital CIOs better be really careful about how they handle Android phones in the healthcare environment.

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April 26, 2013 I Written By

Katherine Rourke is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare  Healthcare Communication  HealthCare IT  HIPAA General  Medical Privacy
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What’s Next TEDMED?

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One of the beauties of TEDMED is that they do a really professional job recording the event and sharing the recorded video with the world. For those who missed it or want to re-watch certain sessions, you can find the full TEDMED session recordings available online. Thanks to Xerox, I was able to cover the event in person. If you’re looking for a cliff notes version of TEDMED, check out my previous posts covering the event:

As I think back on TEDMED, I’m stuck wondering about a major healthcare group I would have loved to see on the TEDMED stage: hospital and healthcare administrators. No doubt they’re doing some really innovative things in healthcare, but yet we didn’t see any of them on stage talking about how to innovate the nuts and bolts of healthcare.

It’s not that many of these hospital and healthcare administrators weren’t at TEDMED, because they were there in force. I met with many of them and saw many of them tweeting about TEDMED like this tweet from New York Presbyterian CIO, Aurelia Boyer:

I hope that many more hospital and healthcare administrators will “Step Out” and speak at TEDMED like Hospital CIO Bill Reiger did at The Breakaway Group’s Healthcare Forum at TEDMED. It’s great that hospital and healthcare administrators are listening and learning at TEDMED, but they also have a voice that needs to be heard.

Looking forward to the next year in healthcare let me suggest three topics I hope we’ll find at TEDMED 2014:

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) – ACOs represent the core of a rapidly changing healthcare reimbursement environment. This change will fundamentally alter healthcare as we know it. ACOs are a hard topic to package into a slick presentation, but there are stories to be told about the impact for good and bad of ACOs. We often hear: “If you’ve seen one ACO, you’ve seen…one ACO.” How about we start with one ACO TEDMED talk and expand from there?

Interoperability – Almost nothing could provide more value to healthcare than true data interoperability. There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of people affected every day by the lack of healthcare interoperability. The challenges to interoperability are real and powerful, but I see a shifting tide where organizations are finally looking to embrace interoperability and its inherent benefits. TEDMED would be the perfect place to highlight the interoperability success stories that will inspire others to follow.

Patient Engagement – A number of sessions at TEDMED 2013 began the discussion of the shifting role of patients in healthcare. I won’t be surprised if 2014 becomes the Year of the Patient. Like a slow moving ship that’s impossible to stop, the patient is finally becoming the center of healthcare. ZDoggMD’s comment at TEDMED highlights this shift from the physician perspective, “I went in to medicine to do things for patients, not to patients.” Patients at the center of healthcare is a message that needs to be shared.

In true TEDMED form, it only seems appropriate that I also suggest a collaborative musical act that could perform at a future TEDMED. If you’ve never heard of The Piano Guys, they’re great. Where else have you seen a piano and cello collaboration perform Coldplay, Usher, and Adele? Although, their real genius is when they take two songs and mix them into one beautiful piece like they did with Love Story Meets Viva La Vida. I can think of a few areas of healthcare that could benefit from some unexpected collaboration.

What did you take away from TEDMED 2013? Have you had a change in perspective personally or professionally? What topics should we see at future TEDMED events?

You can hear more reflections from TEDMED and predictions for the future of healthcare during the May 2 at 2 p.m. ET “Xerox ‘Ask the Experts’ Episode: Looking Ahead After TEDMED” Google+ Hangout that I’m hosting and participating in. Click here for more details and to watch.

Read more coverage from TEDMED from Xerox on the Real Business at Xerox Blog and follow @XeroxHealthcare.

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April 24, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: ACO  Healthcare  HealthCare IT  Hospitals  Meaningful Use  Patients
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Practice Fusion EMR Brings Patients Into The Picture

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Practice Fusion was one of the first free, advertising supported, cloud-based EMR to enter the market and has likely been the loudest proponent of free EMR software. Although, they have some interesting Free EMR competitors like Mitochon and Kareo. Since 2007, Practice Fusion has focused on offering unfettered access to its product in exchange for physicians being willing to accept advertisements relevant to the health records they’re using and the aggregate use of the EHR data.

The company, which has raked in venture capital in buckets since its founding, now says it has 150,000 healthcare providers using its EMR and records on 60 million patients, according to a piece in The New York Times.

Now, the company has taken another step in its free-for-all model with a new service it calls Patient Fusion. Patient Fusion is a new service which allows patients using the system to schedule appointments with any participating doctor who uses the EMR. It also allows patients to rate the doctors in question and to access their records with permission. So far, 27,000 of Practice Fusion’s EMR users have signed up for the service, the Times reports.

The Times columnist covering this announcement speculates that Practice Fusion has launched its new product as a means of building up patient traffic, but I don’t see how that would work. Patients may see more of their records, but this won’t necessarily do anything to increase the number of doctor-based views the network can sell to lab companies and pharmas.

On the other hand, Patient Fusion could prove to be a powerful way of attracting and keeping doctors who want to offer easy-to-administer appointment scheduling to patients. Also, getting patients engaged with their medical records is very much in the spirit of Meaningful Use and the ONC’s priorities generally, so this new patient feature could be a beacon for doctors going through MU-motivated EMR switching this year.

Bottom line, this seems like a nifty idea. I predict that most of Practice Fusion’s EMR customers will sign up over the next year or so.

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April 22, 2013 I Written By

Katherine Rourke is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Free EMR  Healthcare  Patient Portal  Pharma
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User-friendly EMRs, Meaningful Use Fraud, and DietBet – Around Healthcare Scene

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Many are concerned with the user experience in Health IT – particularly regarding the user-friendliness of EMRs. While it is easy to be overwhelmed by the negative reports, there are businesses and providers working hard to resolve these issues. McKesson is one of those companies, and they were recently recognized for their work at HIMSS13. Will more companies start making efforts like this? 

One step toward making EMRs more user-friendly is, well, making them accessible to patients. Unfortunately, according to a recent Accenture study, 65 percent of doctors believe patients should only have limited access to their health records, and 4 percent believe records should be totally closed. Reasons range from self-consciousness of what a doctor says in a record, to being uncomfortable with using digital records. Allowing patient-access may very well be a huge cultural shift for doctors everywhere.

In order to pass Meaningful Use stage 1, one must indicate which EMR was adopted. But, according to BuildYourEMR.com’s CEO, Mike Jensen, 74 percent of the providers who stated they were using his EMR…weren’t. If this is similar across the board, around 5.4 billion dollars were paid in error for incentives. While this isn’t likely to be the case, it’s pretty sad the lengths people will go to in order to get some extra money. EMR vendors need to start going over their CMS data in order to help prevent this fraudulent behavior.

If money was at stake for you to lose weight, would that motivate you? For most people, it probably would. DietBet takes the desire people have to lose weight and pairs it with the innate desire to have money, and creates a weight-loss game. If you lose 4 percent of your body weight in four weeks, you get part of the money pot for the group you are in. If you don’t, you lose the amount you paid to participate in the first place.

John recently had the opportunity to go to TEDMED as a guest of the Breakaway Group (A Xerox company)
. It was a great experience for him, and highlights can be found @ehrandhit or searching #simplehealth on Twitter. John recounts some of key takeaways from TEDMED, and suggests some of the major themes that will likely be seen in healthcare.

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April 21, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: EHR  EHR Benefits  EHR Stimulus  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Consulting  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare Devices  Healthcare Social Media  Hospitals  Meaningful Use
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