Neil Versel posted a list of upcoming Healthcare IT conferences (a few aren’t just IT, but IT will be a large part of it) in the sidebar of his blog. Check out his list:

Medical Device Connectivity (Sept., Boston)
Medicine 2.0 (Sept. 17-18, Toronto)
AHIMA (Oct. 3-8, D-FW)
Health 2.0 (Oct. 6-7, SF)
MGMA (Oct. 11-14, Denver)
Connected Health Symposium (Oct., Boston)
CHIME09 (Oct., Indian Wells, Calif.)
E-Patient Connections (Oct., Phila.)
NIH mHealth Summit (Oct. 29-30, DC)
Inst. for Health Tech Transformation (Nov., LA)
AMIA (Nov. 14-18, SF)

That’s a lot of conferences. Were there any that we missed? That just goes through the end of the year. How do people stay up with all these conferences? I still haven’t made it to HIMSS, but am planning to go to Atlanta in March.

I’ve always wanted to put together my own EMR conference. Basically, just bring in a lot of really smart people to have insightful discussion about topics related to EMR. You could even bring in some EMR vendors and run them through the ringer. Maybe none of them would want to come and be held accountable for their software. However, if they did that would really say something. We could always do it on some test installs or something. Maybe the conference could put 10 EMR vendors through their paces and publish a report evaluating those 10 EMR companies. Then, that report could pay for the expenses of the conference. Who knows, I’m just thinking out loud on my blog. That’s what I love about blogs.

I’m not even sure it has to be a conference. Now that I think about it, it might be even more interesting to just bring a nice group of really smart people together to meet and discuss EMR and HIT for a day. Could produce some pretty interesting content. Plus, with a small group, you could pretty easily find a place to host the event I would think. Not to mention, I live in Las Vegas and everyone loves to come visit Las Vegas.

Back to the list above, which of the above conferences will you be attending? Are there any types of conferences that you wish were available related to EMR and HIT?

Has anyone participated in the health social network iMedix? I first read about this idea a few years ago on TechCrunch and it looks like they’re still around and kicking. I really like the idea of an empowered patient. I like the idea of having good information. I’m just not sure that iMedix or many other websites are the places for patients to get that information.

I wonder if iMedix could possibly start partnering with EHR companies to provide their platform of information integrated with a doctor’s portal. I’m not sure the doctor would ever go for it or if they would want to take on that liability. However, iMedix is interesting as kind of a Yahoo Answers for medical questions.

I’ve certainly seen this a few other places on the web and whenever I see it, I think about my experience at the doctor. Usually they don’t have time to answer all of my questions or it feels rushed or other questions just come up after the fact. Plus, I kind of like to know all the nuances of what’s happening. Since I work daily with a number of doctors, I’ve often found myself going and visiting with those doctors to become more educated about the treatment suggested by mine or my children’s doctors. One time my son was prescribed some interesting drugs for Mastocytosis and so I went and talked with the pharmacist I support and learned about the drugs as well. I just wanted to learn everything I could about the treatment and disease.

At the end of the day, how different is it for someone to go on a health website and ask the questions that I asked the doctors and pharmacist I work with? I guess the main difference is the trust factor between information on a website and my colleagues at work. However, the motivation to get more information is the same.

What can’t be discounted is the power of these health social networks to help patients with similar chronic conditions to interact with each other. I find this type of interaction really interesting to follow.

Unless you’re a part of the health care blogosphere, you probably haven’t been following the incredible firestorm that health care bloggers have created around the acquisition of Wellsphere by HealthCentral. Here’s the cliff notes version:

• Bloggers receive flattering email from Wellsphere asking to join their Health Care blogger network
• Bloggers provide their blog feed to Wellsphere
• Wellsphere aggregates their blog content for months
• HealthCentral Acquires Wellsphere
• Bloggers Freak Out
• Bloggers learn that the TOS gave Wellsphere the right to sell their content
• Bloggers feel betrayed
• Bloggers flame Wellsphere and HealthCentral for acquiring them
• Bloggers pull their blog feeds from Wellsphere
• ? (still to be written)

Honestly, I feel like bloggers are making much ado about nothing.  Sure, the emails from Dr. Rutledge were incredibly flattering.  I had to literally tell myself when reading them that Dr. Rutledge had never read my blog.  He didn’t really know how good I am at blogging even though his email called me an “expert blogger” and a “true medical expert.”  Seems like many bloggers who got that email couldn’t read through the marketing gloss.  (See the full emails here)

I too joined Wellsphere and my experience was very much like this health care blogger except the part where he feels like a sucker.   I knew what I was getting into.   All that was suggested was getting more exposure for my blog and possibly more credibility and visibility for my name.  My blog being about Health Care IT I didn’t see the promised traffic and so I pulled my blog.  No harm no foul.

I think people are making a bigger deal out of having their content on Wellsphere anyway.  If you’re blog holds any weight, then there are tons of spammers all over the internet that are pulling in your feed and republishing it.  Having it on Wellsphere doesn’t change the value of your content.  In fact, in some ways it can add more value to your content since it links back to your original post.

Sure, I feel bad for those bloggers that didn’t understand what they were getting into.  However, do I think that Wellsphere was unethical in what they did: No.  I also disagree with Dmitriy who said that “Wellsphere epitomizes all that is wrong with the “Health 2.0 Movement.”"  There are so many bigger issues with Health 2.0 than this, but I digress.   From my experience, Wellsphere did exactly what they told me they were going to do.  Do I wish they could have driven more traffic to my site?  Yes.  Did it happen?  No.  Oh well, it was worth a try and cost me almost nothing.

The funny part for me about all of this is that just last week I sent an email to a couple wellness educator friends of mine that were looking to creating a wellness website.  I sent them Wellsphere as an interesting example of building a community of people focused on Wellness.  When asked, I told them that Wellsphere was probably VC funded and as such would be looking for exit opportunities.  That’s just how a website like it works.  You build it to exit.  Most common of which is purchase by another company.  It’s just unfortunate that so many bloggers were unaware of the web VC busines model.  Don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

Since I’m the eternal optimist, let’s take a look at a couple really cool things that have happened because of the HealthCentral acquisition of WellSphere:

• I’ve found a ton of really cool Health Care bloggers that I’d never known before
• Health Care bloggers have never been more passionate and united in a common cause

Now if we can harness that passion and energy to something as important as health care and wellness, we can certainly do a lot of good.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Recently I’ve been reading a fair amount about the movement that many are calling Health 2.0. I think the most simple description of Health 2.0 is applying many of the Web 2.0 concepts to health care. My question is whether EMR fits into Health 2.0. My personal feeling is that most of them don’t. Most Web 2.0 projects are consumer facing projects that allow people to interact, collaborate and participate in the process. EMR software is more about facilitating a doctor’s charting.

Certainly you could make a good case that a patient portal or EHR is more Health 2.0. In fact, that really seems to cut to the heart of Health 2.0. Creating a powerful interface between doctors and patients so that patients are a part of the process. However, I think that most EMR in their current state don’t benefit from this type of interaction.

Of course, this begs the question of whether an EMR should have this type of interaction. My short answer is that it should, but until the payment systems catch up with the technology that creates these interactions we won’t see broad Health 2.0 application to EMR software.

About a month ago I got an email that I just got around to reading today. Essentially it was someone announcing a new social network for prescription drug consumers. Here’s a part of the release that I was sent about the prescription drug social network:

I’d like to invite you to try out the eDrugSearch.com Community — a brand new social network for prescription drug consumers. To join, just go to www.edrugsearch.com/register and sign up; it takes only a couple of minutes.

Why a social network for drug consumers? At eDrugSearch.com, we believe that online communities will forever change the face of healthcare — by giving consumers the information and resources they need to ask better questions of caregivers, to support one another, and to save money on treatments and medications.

Prescription drug consumers, in particular, have shown a strong interest in social networks on general health sites, indicating an unmet demand for a niche community. U.S. drug consumers relish the opportunity to share their experiences — their discoveries, their frustrations, their solutions. These Americans are turning to each other rather than relying solely on pharmaceutical company advertising or rushed doctor’s appointments.

We want the eDrugSearch.com Community to be a place you can come for help, reassurance and advice.

Of course, this really begs the question of if we need a social network around prescription drugs. Of course, my gut reaction is that prescription drugs sounds like much to small of a category for a social network. I’m certain that a lot of niche social networks are going to do very well (in fact, I’m working on a sports one myself), but can prescription drug consumers support a social network.

Seriously, when I’m taking prescription drugs I want to get off them as soon as possible. Are people going to just visit the site for entertainment. Certainly there are people who have chronic illnesses that take drugs for a long time, but won’t they stop visiting the site after taking the same drug for so many years? I guess maybe they’re hoping for advancements or alternatives to that drug, but that still feels like a stretch.

The other part of me thinks that something like this might work. I’ve always felt like one of the advantages of my job is that I had access to not only a bunch of doctors, nurse practioners and PAs, but I also support a pharmacy. In the past three years, there have been a number of times where I make the rounds of doctors, APNs and the pharmacist to learn about the drugs that were prescribed to myself or my family. To me this illustrates the need for information that people have when they are prescribed a drug.

Of course, the biggest challenge of this all is can you trust the information that this prescription drug social network provides? How do you know when someone is qualified in the area or not? Not to mention I could see the drug companies really abusing this site with false information. I think we all have been to hotel sites where the ratings just sounded too good to be true. Sounds pretty easy for the drug companies to do the same thing.

Now, if they had a way to certify providers (MD, DO, APN, PA), then you could give some credibility to what was being said. In fact, a social network for these providers to discuss the various drugs is something that could be very strong and useful. That sounds pretty Health 2.0 to me.

Think about how wonderful the ability to send a discharge summary by email to a patient straight from your EMR. I think it’s pretty easy to see the tremendous benefits of this type of communication. Send the patient information to one place they probably visit every day and where they can read and process the information away from the hustle and bustle of the clinic. Certainly many doctors have been doing this with little pamphlets or handout sheets with clinical information. Unfortunately, too many of these sheets never get read. Certainly that same thing could happen with an email, but at least the next generation of patients are going to want this information in their email box.

Of course, the problem with sending this information in an email is that email is not secure. Email encryption hasn’t taken hold fast enough to make it encrypted. Is a user’s email box really a secure location where they want their health information? I personally don’t have a problem with it, but I would expect that many people wouldn’t want their health information in their email any more than their regular mailbox. Either way, without the encryption it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to sniff out what’s being sent in an Email containing for example a patient’s discharge. It would be going across the internet in basically plain text.

This situation actually happened in Austrailia a little while back in an article I read called “Unsecured email sparks dispute.” I know I wouldn’t be happy if a clinic just decided to send these unsecured emails. Not so much because I was personally worried about my information being lost. I personally have nothing to hide (yet anyway). However, I would feel uncomfortable patronizing an organization that would deal so flippantly with my information.

I’m sure that someone will chime in that this is the whole purpose of a Patient Portal or EHR interface that allows people a secure method to receive and send protected health information. This is all well and good, but from what I’ve seen this usually requires the doctor’s EMR company to support this type of interaction. Plus, even more serious of an issue is that you’re giving your patients one more login and password that they’ll need to remember. Certainly not a deal breaker, but one more inconvenience for our users and the staff that have to support our users when they forget their password. Unfortunately, I think that this is the future of secured messaging, but I can always hope that there’s something better that we’re just missing.

We should also realize that this isn’t going to get any easier. In fact, I think we can reasonably say that this is going to get harder and harder. Don’t be surprised if soon some patient would like their health information somehow incorporated into some site like Facebook. It’s really only a matter of time until some developer creates a health interface into Facebook.

It might not make sense to most people, but the next generation of patients are going to grow up living and breathing their online life in some sort of social network (Facebook is just one example of these). They are very comfortable with transparency and will be interested in being able to track and compare health information with other people. Not to mention interact in a social network with other people who have similar conditions. It seems like this isn’t a question of if, but when this type of interaction will happen.

Even if you think that health information on a social network like Facebook is far fetched, we are already seeing health information propagating to the web in Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health. Is this going to be ok? Will it become as synonymous as online banking has become to the banking world? It’s not that far of a stretch to think that Google Health could easily be tied into Google’s OpenSocial platform which would allow a patient’s health information to do all sorts of cool things.

The convergence of Health Care and IT is going to be really interesting. It’s taken health care a while to get going with IT, but I think almost everyone agrees that IT could do amazing things to better the health care a person receives.

UPDATE: Google Health Beta is now LIVE!

Today I saw an article on TechCrunch that talked about how Google Blogscoped found a Google Health login page (UPDATE: The Google Health Beta Landing Page has been taken down) for the hopefully soon to be released Google Health. Of course, there isn’t really anything all that special about the login page. It looks just like almost all the other Google login pages. However, the Google Health page did include the following information:

With Google Health, you can:

* Build online health profiles that belong to you
* Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies
* Get personalized health guidance and relevant news
* Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services
* Share selected information with family or caregivers

Too bad none of the other links work, but it does give some interesting information about what Google Health will be like. The part that is most concerning to me is downloading medical records from doctors and pharmacies. How are they going to do that? The answer is that they aren’t really going to do it. There are going to be a handful of the thousands and thousands of doctors and pharmacies that will be able to work with Google Health.

I hope that Google Health does the right thing and integrates with something like CCR since it is already beginning to be established in many Electronic Medical Record software programs. That would be a huge boon to CCR, but it would also open up an entire set of doctors that could support upload to Google Health. This could definitely be a nice differentiator from Microsoft Health Vault which can’t do this either (unless it’s been added since I looked).

If Google Health decides to create their own standard for a clinic to be able to upload to Google Health they are crazy. Doctors have almost no motivation to support Google’s standard for uploading medical records. I’m not sure many EMR companies will support it either. I can see a few of them do it as a PR move, but I’d be very surprised if many of them bit on this. Doctors don’t buy EMR software because their patients can get their record out easier. It just doesn’t make business sense for EMRs or doctors to really do any sort of uploading like this to Google Health.

Of course the good thing for this all is that having another big player like Google interested in helping the healthcare system with some Health 2.0 solutions is great by me.

You can see my previous coverage of Google Health and also the Google Health Co-op.

Update: Here’s a screen shot of what Google Health could look like.

Update 2: What CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said about Google Health at HIMSS08.