I’m sure many of you are recovering from the Super Bowl right now. I got exactly what I wanted from the Super Bowl: a great game. I didn’t care too much either way, but I am glad that I predicted the Giants to be the winners. Too bad I’m not a betting man. Although, I guess that’s the trick with betting….but I digress.

Time for my regular weekend round up of interesting things happening in the healthcare IT and EMR twittersphere. We’ve got some really interesting tweets this week. Here we go.

@NateOsit We also have a webinar of @eCollab12 for those that wont’ be able to make it to #HIMSS12.ecollab12.eventbrite.com #hitsm

— Leonard Kish (@leonardkish) February 3, 2012

When I created and posted my list of HIMSS 12 sessions, they hadn’t created the agenda for the eCollaboration Forum at HIMSS and so I couldn’t add any sessions. However, the eCollaboration Forum at HIMSS 12 agenda is up now, so check it out. I know there are a number of sessions I’m going to add from the forum. I also love that they have the online option linked in this tweet for those not attending HIMSS 2012.

Yes, stage 2 #meaningfuluse NPRM will be out before #HIMSS12. meaningfulhitnews.com/2012/01/30/yes… #healthIT #ONC #CMS #hitpol #EHR #EMR

— Neil Versel (@nversel) January 31, 2012

This is really important news. I think a lot of us are REALLY interested to see the final meaningful use stage 2 details. Good find by Neil Versel.

Speaking doctor-to-doctor(s) using healthcare social media bit.ly/wiqbyu #hcsm #hcsmeu

— H2Online (@H2Ohu) January 30, 2012

I’m sure we’re going to continue seeing the trend of more and more doctors gleaning value from engaging in social media. At a minimum doctors are going to start finding more and more new patients using social media including things like physician blogging. A well done practice website and social media effort is going to be really valuable for the doctor of the future.

3 reasons why you should start a blog for your hospital bit.ly/ypCE78 #hcsm #blogging

— Mark Ragan (@MarkRaganCEO) January 30, 2012

Yes, blogging will also help hospitals in a number of ways too. Social media can benefit hospitals, doctors, practices, etc.

@DonRosenthal Tablets are for content consumption. PCs are for content creation. Much more intellectual flexibility w/ PCs. #HITsm

— Erica V. Olenski (@TheGr8Chalupa) February 3, 2012

I was fascinated by this tweet. First because I wonder what changes will make tablets more than just great for content consumption. Second, the idea of PCs being more intellectually flexible.

RT @patientslikeme: “my healthcare data is not nearly as portable/accessible as my financial data.” @jeff_cole #hcsm

— Jacqueline Thong (@jacthong) January 30, 2012

I know there are reasons why financial data is more portable and accessible than healthcare data, but it still irks me that we haven’t overcome those reasons…yet!

Last month CareCloud announced a new real-time analytics dashboard to help doctor streamline revenue cycle automation. The core of their product is what they call CareCloud Analytics. As I think about the announcement, I wondered if it was really a big deal or not and why we hadn’t seen more of this in the various practice management systems and EHR software on the market today.

Is Data Analytics important in Healthcare?
I think this type of information is a big deal. Information is power and this is never more true than in healthcare. The press release does a great job of describing how real-time analytics and dashboards provide information which provides transparency and accountability to a practice. One quote from the article says, “The practice can now manage the productivity of the office staff, monitor in real time the productivity of billers, and gain transparency into the business side of operations to help form better decisions through data, instead of intuition.”

I’m a huge fan of analytics in my business. I call myself a stats addict. I have 2-3 stats programs running on my websites at all times. I get stats from my ad server, from Google’s ad server, and from every other stats engine I can find that has reliable data. Much of my success with my websites is because of my passion for knowing what’s happening with my websites. To me, Data is power! The same can be said for a practice. Data is the power to make important decisions that are needed for the success of your practice.

Why don’t more EHR and PMS vendors provide these analytics?
I’m sure there are a number of reasons why we don’t see real time analytics happening very often in the small practices. Hospitals are a bit different. There are whole companies devoted to just providing these types of services to hospitals that can pay for a full scale data warehouse environment to provide this type of data. A hospital that doesn’t do this type of data mining is missing out as well, but they have a number of options. Although, I don’t think many hospital HIS vendors offer this info by default.

The key reason I think real-time analytics and customizable dashboards are missing in the small practice environment has to do with doctors demand (or lack thereof) for such a feature. This will surprise some, but most will agree that the majority of doctors don’t care much for the business side of the practice. Sure, they care that the business side of the practice effects how much money they take home at the end of the day, but a large portion of doctors would love their lives a lot more if they didn’t have anything to do with the business of a practice. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this, but most doctors want to practice medicine not business.

With this as background, if you ask most doctors what they want from their EHR and Practice Management software, they’ll start to list off all of the clinical and workflow needs that they have. Very few of them will even venture into the business requests like real time analytics. Plus, even if they did venture into the business side of things, would they know how to request such a feature?

EHR and Practice Management Vendors have to show them why it matters to have these real time analytics. It reminds me of the famous quote attributed to Henry Ford. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This can often be taken too far, but I think it applies well when it comes to things like real-time analytics of a practice.

One other reason that a number of companies are missing the analytics and its relationship with revenue cycle management is that they’re too focused on EHR. Many just consider the PMS a standard thing that everyone has already and that there’s no room to innovate. Last I checked meaningful use didn’t have any practice management elements and that’s taken up at least one development cycle for most companies. Too many doctors later dismay, the EHR selection process often puts the practice management side of the puzzle on the backseat. This is a mistake that many practices are paying for today.

As one PR rep for a major EHR company said to me, “Revenue Cycle Management isn’t sexy.” Although, she said this directly after telling me how beneficial it was to their bottom line.

Today, I came across the best description I’ve seen of the difficulty of storing healthcare information and also making that information shareable with another EMR in a way that is meaningful.

Longitudinal patient information is arguably one of the most temporally and spatially complex information sets known. Certainly GIS and others are complex as well but the science of medicine and therefore healthcare is constantly changing creating a moving context. To understand how to treat a patient the healthcare provider needs to be able to understand what has worked as well as what hasn’t worked in the context of what was known about the patient and the treatments available at any point in time. This creates an environment of very complex data relationships. If any one of those relationships are broken then the semantic context of the data is lost and now there is a loss of information. Data items need to be bundled and stored as a complete unit of understanding for them to constitute information. Once broken apart into separate data items they are much like Humpty Dumpty.

Certainly the above description describes the challenge of storing and sharing both the healthcare information and the context of that healthcare information. I still can’t help but think that we need to simplify our goals for EMR data sharing into small achievable goals.

The above description also kind of reminds me of my previous post about the “Body of Medical Knowledge Too Complex for the Human Mind.” The description above reinforces this challenge as well.

I just came across a few interesting tweets where Howard Luks, Web 2.0 and HC 2.0 savvy Orthopedist fascinated by Social Media and influence on healthcare delivery, posted his 100 patient “poll” on PHR. His first question was how many people were interested in PHR. The second one was how many patients would want their healthcare data online (cloud). Check out the responses.

66/100 not knowing what a PHR is seems high. I would have guessed more like 95/100 wouldn’t know what a PHR was. The split for those interested in their HC information being online seems pretty representative. Over half of the people don’t care or don’t know. So far no PHR vendor has really given us a reason to care.