An update
posted on 9 May 2008I know I haven’t written anything in quite some time. I’ve been caught up in a few projects that have been taking up my time, but I plan on posting some thoughts based on the recent experiences I’ve had.
I hope to do some posting about my experiences with my dentist and how technologies are being used in that area of health care. Some thoughts about the dichotomy between industry and academia in terms of the outlook of ehealth Some thoughts on recent developments in the mobile/handheld world. By this, I mean specifically Apple’s iPhone and some of the potential implications for health carePowered by Qumana (...read more)
from Hans Oh's eHealth Blog
Cool Technology of the Week
posted on 9 May 2008
Today is my 150th blog entry since I started Life as a Healthcare CIO in October of 2007. Over the past 7 months, I've become a real fan of social networking technologies and have been an active participant in Blogger, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, various Wikis, and countless Webex collaborations. I'm a champion of any technology which democratizes the communication process, turning anyone into an author, publisher or broadcaster. One such technology is Social Networking Radio from blogtalkradio.com (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Blogging MLA 2008
posted on 8 May 2008Looks like I *will* be blogging in the month of May, but only from Chicago.
To my surprise, I was approved as an “official conference blogger” for MLA 2008.
All MLA 2008 conference bloggers:
Stewart Brower - Professional Notes (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Dreaming of Green
posted on 8 May 2008Although being a CIO is my passion and my lifestyle, there may come a time when I want a less operational role, a focus on the simple pleasures of living, and to apply my energy on leaving an environmentally responsible legacy for my daughter. She will inherit the earth I leave her.
The engineer in me wants to pursue a low impact, off grid, eco-friendly life using all the tools and technologies available. Here's my list of Dreaming of Green lifestyle ideas
1. Pick a location with temperatures that vary between 20F and 80F to minimize the need for heating and cooling energy sources. My early research suggests that Portland, Oregon is a good choice for its mild climate, bicycle paths, vegan restaurants, and environmentally enlightened culture.
2. Live in a home under 1000 square feet. That should be more than enough for 2 people and their stuff (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Podcast of Presentation at HIMSS 2008 on SOA
posted on 7 May 2008HIMSS just posted podcasts from the conference in Orlando. Scroll down and you will see mine:
Service Oriented Architecture - Data Reuse and Integration in Healthcare Technorati: SOA
(...read more)
from eHealth
New and Improved!
posted on 7 May 2008CIOs rarely receive credit for keeping the trains running on time . Instead, they receive credit for implementing new applications and cool infrastructure features. The challenge is that 80% of IT resources are needed to maintain existing applications and infrastructure, leaving 20% of the total IT budget to be spent on new work. When you consider the multi-year larger projects, the must do compliance issu (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Web 2.0 and SOA
posted on 6 May 2008Is Service Oriented Architecture a subset of Web 2.0 or are they similar technologies with some overlap. According to and article in eWeek which reports on a presentation by Ben Flock, a Microsoft Healthcare & Life Sciences, at a recent Microsoft conference, "Flock said Web 2.0 encompassed three basic categories: rich Internet applications developed with (...read more)
from eHealth
Role-based Access Control
posted on 6 May 2008Protecting privacy is foundational to electronic health records and healthcare information exchange. In 2007, the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel specified the technical standards needed to ensure the security of patient records and these will be incorporated into vendor products over the next 2-3 years.
At BIDMC, our privacy controls are based on the concept of "minimum need (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Future of PHRs
posted on 5 May 2008The editor of Health Data Management has written an editorial piece on "PHRs: Where Are We Headed?" Because of a variety of products and uneven adoption, he wonders "whether PHRs ultimately will prove to be a passing fad or a ubiquitous technology." He does note that PHRs are probably most effective for the chronically ill who will use them regularly to manage their conditions. He discusses extensively the privacy (...read more)
from eHealth
Semantic Interoperability for Electronic Health Records
posted on 5 May 2008Whenever I lecture about standards harmonization, I'm asked how far along we are on the journey toward interoperability. First a definition of interoperability:
Technical interoperability - the ability to send a human readable record from place to place. A fax machine, secure email, and sending of free text from EHR to a PHR are examples of technical interoperability. For example, at present, Microsoft Health Vault enables documents and photos to be sent from a hospital, clinic, (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Cool Technology of the Week
posted on 2 May 2008
As I write this on my MacBook Air connected to my home WPA-secured 802.11a wireless network traveling over the internet at 20 megabits/second via Verizon FIOS, with my Blackberry 8320 strapped to my belt, and my 4 Gig USB drive in my pocket, my vote for the Cool Technology of the Week is the all of them.Let's consider how these technologies have evolved in my lifetime. The photo is a 1956 IBM 305 REMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive. It weighed over a ton and stored 5 Megabytes of data.
In 1984, I bought my first IBM XT (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
The Way of Koh
posted on 1 May 2008
You're probably familiar with the Japanese martial art Ju-do ("the gentle way"), the Japanese martial art of fencing Ken-do ("the way of the sword"), and you may have heard of the Samurai code of honor Bushi-do ("the way of the warrior"), but you probably have not heard about Japanese Koh-do ("the way of incense").At the end of each day, I have a de-stressing ritual. I leave the anxiety, frustration, and emotion of each day at the office, so I'm always optimistic, energetic, and focused on my family when I arrive home. I chat with my wife and daughter about their day, change in my causal clothing, make a cup of Gyokuro Asahi green tea (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Blogging Vacation Extended
posted on 30 Apr 2008Too buried to write much about it, but I suspect I’ll blog very little between now and the end of May. I decided today that rather than feeling guilty (as I have for the last couple weeks) about not blogging, I would consider this a well-deserved vacation after averaging about 1.5 posts per day for the last two years.
Hope you feel the same way and will be here when regular posting resumes.
Thanks!
-David
(...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Decision Support Service Providers
posted on 30 Apr 2008I've recently written about decision support and speculated on the ways we can transform data to information to knowledge to wisdom.
Over the past few weeks, I've seen a convergence of emerging ideas that suggest a new path forward for decision support. Application Service Providers (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Revolution Health Marks One Year
posted on 29 Apr 2008I had the opportunity to be on a conference call with Steve Case last week on the one year anniversary of Revolution Health. In his usual smooth presentation, he presented some of the features which have made the site a success:
Anchored with trusted content, link it to consumers personal health concernsThe limitation of search engine in finding health information (aka, Google?)Consumer-centricityUse technology as an integ (...read more)
from eHealth
Integrating the Electronic Record
posted on 29 Apr 2008This is the third blog in my series of 2008-2009 areas of personal focus - clinical documentation, decision support, and the integrated electronic record .
At BIDMC, we buy and we build applications. We've purchased vendor systems for Lab, PACS, anesthesia documentation, ICU charting, and cardiology data management. We've built our electronic health record, provider order entry and our portals, which means that we create the enterprise front ends used by clinicians. All our home built applications share one fully integrated database (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
PHRs Make Medicine Less Efficient?
posted on 28 Apr 2008A posting on the Wall Street Journal Health blog quotes Steve Lieber of HIMSS as saying that PHRs may be less trusted by doctors and therefore slow down care, such as emergency or urgent care. The example given is having a PHR on a thumb drive - how does the physician know that the information, some of which could be life-threatening such as allergies, is reliable.
This is another argument for some kind of certification of PHRs and also providing a way to show the source of information in a PHR - is it from a provider, entered by the patient, claims information or something else.
Technorati: PHRs (...read more)
from eHealth
A Field Trip to Dell
posted on 28 Apr 2008From 4/15 through 4/17 my BIDMC team visited the Dell facilities in the Austin area for an executive briefing on several areas of their operations and futures. Today's blog is about their lessons learned.
Data Center Tour
They toured the main Dell data center in Round Rock. This was one of Dell's two Tier III data centers, reduced from the dispersed 16 data center model they used from 2001-2003. Cooling and power were left the way that they had been designed at the time (...read more)
from Life as a Healthcare CIO
Interview on the MaRS site on Medicine 2.0
posted on 24 Apr 2008The submission deadline for the Medicine 2.0 congress is about 1 week away and we have already received some highly interesting abstract submissions and panel proposals. By all accounts, I expect this to be a very exciting conference (to my knowledge, it will be the first academically oriented conference on Web 2.0 applications in health).
Meanwhile, the MaRS Centre (a state-of-the-art Centre bringing together scientists and entrepreneurs, which will be the venue for the conference) has posted the first part of a longer interview with me (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Good Reasons for Not Blogging
posted on 22 Apr 2008I have (no joke) 20 posts that are half-written, and have ideas for another dozen or so that I want to get to- but they’ll need to wait until next week.
Reason 1:
I must try to finish a writing project (about which I’ll write more soon).
Reason 2:
I must make sure I’m well-prepared for my visit to Wisconsin at the end of the week.
Reason 3:
I need to keep refining my materials for MLA 2008. (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Web 2.0 Conferences
posted on 21 Apr 2008Two upcoming conferences worthy of note:
Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare -October 21st - 23rd at the Marriott San Francisco. The agenda looks like a good one: Future of Health 2.0, Wellness 2.0, consumer genomics, business models, and more. Check out the full agenda. Very limited registration spots this time.Cleveland 2.0 - an initiative begun by Case Western Reserve University to apply Web 2.0 to all kinds of non-profit initiatives in Cleveland. In addition to the seminar including Anthony D. Williams, coauthor of Wikinomics, the conference will be simulcasted on Second Life.Techorati: Web 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
Hakia’s Health Search
posted on 21 Apr 2008
Hakia says they’re tapping the expertise of librarians. As CEO Dr. Riza C Berkan writes on the Hakia blog:
Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page does not know X hims (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Frontline Docu: Sick Around the World
posted on 17 Apr 2008I watch Frontline's Sick Around the World documentary last night and really recommend it to all as a sober examination of the healthcare issues that are such a high priority in America today.
Here's a preview below. You can watch the whole program online.
What I found most insightful about T.R. Reid's reporting was the clear and practical way he looked at the pros and cons of the national healt (...read more)
from HealthNex
The Top 100 Open Source Software Tools for Medical Professionals
posted on 16 Apr 2008100 sounds like an exhaustive list but it also demonstrates the extent of tools available to health care. While some of these are definitely healthcare specific, others are general software tools - everything from antivirus to open office. Surprisingly, the category of "storing patient information" includes many open database models which most healthcare providers would not see as secure enough by HIPAA standards. There are patient-specific tools as well. Worth a review and perhaps a selective trial for some of these.
Techorati: Health 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
PubMed Central on Science Friday (NPR)
posted on 16 Apr 2008Via Dale Prince: This Science Friday segment about PubMed Central from last Friday includes free streaming audio and appearance by Harold Varmus.
from davidrothman.net
Newly Announced Employer Wellness website
posted on 15 Apr 2008Limeaid is a new service for employer health and wellness with many of the features you would expect - Health Risk Assessment and wellness tools, but promises a more fun approach to the topic. The primarily green graphics are engaging and have a slightly different twist (sic) such as assessing energy level and giving tips to improve this. It includes such tools as behavioral coaching, biometric screen and offers these online, onsite and via mobile devices.
Looks to be a pretty complete offering in an attractive package. Will have competition from many others including the big players like Revolution Health.
Technorati: Health 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
Complaint about Social Networking - Health 2.0
posted on 14 Apr 2008In response to the NY Times Magazine article on Health 2.0, one person with MS wrote in that, "More than anything, I found it to be a hypochondriac’s virtual theme park." This person also did not appreciate the label "patient". While many people benefit from Health 2.0 style social networking, another writer questioned whether an anonymous user could create an account and then post an amazing recovery based on a specific drug. These are valid concerns which need to be addressed within Health 2.0 to maintain trust with these sites and avoid abuse.
Technorati: Health 2.0 (...read more)
from eHealth
The AMA’s Medical Communications Conference
posted on 14 Apr 2008I think I may take the week off from blogging.
Until Tuesday afternoon, I need to get some writing projects done and make preparations to be away from work for the rest of the week.
I’m flying to San Diego Tuesday afternoon for the American Medical Association’s 28th Annual Medical Communications Conference. I’m excited about serving on this panel (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
“What the heck is Twitter and why should I care?” (Alan Cann)
posted on 11 Apr 2008Dr. Alan Cann made a very decent SlideCast to help explain Twitter (embedded below):
| View | Upload your own
Patricia Anderson (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Open Source for eHealth
posted on 10 Apr 2008Open Health Tools is a relatively new site which is sponsoring projects related to health care. There are so far a small number of projects uploaded to their project list. They also have a collaboration area called OpenCollabnet (...read more)
from eHealth
Use mon.itor.us to keep an eye on your Web site
posted on 10 Apr 2008This site went down for about an hour a couple of weeks ago (my host’s database server had problems, I’m told). Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait for someone to email me and tell me my site was down because a free service I’ve been using for more than a year alerted me promptly that something was wrong.
(...read more)
from davidrothman.net
Hope Leman and ScanGrants.com
posted on 9 Apr 2008Hope Leman and I first got in touch in June 2006 and we jabbered about RSS for a while. By September of 2006, Hope had rolled out MedGrab, where clinicians could easily find and subscribe to TOC updates of their favorite journals via email.
Just recently, Hope has rolled out another neat project called ScanGrants.
ScanGrants is designed to facilitate the search for funding sources to enhance individual and community health. The funding sources listed here may be of interest to virtually anyone associated with the health field – medical researchers, social workers, nurses, students, community-based health educators, academics and others.
Funding sources most frequently listed here include those of private foundations, corporations, businesses, and not-for profit organizations. Finding and listing less traditional funding opportunities is also a priority. Federal and state funding sources are typically not included on ScanGrants because they are readily available on other sites (e.g. www.grants.gov).
ScanGrants was developed as a tool for Samaritan Health Services and its collaborators, but it is also available for use by the general public. The listing is selective and is intended to supplement other search methods. In many instances, grant announcements have been abbreviated for the sake of brevity. To view the full grant announcement, click on the link to the source URL provided for each funding opportunity.
ScanGrants has an RSS feed and email subscription option for each grant category or you can search the site and subscribe to a feed of your search results.
This is a great idea and a terrific, useful (and really good-looking) service for Samaritan Health Services (...read more)
from davidrothman.net
How to: Use Gmail to Manage List Emails
posted on 9 Apr 2008I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists because they frequently contain useful information, but being subscribed to these lists using the email account provided by our hospital would be problematic. The volume of postings on some lists would clutter up the acount, making it more difficult to manage and making it more likely I’d miss other, more important emails from inside our organization.
So I subscribe to lists using a Gmail account. Here’s why:
Separating list em (...read more)from davidrothman.net
Healthcare 3D, via a Web 2.0 tip
posted on 14 Mar 2008I'm amazed almost daily by the growing power of social computing. One of my Australian colleagues who shares a passion for all the new possibilities of the Web 2.0 world and virtual innovations is Jasmin Tragas, who also writes the inspiring WonderWebby blog.
We also collaborate and stay connected via instant messaging, Twitter, virtual worlds and shared social bookmarks. In fact, Jazz was able to share a post by VeeJay Burns (...read more)
from HealthNex
Open Peer Review - Trials and Tribulations
posted on 12 Mar 2008In its dual role as a dissemination medium for peer-reviewed ehealth research on one hand, and as a “e-publishing lab” for pushing the boundaries of “openness” on the other hand, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) and the "e-publishing Innovations Group" which I direct at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, attempts to be at the forefront of what I call the triple-O philosophy: 1) Opening access to everything we publish (Open Access), (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide
posted on 11 Mar 2008
I just got the new book Developing Open Access Journals. A Practical Guide by David J Solomon, PhD. ISBN 9781843343394 on my desk. It is a great work, much needed, and contains a number of useful tips for (low-budget) academic publishers and editors of new OA journals. The book also contains case-studies of 5 successful OA journals, among them the journal I am editing (Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Gunther Eysenbach keynote speeches schedule
posted on 11 Mar 2008Here are a few forthcoming events in the next 2 months where I am a speaker or keynote speaker:
At the invitational NSF/NCI workshop "Cyberinfrastructure in Behavioral Medicine" in San Diego on March 31st I will speak about my infodemiology / infoveillance work
Health Innovation and Policy Summit, Toronto (WebCite), on May 1st I will deliver the closing keyno (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Another plagiarist bites the dust (anatomy of a plagiarizing paper)
posted on 10 Mar 2008Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution.
Within academia, plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is con (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Online PHR + Google AdWords/AdSense = A Privacy Disaster
posted on 8 Mar 2008Much is being written and blogged these days about Google Health, and as a general advocate of what I call "PHR2.0" (PHR: Personal Health Record) I am generally all excited about these developments.
I am also chronically annoyed by the privacy zealots who sometimes seem to want to protect consumers from their own choices ( "I think we've all consented to things online we haven't meant to simply by failing to check or uncheck a box," (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Black sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers
posted on 8 Mar 2008Please cite as: Eysenbach, Gunther. Black sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers. Gunther Eysenbach Random Research Rants Blog. Originally posted 2008-03-08, updated (postscript added) 2008-04-21 and 2008-04-23. URL:http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com. Accessed: 2008-04-21. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5XIsEELKH)
Definition of Spam: The word "Spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email. Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
Source:http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Medicine 2.0 Congress Website launched (and: Definition of Medicine 2.0 / Health 2.0)
posted on 7 Mar 2008Please cite as: Eysenbach, Gunther. Medicine 2.0 Congress Website launched (and: Definition of Medicine 2.0 / Health 2.0). Posted at: Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants (Blog). URL: http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2008/03/ medicine-20-congress-website-launched.html. Accessed: 2008-03-07. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5W9GcYyWN)
(Note: A more refined version of this blog entry will be published as editorial in JMIR - once published please cite as: Gunther Eysenbach. Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness. J Med Internet Res 2008 (in press) http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1030 (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
Google Health Video
posted on 4 Mar 2008If anyone needed further proof that Healthcare 2.0, ehealth or whatever you want to call it is coming, one need only look at the major push that the good folks at Google are making on this front:
(...read more)from HealthNex
Scott Shreeve, MD: The Canonical Health 2.0 Representation
posted on 29 Feb 2008Dr. Shreeve's effort at defining Healthcare 2.0 is just about a year old, but it's a very worthy effort. I'm reblogging it here to advance the collective effort at building some consensus around the intersection of healthcare, social networking and Web innovations. There are excellent alternative sources for defining Health 2.0 on the Health2.0 blog Jack
"In that vein, I have attempted to capture, the quintessential characteristics of the emerging movement and body of companies that make up the Health 2.0 movement.
I have already developed the definition (...read more)
from HealthNex
Health care must move towards strengthening prevention
posted on 26 Feb 2008I am in Sydney this, week, where I am attending the Australian 10th Annual Health Care Congress (WebCite). On Friday I will talk about the role of eHealth in reforming health care systems. One of my key messages is that eHealth is not "just" telemedicine, clinical records, or even "medical informatics" in a classical sense. Rather, ehealth (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
IBM Opens New 3D Virtual Healthcare Island on Second Life
posted on 26 Feb 2008Massive congrats to my colleagues Gina Jesberg, Pranab Sharma and their teams on the upcoming launch of IBM's "vHealth" island in Second Life.
Google Health: the beginning or the end of ehealth as we know it?
posted on 21 Feb 2008Google announced the launch of a pilot project in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic to provide select patients access to their medical record using the Google health platform.
According to the Associated Press, Google will:
begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tes (...read more)
from Hans Oh's eHealth Blog
Google Health starts pilot test at Cleveland Clinic - and my reflections on Personal Health Records 2.0 (PHR 2.0)
posted on 21 Feb 2008Please cite as: Eysenbach, Gunther. Google Health starts pilot test at Cleveland Clinic - and my reflections on Personal Health Records 2.0 (PHR 2.0). Gunther Eysenbach Random Rants Blog. 2008-02-21. URL:http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com. Accessed: 2008-03-08. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5WAZNYYli)
Through the wires I hear that Google Health is finally kicking off:
Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thous (...read more)
from Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
20 Simple At Your Desk Exercises For Web Workers
posted on 20 Feb 2008
Nurses participating in an e-learning course
Originally uploaded by computer_aid_international
This useful health tip comes to HealthNex courtesy of Amy Quinn at the Livesmarter blog. (...read more)
from HealthNex
My Virtual Fitness Epiphany: Expresso Fitness Cardio Bicycle
posted on 19 Feb 2008Let me start by saying while I prefer elliptical and treadmill trainers, I hate stationary bikes, spinning classes etc. I don't even much like riding a bike in the real world.
But I did find the Expresso virtual cycling experience compelling, and offer it as an example of where 3D technologies may play a bigger role in healthcare by turning gym exercising from a chore into a game.