Innovation
mHealth: the icing on the Health IT cake
For those whom might resist adopting health information technology, mHealth promises to bring health information technology to them
Massachusetts advocates for consumer data protection – but does regulation stifle innovation?
The state of Massachusetts recently passed a law that got a bunch of attention. 201 CMR 17.00 targets “Standards for the Protection of Personal Information of Residents of the Commonwealth.” While other states have passed similar legislation – Massachusetts has raised the bureaucratic bar by establishing future guidelines for how businesses will have to prove [...]
Thoughts on the new healthcare reform law
Understanding the details of the new health reform law is challenging – but the focus on “access” is just a start. Much more will need to be done to really reform our healthcare model in the US, and to moderate the rapidly escalating cost trend.
Countering patient apathy towards healthcare cost
Over the course of the last year, I have had many, many conversations with people about the idea of making medical cost information more transparent. For example, there is information available through the State of Massachusetts’ ‘My Healthcare Options’ site (www.mass.gov/myhealthcareoptions) where citizens of MA can compare cost and quality of a variety of medical [...]
Sharing Clinical Data, the First Step in Health Provider Collaboration
HealthCampBoston was an engaging one-day meeting of ideas and vision around overcoming the major challenges and false starts on the initiatives to improve healthcare. People with a wide variety of backgrounds were a part of the unconference, in which the attendees drove the agenda and discussions. These unconferences are now international, from London to Azerbaijan, and the next one is in May and promises to be no less stimulating than this one on Tuesday in Cambridge was.
Personal Health: My Genome
To better understand the make up for the human species, scientists have been looking deeper into our DNA since 1990. There are approximately 20,000 to 30,000 genes in human DNA. The human genome contains about 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. Amazingly enough, 99.9% of the base pairs are exactly [...]
Using Privacy as Currency: Bringing the PHR to Market
Non-functional requirements add overhead to projects. Right or wrong, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick recognized this and is contemplating bypassing reviews for Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance for stimulus funded initiatives. Just as accessibility acts as an impediment to construction projects, privacy delays healthcare IT projects by introducing numerous complexities. Is it time to ignore the rules in order to bring innovation to market?
Advancing to healthcare 2.0 with web 3.0
Web 2.0 was all about user generated content making the web a self-sustainable source of information. Web 3.0 is about organizing this information so that it can be aggregated, analyzed, and used to make and influence decisions. But this won’t be done by idle hands pouring over the organization of content page by page – it will be about building domain ontologies and applying semantics to bring order from the chaos.
Wal-Mart, eClinicalWorks Change the Game
With all the talk of government stimulus and the Obama Administration’s mandates around healthcare, it’s the private sector making the big splash in HIT today with Wal-Mart partnering with Dell and eClinicalWorks to deploy low-cost EHR solutions to physicians.
