Rep. Charles Boustany, a third-term Louisiana congressman and retired surgeon, has been busy on the health care issue, voting against the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), against flu pandemic preparedness and response bills, and against expanding COBRA coverage.

Recently interviewed on CNN, he showed a softer side:

“We do believe that we have to provide a system that creates access to a doctor-patient relationship first and foremost for all Americans.”  (link)

At least there’s something everyone can agree on …

]]> http://reach.medullan.com/2009/09/09/louisana-surgeon-giving-gop-rebuttal-obamas-health-care-speech-tonight/feed/ 0 http://reach.medullan.com/2009/03/24/my-health-history/ http://reach.medullan.com/2009/03/24/my-health-history/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:31:18 +0000 Mindy Tsai http://reach.medullan.com/?p=224 My personal health records are scattered all over different doctor’s offices, hospitals, and boxes at home. Instead of waiting for my providers, health plans, and pharmacies to agree on, implement, and integrate EMR systems, I want to find out what I can do to have a better view of my own health history.

The task seems to be very similar to getting a handle on my cash spending. I have receipts from stores and restaurants everywhere: in my wallet, in my bag, and on my desk. I tried different ways to get an understanding of where my wallet cash went, using Quicken, limiting to credit card spending as much as possible, or setting an overall weekly budget and skipping the details. It was only until when I aggregated all of my information into Mint.com that I felt I had an accurate picture that I could use to analyze my past habits and predict my future spending. What is the equivalent of Quicken and Mint.com for my health records?

I found three websites that I could start using immediately for free: Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and WebMD Health Manager. All three sites have the ability to capture a personal profile, allergies, conditions, medications, and procedures. These sites try to make record keeping easy for the users. For example, proper medical terms can be selected from a pre-populated list. I would be able to record my medical data using any one of these sites.

Beyond recoding the essentials, these websites offers a few different features.

Importing information. Google Health can link my profile with other health vendors. For example: CVS, Walgreens, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, or Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA all integrate with Google Health. Microsoft HealthVault can also link with other applications. For now, I am willing to manually enter my data since the volume of my data is not huge.

Exporting information. I am most concerned about how I can retrieve information from these websites. With all the effort to collect my data, I should be able to share the information with my doctor. Google Health allows exporting all or partial data to Excel. WebMD Health Manager and HealthVault can both print a summary report of the whole profile. None of them allows me to customize a print out.

Sharing. With GoogleHealth, I can share with anyone who has an email address. Other people will be able to read my whole profile without the ability to make changes. WebMD Health Manager allows me to share the same login with others who can have sub-accounts under my (primary) account. Microsoft Health Vault lets me share via email as well. It adds a level of sophistication to the sharing feature by allowing me to specify share level (view, view and modify, or custodian) and information type (allergy, appointments, etc; there are 73 options to select from).

Extra features.WebMD has a dedicated section to manage health for children and a health assessment survey, Healthquotient. Unfortunately, I could not complete the survey because it asked for advanced values such as my LDL, HDL, Triglyceride level, glucose level, etc.  Microsoft Health Vault helps with wellness and fitness management by tracking your height, weight, etc. It can also link with medical devices, such as Weight Scales, Blood Pressure Monitors, Blood Glucose Monitors, Peak Flow Meters, Pulse Oximeter, and Heart Rate Monitors. Microsoft Health Vault asks for Emergency or Provider contact information. WebMD Health Manager can save Coverage information.

In summary, there is not a clear winner among the three tools. Google Health is simple and straightforward. WebMD targets parents and educated healthcare consumers. Microsoft HealthVault seems to have a broader focus. My immediate goal is to take a comprehensive look at my health history. How I can use this information – sharing with whom about what at what level – is not clear yet. Also, by trying to collect my records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, I will learn more about what information is available to me. After sometime, I may end up taking the same approach with my health history as with my petty cash: don’t bother to track every single detail (and conversation) possible.

For now, a simple tool is good.

Change has been on the agenda for a long time in the healthcare industry, but change has been slow to come and implementing change has been fraught with pitfalls along the way.  The Obama Adminstration is giving all indications that addressing this need for change in healthcare is going to be front and center among the key challenges that will be addressed over the next four years.   Since November 4th, much attention within the industry has been given to the question of whether President Obama would still be able to tackle this problem given the issues with the broader US economy.  The industry waited with bated breath to see what investment would be made in healthcare as part of the stimulus package that the President challenged Congress to create.

With the stimulus package signed into law on Tuesday February 17th, it finally seemed that those who had been waiting to see what would transpire could now shift gears and begin the work mapping out the road ahead.  There is much to be done, and there are still many, many more questions than there are answers, but after several months of “wait and see”, it is clearly time for those most able to move the ball forward in healthcare to come together and begin the hard work that lays ahead.  While the Summit of course cannot in and of itself boast to have started the ball in motion, it may prove to be an effective call to action for those of us who have been forced into playing a waiting game over the past three months due to the state of the domestic and global economy.

To hear about the content of the discussion on the summit, I suggest reading my colleague’s blog article here