HEALTH CARE TECHNOLOGY

So you released a health app, now what? While waiting for your creation to do its thing and fix health care, there are some steps you can take to increase the odds of its success. Obviously, marketing is very important, but if you are a really good software developer, you probably released something that looks pretty on the outside, while needing many more iterations before it becomes a robust and really useful application. You should have a fairly good idea of what needs to be fixed, what needs to be added and what needs to be changed, if the funds to pay you and your team were forthcoming. Fortunately, this is a perfect time to obtain funding for health apps. There are all sorts of competitions, challenges, incubators, accelerators and crowd funding opportunities specifically for those working on fixing health care, that will not only get you exposure and buzz, but also a few extra development dollars. Make sure you take advantage of them all. Chances are that you discovered by now t...

"In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: " -- Genesis 15:18 Some four thousand years later, after numerous detours, major scope reductions, tragedies, compromises and constant upheaval, the Promised Land project is very much a messy work in progress. This is the nature of great promises, and in the here and now, we are contemplating yet another, albeit smaller, promise : � �Hospitals, physicians and other health care providers are clearly taking advantage of recent incentives to embrace the promise  of technology [emphasis added] ,� said John R. Lumpkin, MD, MPH, senior vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. �  The Promise of Technology, as you may have guessed, was not made to us by the Lord Almighty, but instead it seems to be a product of spontaneous creation with mysterious origins. A few years ago, before the incentives mentioned b...

The Department of Defense (DoD) is in the market for an EHR solution� again. After a lengthy foray into building its own EHR from scratch ( AHLTA ), with miserable results , and another shorter detour through the fantasy land of an open-source integrated EHR ( iEHR ) with the Veteran Administration (VA), during which no material progress was made, other than spending taxpayers� money of course, the DoD announced that it will begin looking for a commercially available product to suit the DoD�s unique needs. This decision is the source of much angst for some and much excitement for others, because no matter what the DoD decides to do, many more billions will be flowing out of taxpayers coffers and into the hands of a lucky few. On one hand, since most people served by a DoD EHR will eventually be served by a VA EHR, it makes sense that these two government agencies should use the same product and aggregate a lifelong record for their patients. On the other hand, the VA EHR (VistA), alth...

Why are we transforming health care? Why do we feel compelled to act with such urgency and in such broad reformative strokes? Did we just wake up one morning shaken to our very core by the enormity of having to fill the same medical history form multiple times? Are we driven to bleak despair by the thought of an elderly homeless person having to suffer multiple bouts of disease requiring frequent hospitalizations? Is our battle-forged sensibility to human rights egregiously offended by the realization that some Americans live a few months less than people residing on the French Riviera?  Or is it perhaps the American Dream, having fulfilled itself in all other aspects of our lives, that is now expanding to the next frontier of taming the health care system to individually and respectfully cater to our quest for eternal happiness?  Or maybe it has something to do with cold hard cash�.. Health care, we are told, is way too expensive. We are also told that this is really our faul...

If a mosquito lands on someone�s head and you hit the mosquito with a shovel, is the death of the guy under the mosquito considered an unintended consequence? Source: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart So now we know that the government of the United States of America is spying on its own citizens , not specifically on any one in particular, but massively and indiscriminately collecting troves of data on all American people. All perfectly legal, complete with secret courts that must approve each wholesale transaction with government data providers, which they do 4 times every day and twice on Sunday (or something like that). It�s not clear if the government pays for volume or value, or if the data providers are just donating this electronic bounty to the government as an expression of their patriotic duty, and perhaps in lieu of taxes which most of these technology giants (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Verizon, etc.) are successfully, and also legally, evading. So those who are b...

Every article, discussion, blog post, comment and casual remark on the subject of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and their prominent role in health care reform is never complete without stating that EMRs were designed for billing and hence are poorly suited to contribute to patient care. Most health IT apologists are either trying to refute these allegations or are pointing out to new products and paradigms that will be designed from the ground up for something other than billing. Let�s try a different approach. To paraphrase Coach Green, EMRs are what we thought they were, and we shouldn�t let 'em off the hook! EMRs are designed for billing, and they should be designed for billing and as financial administrative tools, they are uniquely positioned to solve our health care problems, if properly utilized, because the health care crisis in this country is a financial crisis. It is a financial crisis at a national level and for too many people it is a financial crisis at a personal ...

On May 22nd, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a momentous press release announcing that �Doctors and hospitals� use of health IT more than doubles since 2012� . The release was accompanied by two beautiful graphs, one for physicians and one for hospitals, titled �Adoption of Electronic Health Records by Physicians and Other Providers� and �Adoption of Electronic Health Records by Eligible Hospitals� , respectively. Both graphs, shown below, start at zero (0) adoption in January 2011 and climb rapidly to �[m]ore than 291,000 eligible professionals and over 3,800 eligible hospitals� by April 2013. Of course, the graph titles are incorrect, since there were plenty of electronic medical records in use well before 2011, and the actual text of the press release does make some references to the world prior to 2011 (more on that below). The White House, eager to display such enormous success, posted the announcement on its own blog and fixed the titles to indicate...