A clever app by Emerging Healthcare Solutions enables EMTs to obtain crucial patient information from their iPhones.
HOUSTON, Jun 21, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Emerging Healthcare Solutions, Inc. (Pink Sheets: EHSI) has secured a potentially life-saving Smartphone application under development called “e-911″. In the event of an emergency that requires treatment by a first responder or emergency room physician, the e-911 app provides for the automated delivery of a user’s medical information, this enables the user to be treated quicker when each second may decide life or death — instead of using the time to verbally find out if the user has a medical condition or is taking medications that could negatively impact emergency procedures.
[From EHSI to Offer iPhone App That Gives Critical Medical Information in an Emergency - MarketWatch]
The app is designed to be a full-featured telemedicine platform, from basic monitoring of patient vitals to live video with a surgeon in a trauma scenario.
Tielman Uncategorized consumer health, telemedicine
I have wondered for a long time why Apple as been so slow to enter the healthcare arena. Perhaps the iPhone’s adoption (including at NYP) is leading it in.
We’d heard the rumors that Apple was working to take advantage of the fact that so many physicians have spent their own money on iPhones. We knew that Apple had convened a meeting among a number of healthcare software companies in Chicago a month or two ago. Now, courtesy of The Medical Quack blog, we learn that the company has turned to its Silicon Valley base–Stanford Hospital and Clinics–to test a mobile version of the Epic Systems EHR.
[From Apple, Epic Systems teaming up on mobile EHR trial at Stanford - FierceMobileHealthcare]
Tielman EHR Systems EHRs
Since the Internet’s earliest days, patients have used the Web to share experiences and learn about diseases and treatments. But now advocates like Dr. Farber say that online communities have the potential to transform medical research — especially into rare diseases like hers that lack the number of patients needed for large-scale studies and rarely attract research financing from the drug industry. Also, she said, it empowers patients to contribute, ask questions and help lead the way to discoveries.
“Patients have been a tremendously underutilized resource,” she said.
Mr. Moss, who came to the laboratory in 2005 from the drug industry, agrees. Patients’ everyday experiences in living with an illness are an enormous source of untapped data, he said; aggregated, those data could generate new hypotheses and avenues for research. “We’re really turning patients into scientists and changing the balance of power between clinicians and scientists and patients,” he said.
Scientists and entrepreneurs are increasingly exploring ways to tap that potential, and not just for rare diseases.
[From Research Trove - Patients’ Online Data - NYTimes.com]
Tielman Biotech informatics
I learned of a worrying trend this weekend. A professor at the Yale Medical School told me that five years ago, 55% of the graduating class were internists. This year, the number was 14%. There has been a natural trend toward physician specialization over the last century as medicine has become more complex and the ever-broadening spectrum of care cannot be provided by any single physician. But this precipitous drop is indicative of more immediate problem: that compensation for specialist physicians so far outweighs that of primary care physicians that students are unwilling to follow the path of primary care
However possible, it is essential that the country create incentives for students to return to internal medicine.
But if this trend continues, it will create new informatics challenges as no single physician will have the reigns of a patient’s healthcare. New physicians seeing the patient on a one-off basis will have to research the patient history from scratch in order to diagnose the day’s problem. This will come in the form of tools to better analyze the patient, and better capture and aggregate information to support this communal model of care by committee.
Tielman Policy issues, Policy
Potentially interested in financing healthcare IT startups:
Bio Equity Risk Management, a boutique health care investment firm, announced its opening Tuesday.
The Boston-based firm aims to provide special-situation investments for companies, limited partners and general partners in biotechnology, medical device and health care IT sectors. That could include ponying up cash for firms raising capital through non-traditional avenues or investing in distressed assets.
The firm was founded by Nessan Bermingham, a former partner at healthcare-focused Omega Funds, and Joseph Siletto, a former director of health care investment banking at Cowen and Co.
Go to Article from the Boston Business Journal »
Go to Item from The Wall Street Journal »
Go to Press Release via Genetic Engineering »
[From Health Care Investment Firm Opens for Business - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com]
Tielman Uncategorized Informatics Funding
There is little information available on this yet, but it is crucial to our field. Any projects based on the current model of healthcare financing must remain flexible to serious change.
President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders met at the White House Wednesday, promising to push a sweeping health-care overhaul through Congress at top speed.
“We’ve got to get it done this year, both in the House and in the Senate,” Mr. Obama said. “And we don’t have any excuses. The stars are aligned.”…
The president spent the past few days highlighting his intent to make sweeping changes in the health-care system, and to do it fairly quickly despite the political obstacles. On Monday, he announced that health industry leaders had agreed to voluntarily find savings of $2 trillion over 10 years. Mr. Waxman said he would need to see more details before relying on those figures as part of a health-care bill.
[From Obama Calls for Urgency in Passing Health-Care Bill - WSJ.com]
Tielman Policy Policy
This is an interesting paper on clinical issues arising at transitions of care, meaning when one physician hands off a patient’s care to another. This can be from a GP to a specialist, or simply as one resident’s shift ends and another takes over. Transitions of care are a notoriously complex, as they involve one physician telling another physician everything they think is relevant, yet there is always information lost for various reasons. Transitions of care have become far more frequent as physician specialization are risen dramatically in recent decades.
Transitions of Care Consensus Policy Statement: “The American College of Physicians (ACP), Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM), American Geriatric Society (AGS), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) developed consensus standards to address the quality gaps in the transitions between inpatient and outpatient settings. The following summarized principles were established:
- Accountability;
- Communication;
- Timely interchange of information;
- Involvement of the patient and family member;
- Respect the hub of coordination of care;
- All patients and their family/caregivers should have a medical home or coordinating clinician;
- At every point of transitions the patient and/or their family/caregivers need to know who is responsible for their care at that point;
- National standards;
- Standardized metrics related to these standards in order to lead to quality improvement and accountability.
Based on these principles, standards describing necessary components for implementation were developed: coordinating clinicians, care plans/transition record, communication infrastructure, standard communication formats, transition responsibility, timeliness, community standards, and measurement.”
Tielman Uncategorized clinical issues
An article in the NY Times describing the split life of a MD/informaticist. This is not an unusual position for many in the field, but I do find it interesting even the Times is publishing articles like this promoting the field like a national call to action. It is true that to really get informatics implemented around the country, it will not take one brilliant invention, but a lot of legwork from people around the country who understand the technical needs of each hospital. This however is not enough, and for this work to be efficient, there must be a national structure in place, with standards in place for information exchange (which exist in the form of HL7 with CDA) but also incorporating into an architecture such as the National Health Information Network.
Fresh Starts - Health Informatics, Connecting the Dots of Medicine and Data - NYTimes.com: “RUSS CUCINA, 37, lives a double life. For two months of the year, he practices internal medicine, treating patients at the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. The rest of the year, he helps the hospital develop its electronic medical records and other data systems.
As a medical doctor who also has a master’s degree in biomedical informatics, Dr. Cucina has a foot in both worlds — medicine and technology — and can bridge the sometimes daunting gap between them.
‘I’m the glue between the I.T. enterprise and the clinical leadership,’ said Dr. Cucina, the hospital’s associate medical director of information technology. ‘Because I have the vocabulary of both sides, I can serve as translator between them.’
Such translators, known as ‘health informatics specialists,’ typically have expertise in medical records and claims, clinical care and programming.”
Tielman Uncategorized informatics careers
While the US healthcare system is world renound for care at the individual level, any national health system with central governance has a significant leg up on the US system for effecting change at the national level. It is good to see China leveraging the (clear) advantages it has to mandate technology that should help tremendously in a country of that size.
HIMSS ‘09: Global Health IT Efforts, Prospects Highlighted - iHealthBeat: “China Hopes To ‘Leap Frog Rest of the World’
While China is coming into the health IT arena relatively late compared with much of the rest of the world, the Chinese system might actually use health IT better and sooner because of it, Dorenfest said.
‘It’s kind of perverse to look at it like that but it makes sense when you realize anybody starting up now can look at all the mistakes others made and avoid them,’ Dorenfest said.
He pointed to Hong Kong as an example. ‘They didn’t get started with health IT until 1999, much later than many other parts of the world — certainly later than the United States — and they are now state of the art in health information technology,’ he said.
China now has ‘a strong desire to leap frog over the rest of the world in health IT. They’re very motivated,’ Dorenfest said.
HIMSS officials also see the potential in the East and have scheduled a trade show in Beijing for May 2010.”
Tielman International