Blogging, Twitter and Healthcare
Posted on 13 January 2009 | No responses
I just found a great resource over at the Medical Student Blog that will come in handy for all you Social Media enthusiasts who also happen to be into healthcare. It is a list of Doctors, Medical Students and Medicine related tweets and blogs/websites. Of course we added ourselves and pending approval we should be part of the list in no time. If you know of anyone who’s missing from the list who you think should be included, head over there and your/their details.
Coincidentally we have finally picked up our Twitter use and you can now follow us here: @virtuate.
Hospitals and Social Networks
Posted on 8 January 2009 | No responses
Through John Sharp I came across this long list of hospitals using social networking sites over at Ed Bennet’s Blog… This is an incredible list and from it Ed’s planning on coming out with some best practices on the use of social networking for hospitals. Looking forward to it.
eHealth vs Health 2.0 vs Medicine 2.0 vs …
Posted on 8 January 2009 | No responses
There are a lot of terms out there and controversy on those terms. But what does it all mean to you … to me?
I notice a need for my own sake and sanity to try and understand the different terms and what they mean to me as a consumer of health services (i.e. patient).
Starting my research by reading this paper – “Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness” by Gunther Eysenbach. Here is the abstract to start you out:
In a very significant development for eHealth, a broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches coincides with the more recent emergence of Personal Health Application Platforms and Personally Controlled Health Records such as Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Dossia. “Medicine 2.0” applications, services, and tools are defined as Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to enable and facilitate specifically 1) social networking, 2) participation, 3) apomediation, 4) openness, and 5) collaboration, within and between these user groups. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) publishes a Medicine 2.0 theme issue and sponsors a conference on “How Social Networking and Web 2.0 changes Health, Health Care, Medicine, and Biomedical Research”, to stimulate and encourage research in these five areas.
We’ll touch base later.
More Physicians Use Mobile Technology in Clinical Care
Posted on 7 January 2009 | 7 responses
From the American Medical News:
Physicians increasingly are discovering smartphones serve a purpose beyond being a convenient communication gadget.
It is good to hear. As you know we are big proponents of the use of mobile technology for everything … so it is always good to read research that supports our crazy ideas. Some of the highlights:
Physicians are adopting mobile technology at a faster rate than the general public (54% of U.S. physicians now and by 2011 70%).
Drug references are the top function accessed by physicians… Other applications are also available (i.e. medical calculators, decision-support tools and electronic health records).
Use of mobile technology among physicians will increase EHR adoption.
Palm started the trend a while back (no idea of dates) when they offered their devices to medical students with select drug reference guides already loaded. Initially and for quite some time, physicians in general, and for no better reason than pure familiarity were heavy Palm users. At first, BlackBerry had a tough time breaking in with this group but began to trickle into their ranks after having won the hearts and minds of hospital management and administration. The main reason for this can be summarized into two words: enterprise grade! Administrators, security folks and management all recognized the BlackBerry platform as being more secure, stable, easy to manage and reliable.
Unfortunately I don’t have access to the reports referenced in the above article by Manhattan Research or the Diffusion Group to see if adoption is broken down by device, however if the data is there I would assume a continuing decline on the Palm side and an upwards trend for BlackBerry usage. If we look at physicians specifically I would have to say that this group would lean more towards the iPhone. But again this is pure speculation from my view (from the ground up).
My conclusion: mobile devices are still being used by physicians as a personal productivity tool and are not integrated into care giving processes to the extent that real and transformational value have been achieved. There are pockets of success around but it is definitely not widespread.
Read the rest of the post at the American Medical News.
Top 50 Health 2.0 Blogs
Posted on 6 January 2009 | 2 responses
One day we hope to make it on this list of the Top 50 Health 2.0 Blogs over at Acumeme. However a few things need to happen first:
- Need to become smarter.
- Need more time.
Because neither of the above seems a possibility in the near future maybe we can just get some contributors…
Financing healthcare for a retiring population
Posted on 6 January 2009 | No responses
Paper at the Vox site entitled Ageing – saving or working more? explores the alternative (?) idea of financing healthcare of the elderly by raising the retirement age:
How will the shrinking labour force pay for the pensions and healthcare of the growing elderly? This column argues that linking retirement ages to longevity would alleviate a significant part of the deterioration in public finances and ensure that the burden of adjustment is carried by those gaining from increases in longevity.
In summary:
… there has been and will continue to be a widening gap between the number of years people spend inside and outside the labour market. When longevity increases and retirement ages stay constant or even fall, it is implied that each generation tries to benefit from existing schemes by taking all of the longevity gain as an increase in retirement (leisure). Obviously this is not possible, and this is the main reason for the projected trend decreases in the budget balance. A much more straightforward reform agenda would thus be to ensure that retirement increases alongside longevity. Linking retirement ages to longevity will remove a significant part of the trend deterioration in public finances, and it will ensure that the burden of adjustment is carried by those gaining from increases in longevity.
Read the entire piece here.
Wireless Homecare Solutions
Posted on 6 January 2009 | 1 response
Although somewhat dated, I just came across this paper by the Venture Development Corporation sponsored by Research In Motion on Wireless Home Care Solutions: Addressing the Quality of Service and Performance Gap.
From the Executive Summary:
If executed well, wireless home care solutions can significantly enhance an organization’s quality of service and profitability, not to mention providing a defensible source of competitive differentiation. So why aren’t more organizations investing in these solutions? Why does there continue to be a general reluctance or hesitancy in automating home care service processes?
At issue are the role of home care service providers within the health care sector and the approaches taken to automate service processes. Yet the evidence of the benefits of homecare service automation, including improved quality, efficiency and safety, continues to mount. VDC conducted in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of home care service providers and wireless solution providers, many with several generations of home care service automation experience. According to our research, home care service organizations can achieve an average net benefit of up to $15,000 per full-time equivalent (FTE) per year by deploying wireless home care solutions.
It is, however, important to note that these represent optimal benefits, which can vary based on factors such as service provider acceptance, level of solution functionality, reimbursement models (capitated vs. fee for service) and the quality of implementation. Furthermore, the value proposition of wireless in home care is multi-faceted and revolves as much around the improved quality of life of individual service providers as it does around potential productivity enhancement. In this paper VDC will examine the opportunity for wireless solutions in the home care sector in North America and provide recommendations on best practices to follow to maximize ROI and reduce the risks that home care service providers face when making wireless investments.
And these are their recommendations which I will not go into and instead point you back to the paper:
1. Avoid multiple, non-integrated information systems.
2. Understand the distribution of benefits received from wireless home care investments.
3. Clearly identify issues to be addressed/benefits gained through wireless solution.
4. Prepare for change.
Hospitals advised to end mobile phone bans
Posted on 6 January 2009 | No responses
As stated on our sister site before, healthcare represents an enormous opportunity for mobility. Healthcare workers (on and off campus) are extremely mobile and the returns are also enormous: from chronic disease management, to critical care, to home health care, to eprescribing to electronic medical records the variety of uses for mobile technology in healthcare do not only have a high return on financial investments but will allow caregivers to spend more time with patients doing what most of them love to do (and went to school for).
Having said all that, it still quite surprising and shocking how hospitals have not opened their doors more widely to mobile phone use inside their facilities. However we see some progress being made:
Hospitals in England have been told to consider allowing “more liberal use of mobile phones”, following new guidance issued today by the Department of Health.
Under the new guidelines areas of hospitals where mobile phone use is banned could become the exception rather than the norm. Bans will remain in place in areas where critical care equipment is susceptible to electro magnetic interference.
The latest guidance says NHS trusts “should consider giving patients, staff and visitors the widest possible use of mobile phones, where it doesn’t interfere with equipment, the privacy of others or cause a nuisance”.
Although the main reason for these changes in England are not for the same reasons we stated above:
Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said: “Close support and comfort from loved ones when you are poorly in hospital is essential. Mobiles phones are commonplace in everyday life these days and people have told us that they’d like to be able to use their phones more in hospital to keep in touch.”
Bradshaw added: “That’s why we’re keen to encourage sensible use in NHS hospitals where it is safe to do so, in addition to other services offered in hospitals such bedside payphones, TV and internet access.”
It appears to be more about the patient experience than on the improvement of care… but both are really one and the same so it is good all around.
One question still remains… when will see hospitals adopt mobile technologies more widely? Will the iPhone do it? With Palm sinking rapidly and physicians no longer able to defend the ailing platform, BlackBerry may have a chance to win hospitals over especially if they go with the enterprise pitch. However, on an individual basis I am sure that the iPhone stands a better chance of winning the hearts and minds of caregivers. We shall see.
**An extremely similar version of this entry has also been posted on our other site.
Do we really own our medical records?
Posted on 5 January 2009 | 2 responses
Found this great letter to the editor to the Lindsay Post which thought it was worthwhile repeating here since part of our refocus for this year will lead us to concentrate on the patient experience and how it can be improved by technology. The original letter can be found here.
Our family doctor retired this past summer for personal reasons.
I know we are not alone when I say it has been terrible. Even though I was able to find a doctor for my children and myself well before our doctor retired, I am having a terrible time getting our records (now I say ‘our’, but do we really own them?). I sent in a request for transfer and heard nothing. I called the receptionist and was told I needed to pay for the transfer, so I offered to pick them up and was told that was not allowed. It is one thing when you switch doctors out of choice, but when your doctor quits … should this really be your responsibility? If they are ‘your’ records, should you not be allowed to just pick them up? These are records describing your child births, miscarriages, surgeries … who really owns them if not you?
I waited and did not receive an invoice, big mistake…a month later I called our soon-to-be retiring doctor to see where the files or the invoice were, as I had received neither. The number had been disconnected. I left messages hoping for some info but never received a response. Two weeks later I got a call from the Medical Record Storage in Toronto, asking $340 in exchange for the records of my five children (more than $400 if I wanted my own). They eventually lowered the price to $260 and all six of us to … $360. If the records had of been sent as per my request, the charge would have been $35 per record. This fee is outrageous .
Almost my whole family has had this same doctor since 1992, including my parents, my sister, her husband and their four children, and my two brothers (not to mention numerous other people from our community.
When I found my children a paediatrician, he agreed to take my sisters’ children as well, and our requests for a transfer were sent in at the exact same time. My sister was lucky enough to receive the invoice for their records and paid promptly, however the cheque was cashed and the records were still shipped to the storage company. Ridiculous. Her situation has been rectified and records forwarded for no additional fee from the storage company. She is still waiting for those records and they are being sent directly to her. Imagine that.
Our doctor is a great man and doctor and I wish him the best at whatever he has decided to do in place of his family practice. I would also like to thank him for the many years of providing a great service to our family. However, his office doors should not have been closed until each and every file transfer request was filled.
If I had been ‘allowed’ to pick up our files -what would I be doing right now? Spending an extra $360 on my children for Christmas instead of paying for something I should already own?
Tessa Sparks Omemee
Update & Healthcare Blogs to Keep You Busy
Posted on 10 November 2008 | 1 response
Over the last few days activity seems to have picked up here at Virtuate and just today we have had 30 visitors to the site. We realize 30 visitors is nothing to write home about, however we have done little to no promotion or linking to date so we are relatively happy with 30 visits in a few hours on this Monday morning.
We wanted to provide an update for those that want to see some content now so you are not disappointed and you keep coming back… It will get better and we will have some valuable and insightful content in these pages. We haven’t sent the official invitation to our planned contributors but that will take place this week. In the meantime you can head over to any of these other places mentioned below to get a dose of healthcare and technology news and information.
HITSphere – The brainchild of The Healthcareguy Shahid Shah this site is a Healthcare-IT blog aggregator you may find useful to discover and uncover other interesting sites.
eHealth – John Sharp’s eHealth blog comes up a lot throughout the net (at least it did for me) and I subscribe to it through Google Reader. A good place to get news and brief commentary. It has served as a gateway to other places for me. (His posts don’t seem to accept trackbacks so I will probably drop by, leave a comment and introduce Virtuate to him).
Life As a Healthcare CIO – Everybody knows John Halamka… this is his blog and latest post. I also found out about John’s post on the iPod (not the iPhone) in Healthcare through David Rothman’s blog – another good place to visit. (BTW – The iPhone and other mobile devices in the enterprise will be one of the many topics discussed at the Mobile Strategy Blog over the next few weeks).
eHealthNews.EU Portal – The First European eHealth News Portal … This site is part of my daily read.
The Health Care Blog – David Kibbe is running a series: “Confessions of a Physician EMR Champion,” subtitled “A Conversation with American Physicians About How to Save Medicine in the Age of Information.”
The New Life of e-Patient Dave – Truly require reading for anyone in healthcare and technology. One of our goals here at Virtuate would be to have e-Patient Dave do a few contributions. We shall muster up our strength later. Dave’s latest post here.
Through Dave above I found Dr. Ted Eytan‘s blog (where I went because this post interested me) and noticed we are using the same theme. Since he was there first we will be looking for another themes soon (note at bottom of this post)… at least we know Dr. Eytan has good taste 
. More importantly you should read his definition of Health 2.0 which I am sure will be mentioned in one of our articles soon.
Quickly Now:
- Neil Versel – Healthcare IT Journalist with a blog. Since he announced one of his gigs going away I wonder if he would consider writing for us? Especially since he leans towards the productivity topic which is near and dear to where this blog wants to go.
- Health 2.0 Blog – A blog is for the whole Health2.0 Community as a space to write and to comment.
- The Doctor Weighs In – Written by five physicians. Sample article: The Future of Health 2.0 Tools.
- The Future of Health IT – Could be summarized by saying its ‘like’ an aggregator that gives us a glimpse into the Long Tail of Healthcare IT (latest post).
- Health Populi – From a health economist and management consultant (sample post).
- Trusted MD – Hippocrates writes more on Health 2.0 which I am sure we will follow a lot of his links to get better acquainted with some of the players. Some of his other posts show that not everything is hugs and kisses in the health 2.0 debate. Nice. (BTW – there is a lot more on Trusted MD worth reading).
- HISTALK – Just imagine how much reading and work goes into a post like this one full of links and information. Saves all of us time.
This is it for now. Hope you find some of these links interesting. Will work on the ABOUT page next and will send that email out to our coveted contributors.
A note on the design – You may have noticed the switch from the very elegant Carrington Theme to this design. We may go back to Carrington but there was dead link to the author pages that was creating some problems for Google so until we can figure it out we will stay with the current theme. However don’t be surprised if the theme changes a few more times until we freeze it for a while.