Ragusa's Neurons

2011-09-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Please watch Axial as we complete today at 3:00PDT / 6:00PM EDT against the top Health Care Start Up's... Vote with your phone as well!

Tune in here: http://lnkd.in/YAsZdY

Cheers,

Mark

ONC Seeks Comment on Standards and Interoperability Framework Initiatives

2010-12-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

This is a good thing… As we move down the path of healthcare interoperability we have to be standards based. With that said, there has been competing initiatives and programs that have largely not included some of the stakeholders that are and will be driving the solutions for this market. So I for one, would like to make sure that, as in other standards, the vendor community is included along with the others identified.
Also, the approach that is outlined in the ONC's plan shows a great deal of effort and thought. I would only say that in the past, standards efforts (telecom & financial markets in particular) sometimes work more efficiently if the standards themselves (i.e. definitions) are more refined with use cases and functional items more fluid.
Lastly, using a standards body such as ANSI will help in the adoption of a standard. The use of a organization with no “weight” or “accreditation” after it has produced a specification or recommendation will not allow for a long term success and only lead to more fragmentation and deployment silos.

More can be found at ONC's site - http://healthit.hhs.gov/blog/faca/

Call to Arms (or at least to EHR adoption)

2010-09-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

Just yesterday I read the following in iHealthBeat... "In a recent interview with Federal Times, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal discussed how the federal government is encouraging doctors to participate in the incentive payment program for the "meaningful use" of electronic health records."

Fair enough - in fact isn't this what we are all trying to do? We all want to get the word out to the masses, to help providers discover the benefits of using the tools and solutions designed for "meaningful use". But there are some obstacles:

1) How many healthcare providers are there? Oh yeah... billions. Ok, not really, but there are a bunch and getting all of them connected - let alone talking to one another - is daunting and will not happen overnight. Even using a standards-based approach.

2) "Connect everyone by 2015... or else." Yeah, right! Try telling that to the 1- to 2-provider practice in a small community that has been providing quality care for 50 plus years. Meaningful Use is daunting to everyone, but particularly to small practices. Oh and by the way, this is how a majority of healthcare in this country is delivered.

3) Reshaping processes in the provider practice to meet new quality measures and create information flow to the patient. With minimal impact to revenues, costs, and patient care. Really, this point does not need any more elaboration.

On the flip side, these three tough challenges can actually be simple to solve. Seriously! What we need to do is to look back in time, and to remind ourselves of what we already know - then try not to reinvent the wheel. High tech innovators and entrepreneurs are the key - over the last 20 years they figured out how to solve that problem in the communications and finance markets. Today they are figuring out how to provide interoperable solutions to connect the whole spectrum of providers to consumers, with minimal (or even positive!) impact to current processes.

Dr. Blumenthal summarized the bottom line well: ONC's "overwhelming challenge is that we have to convince skeptical, busy hospitals and doctors that they should adopt [EHRs] and use them in a way that will qualify them for the incentive payments that we are offering."

It's a tough challenge, but by learning from our past, we can continue to move forward by providing innovative, standards-based reusable solutions for the healthcare market. Think of it as a grassroots solution for a grassroots problem.

Lessons Learned

2010-08-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

There have been moments when I was not a very good student, but after reading some things over and over and then implementing what I've learned many times, it finally starts to stick. One such issue is interoperability - a hot topic for the healthcare IT market. Let me say first that the real issue is not only interoperability, it's more than that: we need applications that are, well... smart. Moving data in and out of systems is only a small part of the equation. The clinical stakeholders of our healthcare ecosystem can get flooded with data. This can not only cause frustration but apathy to this data. What is needed, is relevant and timely information that makes a difference in the current state and future outcome of a patient.

Now as we look at how to enable and empower the healthcare IT market for interoperability, a group of issues come up... security, scalability, use case management, costs, etc. Sound familiar? ...it should. Many other markets and industries have gone down this path before and solved many of the issues facing the healthcare IT industry today.

By observing network evolution / revolution over the past 25 years, we can honestly say we have seen and solved these issues before. We now have the opportunity to learn from the history of these industries. For example, we could analyze how the financial sector solved security issues in the 80's and 90's, or look at the transition of voice communications from TDM to VoIP in the telecom industry. What we can be sure of is that we have done this before. Not only have we done this before but we can do it again, and the winner is our future health.

We have a map, now all we have to do is follow the dots. To better health!