Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Why doesn’t the US have a single integrated electronic medical records system for sharing patient information. The promise from an integrated EMR is clear. In an interview for Marketplace, Dr. Neal Weinberg says: Not having immediate, accurate information in one chart can lead to complications for the patient, they could die, they could be pretty…
Wearable technology is all the rage. There was even a recent paper in JAMA about wearable technology. However, will wearables soon to be old news? What is the future? Joe Kvedar gives his thoughts on the topic: Thus, we have plentiful pedometer apps…We’ve also solved how to run these apps in the background without disrupting the…
Information technology without a doubt is helping to restructure the very fabric of society, business and government. However, these changes do not come without challenges. For instance electronic health records (EHR) may harm the patient-physician interaction and are susceptible to hacker attacks. A recent Fiscal Times article demonstrates how government programs often do not invest in IT infrastructure efficiently. Meanwhile,…
Electronic Health Records can help doctors access the information they need regardless of whether they have treated you before. Setting up integrated health care systems or systems where EHR networks are interoperable can improve this facility across healthcare organizations. However, this approach is not without risks, as shown by this recent hacking episode at Anthem.…
…in the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together. Vinod Khosla
…is the potential for data breaches. Experian’s 2015 industry data breach forecast notes the following: We expect healthcare breaches will increase — both due to potential economic gain and digitization of records. Increased movement to electronic medical records (EMRs), and the introduction of wearable technologies introduced millions of individuals into the healthcare system, and, in…
Robert Pearl’s MedX keynote address gives some reasons. Many New Technologies Don’t Address The Real Problem. Tech entrepreneurs often take a backward approach to invention. They start by discovering a nifty technology. Later, they figure out how people can use it…Alan Cooper, considered by many to be the father of modern user experience design (UXD),…
PwC just released a report on wearable technology. Some findings from the health field include: More than 80% of consumers said an important benefit of wearable technology is its potential to make health care more convenient. Consumers have not yet embraced wearable health technology in large numbers, but they’re interested. More than 80 percent of…
How have different countries developed their health IT systems? A paper by Adler-Milstein et. al in Health Affairs provides some insight. I summarize their findings below. Australia. In the 1990s-early 2000s, the government supported the adoption of EHRs through federal incentives to general practitioners. These efforts focused primarily on EHRs with e-prescribing. In 2005 the…
Apple recently unveiled its smart watch. The watch not only is a mini-computer, but it can help improve your health. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktujsc4ZUTo Pharmafile reports: The watch comes with an app that promises to calculate all kinds of data including heart rate, calories burned and other metrics in one place – and can also count how many…