"patient-centered medicine" entries
Where did the issue of health data exchange disappear to?
More visible at Health Privacy Summit than Health Datapalooza.
On the first morning of the biggest conference on data in health care–the Health Datapalooza in Washington, DC–newspapers reported a bill allowing the Department of Veterans Affairs to outsource more of its care, sending veterans to private health care providers to relieve its burdensome shortage of doctors.
There has been extensive talk about the scandals at the VA and remedies for them, including the political and financial ramifications of partial privatization. Republicans have suggested it for some time, but for the solution to be picked up by socialist Independent Senator Bernie Sanders clinches the matter. What no one has pointed out yet, however–and what makes this development relevant to the Datapalooza–is that such a reform will make the free flow of patient information between providers more crucial than ever.
Changes in the health care system driven by self-service and DIY health
Apps reflect the public's pressing health concerns
Health care is migrating from the bricks-and-mortar doctor’s office or care clinic to the person him or herself at home and on-the-go–where people live, work, play, and pray. As people take on more do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to everyday life–investing money on financial services websites, booking airline tickets and hotel rooms online, and securing dinner reservations via OpenTable–many also ask why they can’t have more convenient access to health care, like emailing doctors and looking into lab test results in digital personal health records.
The public clamor for digital outreach by health providers
85% of U.S. health consumers say that email, text messages, and voicemail are at least as helpful as in-person or phone conversations with health providers, according to the Healthy World study, Technology Beyond the Exam Room by TeleVox. Furthermore, one in three consumers admits to being more honest when talking about medical needs via automated voice response systems, emails, or texts than face-to-face with a health provider.
And three in ten consumers believe that receiving digital health care communications from providers—such as texts, voicemail, or email—would build trust with their providers. Half of people also say they’d feel more valued as a patient via digital health communications. When people look to engage in health with an organization, the most important enabling factors are trust and authenticity.
Visualizing Health IT: A holistic overview
O'Reilly report covers major trends and tries to connect the neurons
If visualization is key to comprehending data, the field of health IT calls for better visualization. I am not talking here of pretty charts and animations. I am talking, rather, of a holistic, unified understanding of the bustle taking place in different corners of health: the collection and analysis of genetic data, the design of slim medical devices that replace refrigerator-sized pieces of equipment, the data crunching at hospitals delving into demographic data to identify at-risk patients.
There is no dearth of health reformers offering their visions for patient engagement, information exchange, better public health, and disruptive change to health industries. But they often accept too freely the promise of technology, without grasping how difficult the technical implementations of their reforms would be. Furthermore, no document I have found pulls together the various trends in technology and explores their interrelationships.
I have tried to fill this gap with a recently released report: The Information Technology Fix for Health: Barriers and Pathways to the Use of Information Technology for Better Health Care. This posting describes some of the issues it covers.
23andMe flap at FDA indicates fundamental dilemma in health reform
We must go beyond hype for incentives to provide data to researchers
The FDA order stopping 23andM3 from offering its genetic test kit strikes right into the heart of the major issue in health care reform: the tension between individual care and collective benefit. Health is not an individual matter. As I will show, we need each other. And beyond narrow regulatory questions, the 23andMe issue opens up the whole goal of information sharing and the funding of health care reform.
OneHealth: Combining Patient-Generated Data With Communities and Feedback Loops
Evolution from a research tool to a platform for patient engagement
Bruce Springer of OneHealth will speak about this topic at the Strata Rx conference. This article was written by Patrick Bane of OneHealth in coordination with Bruce Springer.
According to a recent study performed by the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center and University of Illinois at Chicago, patient-centered care has demonstrated positive outcomes on patients’ health, patients’ self-report of health, and reduced healthcare utilization. The study’s results are consistent with previous research that the patient-centered care model improves the quality of care while simultaneously lowering the cost of care.
OneHealth’s behavior change platform extends the patient-centered model by connecting members anytime, anywhere through mobile and web applications. Member generate data in their daily lives, outside of a clinical setting, which creates a much richer dataset of behaviors that are required to understand the patients’ condition(s), and their readiness to change. Members freely choose what to do and their choices actively generate data in five classes of information:
How to bend fate in the health care field
Data that matters to patients
This article is by guest author Amik Ahmad. He is speaking on this topic at Strata Rx.
Distractions didn’t have a chance. My phone was devoid of reception. The New York Times mobile application searched impossibly for a Wi-Fi connection. Conditions perfect for focus: away from a world always on and connected, noisy, and belligerent with information overload. I could have found joy in a single byte. But instead, I was pushed to the limit of sensory deprivation, and I teetered on the edge of insanity. I spent nine hours of my life in a hospital waiting room.
Combining personal data with ratings for targeted medical information
HealthTap refines the answers returned to specific health queries
HealthTap is a community of doctors and clients seeking answers to health questions. Its central service provides immediate access to doctors and their knowledge either by doctors answering client questions in real time, or through a large database of previously answered questions and answers from doctors that are peer reviewed and tagged with recommendations by other doctors. By combining the doctors’ recommendations with data provided by each client on himself or herself, HealthTap provides customized results to queries. In this video, HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman explains unexpected lessons they’ve learned from offering the intelligent search service.
Ginger.io: Putting the Patient-Provider connection at the center
A tool for outreach to patients produces unexpected benefits
This posting was written by guest author Julia Bernstein of Ginger.io. Ginger.io’s CEO Anmol Madan will be speaking on this topic at Strata Rx.
The traditional, office-based model for health care is episodic. The provider-patient relationship exists almost completely within the walls of the exam room, with little or no follow-up between visits. Data is primarily episodic as well, based on blood pressure reading done at a specific time or surveys administered there and then, with little collected out of the office. And even the existing data collection tools—paper diaries or clunky meters—are focused more on storing data that on connecting the patient and provider through that data in real time.
There is no way to get in touch when, for instance, a patient’s blood sugar starts varying wildly or pain levels change. The provider often depends on the patient reaching out to them. And even when a provider does put into place an outreach protocol, it is usually very crude, based on a general approach to managing a population as opposed to an understanding of a patient. The end result is a system that, while doing its best within a difficult setting, is by default reactive instead of proactive.
Donald Berwick discusses health care improvement: goals, exemplary organizations,and being at a turning point
A video interview with entrepreneur Colin Hill
Last week, a wide-ranging interview on data in health care took place between Dr. Donald Berwick and Colin Hill of GNS Healthcare. Dr. Berwick and Hill got together in the Cambridge, Mass. office of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a health care reform organization founded by Dr. Berwick, to discuss data issues related to O’Reilly’s upcoming Strata Rx conference.
Berwick returned to IHI after his year as administrator of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Throughout these changes he has maintained his stalwart advocacy for better patient care, a campaign that has always been based on a society’s and a profession’s moral responsibility. Even an IHI course for the “Patient Safety Executive” program puts “Building a just culture” on its agenda.
Among the topics Berwick and and Hill look at in these videos are the importance of transparency or “turning on the lights,” ways of learning from the health provider system itself as well as from clinical trials, types of personalized medicine, the impediments to collecting useful data that can improve care, exemplary organizations that deliver better healthcare, and how long change will take.
The full video appears below.
Ways to put the patient first when collecting health data
Report from 2013 Health Privacy Summit
The timing was superb for last week’s Health Privacy Summit, held on June 5 and 6 in Washington, DC. First, it immediately followed the 2000-strong Health Data Forum (Health Datapalooza), where concern for patients rights came up repeatedly. Secondly, scandals about US government spying were breaking out and providing a good backdrop for talking about protection our most sensitive personal information–our health data.
The health privacy summit, now in its third year, provides a crucial spotlight on the worries patients and their doctors have about their data. Did you know that two out of three doctors (and probably more–this statistic cites just the ones who admit to it on a survey) have left data out of a patient’s record upon the patient’s request? I have found that the summit reveals the most sophisticated and realistic assessment of data protection in health care available, which is why I look forward to it each year. (I’m also on the planning committee for the summit.) For instance, it took a harder look than most observers at how health care would be affected by patient access to data, and the practice of sharing selected subsets of data, called segmentation.
What effect would patient access have?
An odd perceptual discontinuity exists around patient access to health records. If you go to your doctor and ask to see your records, chances are you will be turned down outright or forced to go through expensive and frustrating magical passes. One wouldn’t know that HIPAA explicitly required doctors long ago to give patients their data, or that the most recent meaningful use rules from the Department of Health and Human Services require doctors to let patients view, download, and transmit their information within four business days of its addition to the record.