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EHRs/PHRs

The Healthcare Platform Blog

Will Google Health Platformize the Electronic Health Record Market?

by Vince Kuraitis, Edward G. Anderson, and Geoffrey Parker

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated calls for the development of EHR 2.0 (electronic health record 2.0) – the next generation of EHRs with extended platform features and capabilities.

Who will answer this call? While existing EHR vendors have made modest efforts, the door is open for big tech companies and start-ups to develop functionality to envelop and disintermediate current EHRs. We highlight early efforts by Google Health Care Studio as having the potential to bring platform functionality to a sector of the healthcare industry known for resistance to change and innovation.

Read the full article in The Health Care Blog.

Open.Epic: A (Not So Open) API

Last week EHR vendor Epic unveiled it’s new API (application programming interface) targeted at developers — more specifically at remote patient monitoring companies and health/wellness apps or portals. Epic seems to have had second thoughts about the site since only remnants of the landing page are still there as of today.

Could Google+ Be Your Platform for Care Coordination?

An earlier post — Could Facebook Be Your Platform for Care Coordination? —  resonated well with folks.

Readers and commenters (on e-CareManagement and The Health Care Blog) quickly grasped that a social networking platform could play a very useful role in coordinating our health care, yet also agreed with the conclusion that Facebook wasn’t  “it”.

So let’s ask the question again: Could Google+ be your platform for care coordination? This post will

Describe Google+ and Circles
Discuss how Google+ gets past some of Facebook’s limitations as a […]

Part Deux: A Rebuttal to PHR Luddites

By now most people understand the promise of pharmaceuticals being customized to “YOU” based on your individual genetic code.  While this isn’t prevalent today, we understand that this will be possible in a few years.

Let’s take a minute to consider the mechanics of how this will occur. You’ve received a prescription, and it directs the pharmacist to tailor the medicine to YOUR genetic profile.

Consider two possible scenarios of how this transaction might happen. You’re on the phone with your pharmacist:

1) “OK, […]

A Rebuttal to PHR Luddites

Unlike some of my colleagues, I’m not losing ANY sleep over whether personal health record (PHR) systems ultimately will be adopted and used by patients.

In my mind, the issue isn’t WHETHER, but WHEN.

Yes, I know that adoption has lagged and that surveys suggest 7% or less of the U.S. population has used a PHR.

Stay with me on this one for a minute. You’d have to have two underlying beliefs to conclude that PHR systems won’t eventually emerge:

That health record data will persist […]

Through the Lens of Disruptive Innovation: Why Direct is a Hit and PCAST is an Outcast

(click on the graphics to link to original sources)

Regular readers know that I find Professor Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation to be a useful lens to explain industry evolution. Let’s look at two recent health IT initiatives and see why one is working and the other is stalled.

Electronic Health Information Exchange — Way More Complicated Than Getting Money from an ATM

“If banks can exchange funds electronically through the ATM system, why can’t my doctor and hospital exchange information electronically?”

Keith Boone’s concise article “A Doctor is Not a Bank” explains why this conclusion about healthcare interoperability is overly-simplistic.

…and Keith’s article reminded me of an even deeper explanation presented in the National Academies’ Frontiers of Engineering series — Why Health Information Technology Doesn’t Work, by Elmer Bernstam and Todd Johnson. The table below summarizes the differences between health data and banking data.

 

Top 20 iPhone Medical Apps: No Connection to EHRs…Yet

iMedicalApps recently published its list of Top 20 Free iPhone Medical Apps for Healthcare Professionals.

What struck me about the list is that the state-of-the-art is stand alone applications — I didn’t see any that had any connection to an EHR (electronic health record).  Here’s the top 5 to give you a flavor of what’s on the list:

Medscape
Micromedex
New England Journal of Medicine
Epocrates
Free Medical Calculators

I expect that this list will begin to look very different in coming years as EHRs continue to […]

Doctors Love iPads. What Does it Mean? What Does it Mean?

After attending the largest annual health IT conference of the year — HIMSS 11 –  John Moore reported that “nearly every EHR vendor has an iPad App for the EHR [electronic health record], or will be releasing such this year.”

Doctors love iPads…not surprising? But, how might you explain this?

There are at least two different possibilities:

Coincidence Theory
Conspiracy Theory

The Coincidence Theory

So doctors want to access EHR software through the iPad…what’s the big deal?

Apple has built a great new hardware platform with the iPad. […]

Complimentary Webinar — An Impending Marriage: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Care Management Software

Webinar Title: An Impending Marriage: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Care Management Software

The presentation will be geared at practicing clinical case managers in health plans, hospitals, disease management companies, and similar organizations:

Describe market forces driving integration of EHRs and care management software. 
Review care management software survey data and stimulus funding for EHR adoption. 
Describe a 3 stage framework for the evolution of EHRs and care management software. 
Characterize benefits to patients and impacts on care manager responsibilities.

The event is sponsored by HealthSciences Institute […]