e-CareManagement blog

Chronic Disease Management • Technology • Strategy • Issues and Trends

Intro to a New Series

  “We need to make care linkages a core competency of American health care.” 
George Halvorson, Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospital
 
There’s a double meaning to the title of this new series: Healthcare Crosses the Chasm to the Network Economy
At the level of technology, it’s a reference to Geoffrey Moore’s bestselling business/technology book [...]

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“Meaningful Use” Criteria as a Unifying Force

by Vince Kuraitis, Steve Adams, and David C. Kibbe MD, MBA
Over the past several years, many diverse initiatives have arisen offering partial solutions to systemic problems in the U.S. health care non-system. 
We see Meaningful Use Criteria recommended by the HIT Policy Committee as a unifying force for these previously disparate initiatives. These initiatives have included:

Patient Centered Medical Homes [...]

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Overcoming The Penguin Problem: Setting Expectations for EHR Adoption

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Economists call it “The Penguin Problem”  — No one moves unless everyone moves, so no one moves. 
The role of user expectations is crucial in getting penguins to move off of ice floes and in the successful adoption of new network technologies.  I’ll cover two main points in today’s essay:

How “The Penguin Problem” Helps Explain Low EHR (electronic [...]

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Adieu, LifeCOMM

“Qualcomm pulls the plug on LifeComm”  announced Brian Dolan of mobihealthnews recently. 
As demonstrated by e-CareManagement blog readership, there has been a lot of interest in LifeCOMM.  My first blog post on LifeCOMM in 2007 has been single the most commented on post and the second most widely read blog post.
It’s taken me a while to sift through [...]

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Time for EHRs to Become Plug-and-Play

by David C. Kibbe MD, MBA
The remarkable report, “Initial Lessons From the First National Demonstration Project on Practice Transformation to a Patient-Centered Medical Home,” published in the May/June issue of Annals of Family Medicine, the Nutting Report, makes this point about the state of primary care IT offerings:
Technology needed in a PCMH is not “plug [...]

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Stunning Announcement: AMA Goes to the Dogs in Deal With Physician Web Portal Company

What’s stunning about this deal is who its NOT with.  The AMA chose NOT to partner with any of the incumbent electronic medical record (EMR) companies, e.g., Allscripts, GE, Epic, NextGen, or many others.
For those of you who have not seen earlier posts in this series, please understand that the reference to “goes to the dogs” is a [...]

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Privacy Law Showdown? Setting the Stage

Today’s post is the first in a series entitled:
Modifications to HIPAA Privacy Laws: Impact on Microsoft HealthVault, Google Health, and other PHRs. 
We’ll explore how recent changes in privacy provisions of  ARRA/HITECH Federal stimulus legislation affect personal health information (PHI) platform companies (e.g., HealthVault, Google Health,  Dossia) and personal health record (PHR) companies.
Health IT expert and journalist Neil Versel described the issue in the April [...]

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EHR 2.0: Thinking Outside the Cat Box

One of the potential dangers of limiting $17 B HITECH federal stimulus funds to electronic health records (EHRs) is the risk of locking-in outdated technologies. Let’s consider what this might mean.
If you think of today’s EHR technology as EHR 1.0, what might EHR 2.0 look like? This post presents a number of innovative ways to conceptualize [...]

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Will HITECH Lead to Innovation? The Continuing Cat/Dog Dialogue

Will the recently passed HITECH legislation — the federal stimulus funding for health IT — encourage innovation?  or will it lock in outdated electronic health record (EHR) technology?
It’s a mixed bag — HITECH legislation  is both dog-like (innovative) and catlike (protecting incumbents).  I’ll refresh your memory below on more specific definitions of cats and dogs.
Among many other reasons, HITECH [...]

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