Does Epic resist or support interoperability? Hell if I know.

I just realized that my somewhat infamous question at the ONC annual meeting is recorded on video! The background on my question, which I made me very popular at the meeting afterwards, was that I had heard that Epic hired a lobbyist to convince congress that it is an interoperable company. That lobbyist and others at […]

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Sharks, Bees and Privacy

Hi, I am happy to announce that my new article on healthcare privacy and interoperability has been accepted in the Journal of Participatory Medicine. I am not against privacy in healthcare, but I am against the notion that privacy concerns should trump issues relating to good healthcare. You can read the full article here: http://www.jopm.org/opinion/commentary/2011/07/05/sharks-bees-and-health-privacy-paranoia/ […]

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Google Health: influential, controversial and gone.

Google Health is no more. Thats a shame, because I am writing a book on Health IT for O’Reilly and before this announcement, my rough draft featured Google Health extensively. I guess this is better, though, than having Google Health shut down just -after- I finished writing my book. Of course, I am going to […]

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Direct gathers steam

Recently, the AAFP and Surescripts announced Physicians Direct, a secure messaging service for providers.  But neither the article nor the signup page for Physicians Direct detail the most critical single issue regarding the service. This is a very large deployment of the Direct Project. This is by far the most important part of the story, […]

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Kaiser Ontology Interview

To the novice, the term “interoperability” means that two systems can talk. To the expert, it means that they can understand each other. To much of our current data interchange is “meaning poor”. To get past that problem, we need to do lots of work with ontologies, which, loosely put, are knowledge dictionaries. Most clinicians […]

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Health Internet

For whatever reason people simply do not get what the NHIN is and what its implications are. This feels like a repeat of what happened to me more than a year ago. The NHIN (which has been rebranded the “Nationwide Health Information Network” or NWHIN from “National Health Information Network” in response to these silly […]

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