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 […]
Category: Health Information Exchange (HIE)
The transfer of health information from one organization to another organization. Harder than it seems.
Using HTML5 as the basis for HL7 CDA v3
Keith Boone, well known and liked Health IT standards geek has written up a proposal that would make the next release of HL7 CDA based on HTML5 rather than XHTML. I have just become more deeply familiar with this set of standards as the result of the extensive research I have done on my new […]
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/ […]
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 […]
EHR can make the paper problem worse
Once a persons record has gone electronic, it really should never go back. A paper printout of an Electronic Health Record is often huge and unwieldy. If it is printed out or faxed it creates something so huge that it is pretty impossible to be useful in a paper record. This is the reason why […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
MOSS crosses the threshold
MOSS has successfully tested the IHE profiles, all available under Open Source licenses. I know for a fact that the MOSS team has been working on this for years. Completing these tests, and making sure they actually work at a Connectathon takes months of preparation and several frantic days of performance. In this respect, the […]