An eHealth Smorgasbord

Jack Mason, IBM Strategic Communications, HealthNex Producer

One of my new year's resolutions for HealthNex was to make time to investigate and interact with both the growing phalanx of health IT related blogs, as well as the myriad organizations cited in our "Groups Transforming Healthcare" list at left.

I've sent out introductory notes to some of the organizations cited here recently, but today I wanted to focus on the wealth of innovative content scattered across our virtual federation.

For example, I noticed that the Journal of Medical Internet Research's Blogline offering links to a paper on how mobile ehealth technologies are being used to treat obesity.

Over at symptym, conventional blog posts are being augmented with what appears to be some automated searches or feeds based on del.icio.us tags.  I don't fully understand how it works, but I sense that this tagging business is going to be huge, and wonder how it could advance the healthcare IT blogosphere.

My blogroll surf also uncovered that Telemedicine Insider has essentially been folded into Medical Informatics Insider, which has a few notable posts like one on how ambulances in Guangzhou, China are being outfitted with GPS and mobile internet systems.

A brief tour of the Piper Report revealed an older post touting an intriguing book, Redefining Healthcare. Kip Piper reports that the book "provide a thoughtful, groundbreaking framework to use competition to drive dramatic increases in quality and efficiency."  Might be something I should read.

Finally, via the new blogroll addition of  Future Health IT, I came across a thought provoking item from Colin Jervis on the debate over performance problems associated with a computerized physician order entry system at the Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh.

This profusion of electronic-health content and advocacy makes me wonder if the nascent healthcare IT blog community has a bigger, more interesting role to play: could we serve as a kind of shadow or analog of an electronic healthcare system itself? Can we self-assemble into a kind of loose, interoperable system that makes all of us smarter than any one of us?

Since the inspiration for HealthNex was to interconnect thought leaders on healthcare's future, the thoughts I like to lead in 2006 are:

How can we, this emergent community, knit ourselves together in innovative ways that will advance electronic health? Clearly efforts like Shahid Shah's HITsphere is a great new tools for aggregating our associated efforts, but what will confederate the HIT landscape further?

Moreover, how can an HIT blog confederation serve as a kind of virtual collaboration that will help resolve some of the policy and technical obstacles confronting digital healthcare? Sites such as HISTalk do a bang up job of promoting discussion and knowledge exchange. But how could that kind of energy be focused on solving particular problems or issues?

Lastly, how can we help educate a public that needs to be a proactive partner in the transistion toward networked medicine and well-being?

As always, your ideas and analysis are welcome greatly appreciated.

IBMHealthNex

Comments

[Colin Jervis, Kinetic Consulting]

Jack,

I think this is a great idea. A virtual, international, hyperlinked, healthcare IT "blogmoot" might address common problems.

Though the healthcare systems in the USA and UK are very different, the challenges they face are often very similar. I daresay that applies to other countries.

Areas like IT and:

Patient safety
Clinical resistance
Changing medical practice
Future healthcare
Best practice etc.

are likely to be in common to many of your visitors. Perhaps we choose a topic, have someone champion it, debate it and extract a consensus?

[Jack Mason]

Colin:

A capital idea. If we could actually harness the collected energy and expertise of this community of interest, this approach could serve as a kind of open source policy development.

I would throw data privacy and security into the mix of topics with global applicability

[Shahid N. Shah]

Wonderful article. Here are some specific ideas I would suggest:

1) If we setup an RSS feed from technorati.com for "health+IT", "healthcare+IT", and other related tags we will get blogs that we're interested in and it wouldn't require us to create another search engine. I could probably add this feature to HITSphere. Please suggest tags.

2) What we could really use, and IBM could play a huge role, is to create a "Healthcare IT Architect" profession and position. This is someone who (probably) has deep healthcare experience plus deep modern technology experience and may be required to be certified. We have lots of folks on one side or the other but not both (business+technology). I am working with the folks at the International Association of Software Architects (IASA - http://www.iasahome.com) to create a Healthcare Working Group within that organization to help support a "Healthcare IT Architect" profession. As I get more done I'll share it in a guest article. If anyone would like to join me or help, please let me know at my blog.

3) I really like the "confederation" idea as well. Several of us could get together and merge our respective blogs into a centralized place (I'd be happy to setup the technology if anyone wants it) where we can talk with one voice, as a group, to be heard by vendors, the government, or customers of health IT. I, for one, am not married to my blog and would move if it makes sense and there are others that would join. Of course, there is always the matter of whether a "mall" approach to blogs (being at one site) would actually elevate the debate or educate more but we could discuss it.

The ideas are worth a virtual seminar or online health IT bloggers convention. All it would require would be an agenda, an online meeting space, and a conference call number. I'm happy to setup such a call and online space for up to 10 people (my services support that) if there is any interest.

[Jack Mason]

Shahid:

On the technorati feed search, I think "ehealth" "healthcare networks" and "digital health" would be three good tags.

On the Healthcare IT Architecture front, you're reading my mind. We're working on a new academic discipline, services science, but I think there is definitely a sub-speciality that should be a part of it, perhaps called "ehealth services," that would blend IT architecture, public health administration and maybe even a smattering of bioinformatics, biobanking and other skills relating to biological or medical data.

[Tim Gee]

Great idea Jack. Regarding the focus of our efforts, I'd like to keep it practical and down to earth. For example it seems everyone's talking about RHIOs or CPOE - I just can't see how we can really make a substantive contribution in areas that are already over hyped. I would also suggest we tackle something rather narrow in scope so that we can reasonably create something that will be a resource to the industry. What are some issues that hospitals and CIOs are grappling with today? Here are some ideas.

1) Wireless LANs - sure most hospitals have some sort of WLAN deployment, but the hospitals that are prepared for wireless communications, wireless medical devices, and true mobility (WLAN connections while in motion across subnets) can be counted on one hand. And the medical device vendors that understand WLAN requirements for embedded radios is just as miniscule.

2) Medical device integration into EMRs - this is the prime market factor driving medical device connectivity today. Few hospitals anticipate this challenge, let alone plan adequately for it. Best practices and strategies for transitioning from legacy devices with serial ports to devices with integrated connectivity would be a realistic and provide tangible value.

3) The industry goes through a continuous cycle from new technology to an abundance of point solutions to some sort of enterprise solution. This is currently happening with wireless infrastructures, RFID, and point of care workflow automation. I'm sure there's other technologies and applications that would fall under this category. Again, best practices, recommendations, etc. could provide the industry with a reference body of work that could help ease the transition to an enterprise approach.

4) Simple education could also a meaningful objective. There are also many new technologies and trends where the industry would benefit from greater understanding. One topic close to Shahid's heart is SOA - what is it? How does it fit in with HL7? How can I tell a vendor really has it? How can I use it and wring out all the potential benefits? This kind of approach could be a template for an ongoing series of topics.

[Jack Mason]

Very good thoughts all around. What kind of collaborative output or methodology do you think we could apply to take on one these topics? I hope you'll share them further via the Blogposium idea bank that Shahid set up.

http://www.healthcareguy.com/tinc?key=7sSyPffh&formname=blogposium_registration