Health gets personal in the cloud

Google Health Beta and Microsoft's My Health Info

by Brian Ahier | @ahier | comments: 13

Healthcare is one of the biggest industries in the world. The United States spends over 17% of its GDP on healthcare and the issue of the industry's future is being hotly debated in Congress. Whatever happens to other elements of health reform, health information technology will play a key role in moving us towards the goal of bending the cost curve and improving quality and clinical outcomes. A Personal Health Record (PHR) is one way that patients can have some control of their own health data, while providing an interoperable platform for sharing relevant clinical data between providers. Healthcare is changing rapidly and there are some important trends worth watching.

Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.

For example, Google announced at the Health 2.0 conference that they have entered into a partnership to provide telehealth services through their Google Health platform using MDLiveCare. With the integration of MDLiveCare technology, Google can provide a service that offers patients access to doctors from remote locations, via webcam or telephone, into its personal health record offering. This will be particularly valuable for those who are caring for their loved ones from far away. My family is scattered around the country and caring for our mother with advanced stage Alzheimer's was quite a challenge that would have benefited from this type of service. Here is a screenshot of Google Health:

"Patients remember less than 25% of what they're told when they consult with a doctor,” said Bob Smoley, CEO, MDLiveCare, in the statement. "By directly synchronizing the information that's shared…we're able to provide patients with a convenient solution to review their physician or therapist encounters."

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Health gets personal in the cloud

Google Health Beta and Microsoft's My Health Info

by Brian Ahier | @ahier | comments: 13

Healthcare is one of the biggest industries in the world. The United States spends over 17% of its GDP on healthcare and the issue of the industry's future is being hotly debated in Congress. Whatever happens to other elements of health reform, health information technology will play a key role in moving us towards the goal of bending the cost curve and improving quality and clinical outcomes. A Personal Health Record (PHR) is one way that patients can have some control of their own health data, while providing an interoperable platform for sharing relevant clinical data between providers. Healthcare is changing rapidly and there are some important trends worth watching.

Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.

For example, Google announced at the Health 2.0 conference that they have entered into a partnership to provide telehealth services through their Google Health platform using MDLiveCare. With the integration of MDLiveCare technology, Google can provide a service that offers patients access to doctors from remote locations, via webcam or telephone, into its personal health record offering. This will be particularly valuable for those who are caring for their loved ones from far away. My family is scattered around the country and caring for our mother with advanced stage Alzheimer's was quite a challenge that would have benefited from this type of service. Here is a screenshot of Google Health:

"Patients remember less than 25% of what they're told when they consult with a doctor,” said Bob Smoley, CEO, MDLiveCare, in the statement. "By directly synchronizing the information that's shared…we're able to provide patients with a convenient solution to review their physician or therapist encounters."

(continue reading)

Converting to Electronic Health Records: fits and starts

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 26

The people of the United States are finally pulling together around the goals of reducing health care costs (by far the highest per capita in the world) and improving outcomes (we have the worst health of any developed country). Everyone seems to recognize the critical importance of data and communications in these efforts. So several of us at O'Reilly Media, having been involved with information technologies for some time, are tracking the issues that come up in deploying computer technology in health care--not just to streamline payments, not just to facilitate access by doctors to records, but actually to create new ways to deliver and track health care.

I recently attended a forum on how my state, Massachusetts, is facilitating the move to Electronic Health Records, a prerequisite for many things doctors, patients, and insurance companies can do to improve health. It's notable that the chief sponsor of the event, the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium, derives a lot of its support from insurance companies. Lots of invective has be\ en thrown at these companies recently, but the questions of technology can pull together the insurers, providers, and patients in a common quest. [AO: My original blog said that insurance companies set up MHDC, but this was incorrect.]

My own understanding of the progress and frustrations in deploying heath care technology was enhanced by the conversations I had that day and the statistics bandied about.

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How the Zeo sleep device works around the limitations of home monitoring

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 9

The Zeo is part of a trend toward using technology to monitor our own bodies. People have always been concerned about their health, of course, and have tried different things to see what works (including rather absurd superstitions). But now there are ways to bolster one's curiosity with real scientific data.

The Zeo makes this data available for people who may have sleep problems--and quite a lot do, judging from a 2005 National Sleep Foundation (NSF) poll (a recent poll covering a wide range of adults):

26% say they had "a good night's sleep" only a few nights a month or less. Another 24% report having "a good night's sleep" a few nights a week.

This blog is meant to be a technical discussion, not a consumer guide, so I took the opportunity to talk to Ben Rubin, CTO and cofounder of Zeo, just a couple weeks after the official release of the Zeo to get some information on two aspects:

• How it collects data during sleep
• How they analyze the data to help the customer sleep better

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Four short links: 16 September 2009

Data Sharing, Health Dashboard, DIY Repairs, Crowdsourcing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Data Sharing: Empty Archives (Nature) -- asking and answering the question "why don't researchers share their data?"
2. San Francisco Health Visual Dashboard -- Health Matters in San Francisco is a o­ne-stop source of non-biased data and information about community health in the City, and healthy communities in general. It is intended to help planners, policy makers, and community members learn about issues and identify improvements. (via the blog of the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess and titine on delicious)
3. iFixit -- information on Mac, iPhone, etc. repair. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. Crowdflower -- labour as a service. Love the analytics. Don't miss the TechCrunch 50 demo. (via waxy)

Four short links: 11 September 2009

Healthcare Fellow, Javascript Math, Web PDF Viewer, Tweeting Kegerator

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Healthspottr Fellow -- outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit)
2. jsMath -- Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News)
3. Google's Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer -- Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online. (via Waxy)
4. Tweeting Kegerator -- network connected keg that tells you when it's about to run out.

Four short links: 12 August 2009

Health Data, Python Term Extraction, Network Neutrality, New Database

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Improving Health Care -- Adam Bosworth's speech to the Aspen Health Forum. It starts strong and just gets better: There is a lot of talk about improving health care. And there is a lot to improve. Inadequate Evidence: We don’t know enough about what works. We should require sharing of population statistics across practices and hospitals in order to better determine what works for whom. We should reward practices and hospitals that are delivering the best most cost-effective long-term outcomes and penalize those that deliver the worst.
2. topia.termextract -- Python library for term extraction, so you can get a list of the nouns and noun phrases used in a piece of text. (via Simon Willison)
3. Key to Understanding Network Neutrality -- David Pennock neatly identifies the crucial issue, that service quality and price levels be uniformly applied and not arbitrary based on how much the service provider thinks they can gouge from the customer. The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet.
4. (the item I linked to releases in a week's time, I will link again when it's live--sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a monkey washing a cat)

Four short links: 7 July 2009

Motivation, R, Games, and Open Source Medicine

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them -- Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed. I have noticed this myself. It must be balanced against the other finding that public commitment increases probability of followthrough, which might work in sales but seems to fail miserably in getting me to do anything productive. (via migurski on Delicious)
2. Rseek -- search engine for info on R. Necessary because of the non-unique project name. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
3. Treasure World (Offworld) -- Nintendo DS game that turns wifi spots into collectible treasure. You have to explore the real world as you play the game, another of these games that mix the online and offline worlds. (via waxy)
4. 50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine -- notice the large number of electronic health record (EHR) suites. What are the chances of any of them getting a slice of Obama's EHR money that the ex-RedHatters behind The Axial Project are going for? (via timoreilly on Twitter)

A Manifesto on Health Data Rights

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 26

As a medical patient, I've always assumed that my medical records were something that I had a right to - after all, they are about me, and my freedom to share them with a second doctor, or see them myself so I can understand my own medical situation, seems self-evident. It was only the fact that so many of these records were on paper that made it so difficult for them to be shared. Electronic access would change all that.

I was surprised then, when I met recently with a congressman in Washington, a former physician, to talk about healthcare reform. When we moved to the topic of portable health care records, I was quite startled to hear him say "When I was practicing as a physician, I considered those records to be my property." After all, he said, they were his notes, his analysis. He obviously still felt this way.

Given this disconnect, I was glad to endorse today's Health Data Bill of Rights:

In an era when technology allows personal health information to be more easily stored, updated, accessed and exchanged, the following rights should be self-evident and inalienable. We the people:

1. Have the right to our own health data
2. Have the right to know the source of each health data element
3. Have the right to take possession of a complete copy of our individual health data, without delay, at minimal or no cost; if data exist in computable form, they must be made available in that form
4. Have the right to share our health data with others as we see fit

These principles express basic human rights as well as essential elements of health care that is participatory, appropriate and in the interests of each patient. No law or policy should abridge these rights.

I urge you to add your voice to mine by endorsing the health data bill of rights.

P.S. If you wonder whether a non-binding manifesto like this can have an impact on the deliberations of government, you have only to look at another similar statement, issued at the end of 2007 by a group of open data activists at a meeting organized by Carl Malamud of public.resource.org at O'Reilly, with support from Google, Yahoo! and the Sunlight Foundation, the 8 Open Data Principles. It was extremely gratifying to recently see the White House blog considering the commitment of the Obama administration to these principles.

Or consider the Robustness principle from RFC 761, the commitment to interoperability that provided a philosophical touchstone for the Internet, and has helped ensure its extraordinary resilience.

Statements of principle do matter. We may not yet have any idea what the exact format of an open health record system will look like, but we don't need to. If we establish the underlying principle of open exchange, the marketplace can sort out the details.

Health data exchange will unleash one of the great opportunities of the coming decade. Let's make it happen!

Four short links: 2 June 2009

Fonts, Medicine, Healthcare, Project Natal

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. TypeKit -- Jeff Veen's new startup, making typography on the web fail to suck. Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
2. Talking With Jamie Heywood About PatientsLikeMe (Jon Udell) -- the creator of patientslikeme, a site that provides people with serious conditions a chance to report on the efficacy of their treatment, their unique symptoms, and (if they wish) to connect with the researchers in the drug companies who made the treatments. It's a new closure for the feedback loop of medical research.
3. The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. (New Yorker) -- the lesson is that you tolerate bad ethics, bad business, bad behaviour at your own risk because the rogue you tolerate may become the anchor tenant for a mall of villainy you'll find very hard to dismiss.
4. Microsoft Announces Project Natal -- full-body motion capture for XBox 360, as game controller. I'm keen to see whether having nothing in your hand is as satisfying as having something to hold. Kudos to MSFT for bringing research to market as mainstream entertainment.

Four short links: 11 May 2009

Healthcare, Diagrams, Social Networking, and Email

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 4

1. OSCAR Canada -- open source healthcare (EMR) software, akin to VistA. See linuxmednews.com for more.
2. Instaviz -- iPhone app for mindmapping/any other blob-and-line diagram. I'm hypnotised by the correction of a fuzzy hand-drawn circle into a clean crisp algorithmic circle.
3. Buddypress -- open source software that turns a Wordpress installation into a social networking platform. Ok, so social networking software is now essentially free. What's the next big thing that will as hard and new as social networking was in 2003?
4. Getting Insight Into One's Own Email -- Thunderbird now shows interesting facts when there's no message to look at: recently read messages, messages most likely to be interesting, and a histogram of activity.