from eHealthNews.eu
eHealth Action Plan - 1 year of progress
Tuesday, 05 June 2007
This progress report describes the main results of a first year of work since the publication of the eHealth Action Plan: activities undertaken by the European Commission and Member States together.
What if it were possible for every European citizen to select the precise place where they can receive that healthcare? What if they were to have the means and the information about Europe’s healthcare organisations and healthcare infrastructure so as to ensure absolutely their own continuity of care?
It is precisely these kinds of scenarios that the 2004 eHealth Action Plan (COM(2004)356) facilitates by proposing both a set of actions and an associated roadmap to help in defining a European eHealth Information Space.
Today’s eHealth solutions in Europe are extremely select, designed in particular circumstances very often for limited numbers of patients or health professionals, in idiosyncratic circumstances: in summary – they are fragmented. To turn the situation round, a more effective coordination of implementation efforts of eHealth systems and services would greatly benefit patients, industry and health systems across the whole of the European Union. A more structured approach to an integrated, interoperable European approach to eHealth systems and services would be a great step forward….
[it goes on and, at the end gives a link to a pdf progress report dated 2005.
so I double checked the post date, yup, June 07 post is talking about an ‘04 action plan and an ‘05 progress report.
then a corporate “for further information”]
http://europa.eu/information_society/eHealth
from LinuxMedNews - Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice
Gov’t Technology: Miracle Cure?
Government Technology News has a wide-ranging article on Free and Open Source Software in Medicine: “Doctors are fed up with the we-own-you, vendor lock-in, phone-home-to-the-mother-ship-to-do-anything status quo,” he said.
In addition, open source health IT applications are hitting their late teens, with more growth coming. What will be available in the next year, he said, will likely challenge anything in the proprietary world….
This can cause confusion, but some front-runners in the open source health IT market have emerged in the last few years, he said, though the confusion level is nothing compared to the proprietary software world.
“In the proprietary world, whole companies and software suites disappear forever in business failures, buyouts, forced ‘upgrades’ and changes in corporate agendas,” he said. “Somehow, this is considered normal. “Free and open source software EMR/EHRs are relatively immortal and are much more resistant to service decline, price increases, buyouts and corporate failure than the proprietary world….
Posted by Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS on
Tuesday June 05, 2007 @ 08:39 AM
from the interesting-development dept.
from The Informatics Review
e-journal of the Association of Medical Directors of Information
Systems and The Improve-IT Institute
Jun 1, 2007 : Vol.10 No.11
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care
Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This report—an update to two earlier editions — includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries’ health systems. Compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom — the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives….
in other news (ok, Clinical Computing and Informatics News)
Why Progress Toward Electronic Health Records Is Worse Than You Think
Despite years of concerted national effort, including President Bush’s rallying cry in 2004 to get most Americans on e-health records by 2014, the use of digital records is at a precarious place. Just 10% of doctors’ offices use them. And while hospitals are expanding their use, the most difficult work–the exchange of data among health care providers, especially with rivals–has barely begun. Technology itself has caused problems. There are legal questions, privacy issues, and competitive pressures surrounding the technology, as well as concerns about return on investment. And data-sharing practices have yet to be widely tested in the real world. It’s not hopeless, and a number of ambitious projects for sharing health data show signs of progress.
Characterization of prescribing errors in an internal medicine clinic
The Extent and Importance of Unintended Consequences Related to Computerized Provider Order Entry
New Vision for Personal Health Records - Project HealthDesign E-Primer #1
So I scan these headlines and decide to go to Borders Books and find something cheerful.
I did.
But first, there was some positive web posts.
from Medical Economics - Smarter Business, Better Patient Care
My website transformed my practice
Patients and staff love the interactive features, and I like the way it saves time and phone calls.
Honorable Mention 2006 Doctors’ Writing Contest
Jun 1, 2007
By: Howard Stark, MD
Medical Economics
Focusing on the software of managing health workers: what can we learn from high commitment management practices?
(from Wiley InterScience, The International Journal of Health Planning and Management
published Online: 5 Jun 2007 Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)
Knowledge of what constitutes best practice in human resource management (HRM) in public-oriented services is limited and the operational aspects of managing health workers at provision level have been poorly studied….
Bruno Marchal *, Guy Kegels Department of Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine-Antwerp, Belgium
Podcast: The Future of Group Practice by Randy Bauman, President, Delta Health Care
The Future of Group Practice by Randy Bauman, President, Delta Health Care, Podcast Editor
In this 20-minute podcast, seasoned consultant Randy Bauman discusses the state of independent physician groups, challenges that face small-to-medium sized groups, the impact of The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, values of practices and hospitals’ interest in acquiring practices, pitfalls in selling to a hospital, and the future of physician group practices.
What I picked up was a couple of books.
The key one here is the myths of innovation
, by Scott Berkun.
He has some great language:
The goodness/adoption paradox
The good is the enemy of the best. -Voltaire
…The factors that spread innovations, from the personal ones listed in Chapter 4 to the broader ones listed above, are largely about ease of adoption. The reason why Internet and cell phone usage climbed faster than previous technologies isn’t because things happen faster today. (Nor is it because these technologies are bigger leaps forward than previous ones.) It’s simply because the barriers of entry were low. People already had PCs and phone lines, making Internet use cheap and easy (economics). For cellular phones, the population already had daily experience with personal telephone usage and cordless phones, and their frequent use was accepted social behavior (culture). If you think about it, the cell phone isn’t more than a cordless phone with unlimited (well, sometimes) range. The Internet and World Wide Web, for all their wonders, were an extension of the PCs and modems already in use-AOL had trained millions to use email, and word processors were popular applications on those computers….
Problems as invitations
The word problem often means something bad, as in “Houston, we have a problem” or “I have a problem with your tuna salad,” but successful innovation often involves more attention to prob-lems than solutions. Einstein once said, “If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it,” a gem of insight lost in the glory of what he achieved on that 20th day. It’s counterintuitive because, on the surface, problems rarely need help to be understood….
But the challenges innovators choose have no known solutions or aren’t believed to be important at all. No one asked Galileo to explain the solar system, Engelbart to invent the mouse, or Bell to create the telephone. They saw unidentified problems in the world and dedicated themselves to defining and solving them. Einstein’s motivation for developing his special theory of relativity, while working as an unknown patent clerk, wasn’t that his girlfriend thought it’d be cute. Nor did his boss threaten to fire him if he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. Being curious of mind, he followed his own logic and asked questions others were unwilling to ask, and when he saw no answers, he simply set about finding his own.
Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions….
Framing problems to help solve them
One way to creatively describe a challenge is to compare it to another kind of challenge that’s been solved. Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit (makers of Quicken and QuickBooks software), felt that the problem to solve wasn’t making good accounting software, but something else entirely: “The greatest competitor. .. was not in the industry. It was the pencil. The pencil is a tough and resilient substitute. Yet the entire industry had overlooked it.” He creatively framed the problem and shifted the perspective of his team to find a better solution than pencil and paper. Even if his competition had more talented problem solvers, engineers, or designers, his creative framing of the problem gave him an advantage. Anyone can use Cook’s basic framing strategy; by choosing a powerful reference (the pencil), and framing the challenge around it (sell software), he created opportunities before he wrote a line of code.
This pattern is everywhere in the history of innovation, but it’s often hidden behind tales of brilliance and breakthrough solu-tions. As a test, follow the trail of any successful innovation far back enough, and odds are high that you’ll find a creatively framed problem behind it. While Edison is heralded for the light-bulb, he was late to the party: dozens of other inventors were trying well before he began. His success came from defining the challenge differently. He thought of the lightbulb as a system, asking questions like, “How do you get power to homes to power the lightbulb? And where does that power come from?” A light-bulb alone was useless, and Edison knew why….
[then he discusses PDAs and how many failed…
until Palm]
The key factor in Palm’s success was that they defined their challenge differently than their competitors. Instead of focusing on engineering constraints, or lofty dreams of revolutionizing computers, they focused on what customers wanted. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, reasoned that his team knew as much about consumer feedback on previous PDAs as their competitors. Why not start the conversation with what people clearly needed, rather than what the companies of the day could provide?
Hawkin’s spent an evening at home with a notepad, and soon had the following list of goals for the Pilot project:
- Fits in a shirt pocket
- Syncs seamlessly with PC
- Fast and easy to use
- No more than $299
In 1994, all of these goals were beyond ambitious - they were impossible. If you had shown them to any of the PDA companies of the day, you’d have been told to go home. But Hawkins realized solving these problems was the only real path to success. Handwriting recognition, color displays, or fancy keyboards, were all nice ideas, but they weren’t essential. If they could succeed at these four challenges, Hawkins was convinced they had high odds of success….
The Palm Pilot’s success came largely from its simplicity as a product - a quality driven entirely by the self-defined constraints….
Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions.
they focused on what customers wanted.
all nice ideas, but they weren’t essential.
framing problems to help solve them
success came largely from its simplicity as a product - a quality driven entirely by the self-defined constraints
So, with Health Care and eHealth records, what is the problem? How do we frame it?
Back to basics,
- what are the problems to be solved?
- what do the customers want? (btw, there are more than one type of customer in this arena)
- what is essential?
- how do we frame the problems so we can solve them?
The chief cause of problems is solutions. - Eric Sevareid
