O’Reilly Radar, June 21, 2012 — Andy Oram
While thousands of health care professionals were flocking to the BIO International Convention this week, I spent Monday in a small library at the Harvard Medical School listening to a discussion of the Indivo patient health record and related open source projects with about 80 intensely committed followers. Lead Indivo architect Daniel Haas, whom I interviewed a year ago, succeeded in getting the historical 2.0 release of Indivo out on the day of the conference. This article explains the significance of the release in the health care field and the promise of the work being done at Harvard Medical School and its collaborators…
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News
SMART-Enabled Indivo X Release a Highlight of Users’ Conference
A key topic at this year’s Indivo Users’ Conference was the release of version 2.0, which provides “deep integration with the SMART data models and API.” In other words, the Indivo personal health platform is now a full-fledged SMART container. Visit the Indivo site to learn more about
- What SMART adds to Indivo
- What Indivo adds to SMART
- The SMART-Indivo Portal
Conference presentations included a keynote from Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator of HIT, ONC; Indivo–SMART integration by Daniel Haas, Indivo Lead Architect; the SMART API by Nikolai Schwertner, Senior SMART Developer; Indivo–i2b2 integration by Shawn Murphy, Partners HealthCare; Indivo iOS framework by Pascal Pfiffner, Children’s Hospital Informatics Program; and lightning talks from the MIT Media Lab, Novartis, Childhood Arthritis & Rheumatology Research Alliance, and MuleSoft.
Ken Mandl also premiered the new Indivo Film, an animated “story of what’s to come” in Health IT, voiced by Amy Madigan.
EHR Innovation Gap Threatens Healthcare Progress
InformationWeek Healthcare , June 19, 2012 — Nicole Lewis
Electronic health records suffer from a lack of innovation that thwarts physicians’ attempts to advance healthcare processes and workflow. Unlike word-processing programs, search engines, social networks, and mobile phones and apps, EHRs are stuck in the pre-Internet world where EHR vendors not only control the data, but also resist improvements to functionality while reaping huge financial rewards, concludes a…
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HIT Expert Contends That EHR Vendors are Curbing Innovation (Part 2)
Healthcare Informatics Magazine, June 18, 2012 — Gabriel Perna
A recent piece by two Boston Children’s Hospital informatics researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine, Kenneth Mandl, M.D. and Isaac Kohane, M.D., made the argument that EHR vendors are holding back innovation in the health IT industry. This controversial opinion comes from the duo’s belief that many vendors have failed to adopt basic Internet-era sources for their systems such as private cloud-based storage and secure communication protocols, as well as modern consumer technologies such as word processing and search engines…
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HIT Expert Contends That EHR Vendors are Curbing Innovation (Part 1)
Healthcare Informatics Magazine, June 15, 2012 — Gabriel Perna
In a recent piece for the New England Journal of Medicine, two Boston Children’s Hospital informatics researchers, Kenneth Mandl, M.D. and Isaac Kohane, M.D., make the argument that EMR and EHR vendors are holding back innovation in the health IT industry. Many vendors, the duo insists, have failed to adopt basic Internet-era sources for their systems such as private cloud-based storage and secure communication protocols, as well as modern consumer technologies such as word processing and search engines…
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The EMR Race is Over, Long Live EMR Extender Tools!
Change Doctor, June 15, 2012 — Lyle Berkowitz
I’ve been increasingly talking about the concept that the EMR race is over, and that EMRs now serve as the infrastructure and platform upon which innovative companies will develop “EMR Extender Tools“, in areas such as: Physician Productivity (e.g. healthfinch), Decision Support (e.g. Zynx), Business Intelligence (e.g. DrEvidence), and Patient Outreach (e.g. Healthloop). This seems to resonate well with mature EMR users since they often feel like the….
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In the New England Journal of Medicine:
Letting the Air out of EHRs
Mandl and Kohane in the NEJM
Mandl and Kohane in the New England Journal of Medicine: Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT [PDF]. It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their “civilian” life.
EHR design: A mold in need of breaking
FierceEMR, June 13, 2012 — Marla Durben Hirsch
Editor’s Corner: Apparently I struck a nerve with last week’s commentary on making the transition to electronic health records. The editorial generated quite a few comments, and every one of them were against EHRs. They’re expensive, become a crutch for the lazy or less-trained, and deter from direct patient-physician communication…
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Fierce Q&A: EHR vendors propagating a myth about their products
FierceEMR, June 13, 2012 — Marla Durben Hirsch
Electronic health record system vendors are “entrenched” in a legacy mindset that hampers innovation, preferring to propagate the myth that EHRs require specialized IT systems in order to protect their prices and block new entrants into the industry, according to an article published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. EHRs can and should be redesigned and adopt modern…
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UK Collaborators Build SMART Proof of Concept at NHS Hack Day
The UK’s National Health Service held its first NHS Hack Day on May 26-27, a weekend marathon of disruptive innovation, largely inspired by the open source culture and hackathon trend in the US. One of the 14 teams to submit an app at the end of the session used SMART, implementing a portion of the SMART API to expose the HES dataset. The result was a modest data grid and radar chart for patient problems (image below). But the strategic ramifications, said co-developer Rob Tweed, are far-reaching. “The technology clearly works and is applicable to use in the UK just as in the US. This is a set of wheels that the NHS can avoid re-inventing.”
The demo app has also added momentum to a specific goal that Tweed and colleague George Lilly are helping us realize: to SMART-enable VistA, the open source EHR created at the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs. The two will be presenting on just that topic next Tuesday, June 5, at the 25th VistA Community Meeting in Fairfax, VA. Their talk will follow shortly after Lead Architect Josh Mandel presents an overview of the SMART architecture.
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