Life as a Healthcare CIO Blog, April 12, 2010 — John Halamka
Last week, ONC awarded $60 million to four institutions – Mayo Clinic, Harvard University, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program…
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News
SHARP Grant Awarded
Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT awards $15 million to Harvard Medical School to build the “app-store” for health.
Government Pushes To Create A New Health Internet
The Huffington Post, March 18, 2010 — Fred Schulte
Hoping to provide the backbone for a grand plan to put the nation’s medical records online, federal officials have been quietly retooling an obscure government data-sharing service into a robust new Health Internet. The concept has drawn intense interest from technology firms, including Microsoft and Google, which are scrambling to find new–and profitable–uses for digital medical records and the cyber health-care services they are starting to spawn…
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Electronic medical records not seen as a cure-all
The Washington Post, October 25, 2009 — Alexi Mostrous
In a health-care debate characterized by partisan bickering, most lawmakers agree on one thing: American medicine needs to go digital. When President Obama designated $19.5 billion to expand the use of electronic medical records, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said it was one of only “two good things” in February’s stimulus package. But such bipartisan enthusiasm has obscured questions about the effectiveness of health information technology products, critics say. Interviews with more than two dozen doctors, academics, patients and computer programmers suggest that computer systems can increase errors, add hours to doctors’ workloads and compromise patient care…
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The Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE): a prototype federated query tool for clinical data repositories
Weber, G. M., Murphy, S. N., McMurry, A. J., Macfadden, D., Nigrin, D. J., Churchill, S., and Kohane, I. S. The Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE): a prototype federated query tool for clinical data repositories. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2009;624-30
Acceptability of a personally controlled health record in a community-based setting: implications for policy and design
Weitzman, E. R., Kaci, L., and Mandl, K. D. Acceptability of a personally controlled health record in a community-based setting: implications for policy and design. J Med Internet Res 2009;e14
Substitutability: Why, What and How?
Substitutability is a property of software applications that allows the users of such systems fine grained choice and control of the way their computing environment works for them without. This is in marked contrast to existing healthcare applications, particularly electronic health records which are typically monolithic and do not allow substitution for functions by other vendors without extensive technical support, it at all possible. I review here early questions that follow from the adoption of a substitutability model in health care information technology.
Authors
Emerging Consensus to Create a ‘Health Internet’ With Broad Consumer Engagement
Boston Children’s Hospital Newsroom, October 9, 2009 — Keri Stedman/Rob Graham
As government, industry and academic leaders work to transform the nation’s health information system, there is increasing interest in the notion of a national health information network in which consumers can actively engage, and which can provide the foundation for an “iPhone-like” ecosystem of applications to compete on price and value. In such an ecosystem, purchasers of applications–whether physicians and hospitals buying electronic health records, or patients and consumers buying technology to support wellness and disease management–would be able to easily substitute any application for any other…
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Transforming US Healthcare and its Shadow Impact on Canadian Health Information Technology (HIT)
OSCAR Canada Users Society blog, October 3, 2009 — David Daley
The OSCAR community was privileged to be the sole Canadian delegation present at Harvard’s 2009 HIT Platform Meeting, chaired by Kennedth Mandl and Isaac Kohane, both of Harvard Medical School, and the launch of ITdotHealth (www.ITdotHealth.org), a National Health Information Technology Forum…
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Two big deals in Health 2.0
The Health Care Blog, October 2, 2009 — Matthew Holt
John Halamka writes about the small but important meeting this week at Harvard Medical School hosted by Zak Kohane and Ken Mandl. Because of the impending arrival of about 1,000 of my best friends next week at Health 2.0, I couldn’t go to that meeting. But it may be very important in putting the “cats and dogs” together to think about ways for new platforms with players like Halamka and David Kibbe (who have not been on the same side of these issues) both taking part…
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