Category: News Etc

Kohane on Health Record Surveillance

Why You Should Demand More Surveillance—Of Your Health Records

Today on WBUR’s CommonHealth:

“Your medical data—the records of your doctors’ visits and operations and drug purchases—is already not as private as you might like to imagine. Dozens of agencies, commercial and governmental, routinely have access to it, ostensibly for the purpose of ensuring efficient and accurate payment.

Yet the vast majority of your health care data remains unused, discarded and ignored. It sits idle when it could be applied today to improve the delivery of health care—including yours—and advance medical science.…”

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SMART Networking at Health Datapalooza IV

Shown above (from left), SMART architects Nikolai Schwerter and Arjun Sanyal, co-director Ken Mandl, and advisor Mark Frisse all attended the fourth annual conference to liberate health data in Washington D.C. on June 3–5, hosted by the Health Data Consortium.
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Mandel on RDF Panel at SemTechBiz

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Josh Mandel (second from right) spoke on a panel this week at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference, held June 2-5 in San Francisco’s Union Square. His group was there to discuss RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language, following a workshop earlier in the week that had prepared what came to be called the “Yosemite Manifesto” on the topic.

Like the other four speakers on the panel, Josh is in the business of addressing what the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology stated in its 2010 report on health IT:

The best way to manage and store data for advanced data-analytical techniques is to break data down into the smallest individual pieces that make sense to exchange or aggregate.

RDF—the Resource Description Framework—plays a key role in the SMART API. Details are provided in our developer documentation.

For more on the panel session, see the write-up on SemanticWeb.com, who presented the conference along with parent company WebMediaBrands, Inc.

SMART Reverberations from Health:Refactored

Reflecting on his recent experience at the first-of-its-kind Health:Refactored conference, SMART lead architect Josh Mandel (left) said:

Health:Refactored convened a vibrant mix of doers in Health technology, with a clear focus on designing, building, and iterating on better health tools.  It was an exciting chance to meet and scheme with the broader developer community about SMART, BlueButton+, and the burgeoning marketplace of health APIs. A key theme for me: the critical importance of breaking down silo walls so patients (consumers!) and clinicians can—to echo Zak Kohane’s TEDMED mantra—make their data count for them.

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How An Age-Old Chart Is Redefining Health Care

Fast Company Co.DESIGN, May 24, 2013 — Mark Wilson
In a world where organ transplants and MRIs are commonplace, pediatric growth charts don’t sound very exciting. But after spending 30 illuminating minutes on the phone with Harvard researcher Dr. Isaac Kohane, a passionate intellectual who speaks with an infectious urgency, I’m a convert…
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Universal EHR? No. Universal Data Access? Yes.

Informatics Professor, May 15, 2013 — William Hersh
A recent blog posting calls for a “universal EMR” for the entire healthcare system. The author provides an example and correctly laments how lack of access to the complete data about a patient impedes optimal clinical care. I would add that quality improvement, clinical research, and public health are impeded by…
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Conversations on Health Care: Dr. Kenneth Mandl, Director of the Intelligent Health Lab, Boston Children’s Hospital

Community Health Center, Inc., May 1, 2013 — Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter
PODCAST: This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Dr. Kenneth Mandl, Director of the Intelligent Health Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Mandl is a pioneer in consumer information technologies and biosurveillance, creating platforms for sharing big health data as well as assisting the…..
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Progress toward interoperability in healthcare remains slow

SearchHealthIT, April 30, 2013 — Ed Burns
Recent months have seen a number of initiatives intended to advance interoperability in healthcare. Some see these moves as being—at best—baby steps toward solving the system’s connectivity challenges, while others say they continue to push the industry down a misguided path….
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Query Health: Interoperability for Population Data

One of our fellow travelers on the ONC’s interoperability journey is Query Health. Like the SMART platform architecture, Query Health defines a standard framework for looking at medical record data. While SMART focuses on a single-patient view of that data, Query Health is designed to ask questions about a broad swath of patients so that clinical quality trends can be observed.
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Global Design Studio Adds SMART App to Portfolio

Doctors and parents alike are frustrated by today’s standard growth charts. For a fresh look at how to fix this, the SMART team turned to the New York studio of Fjord, a global service design consultancy. Read their case study to see how they worked with a panel of pediatric specialists to turn medical intuition into design thinking, integrating “multiple graphs into a single view to gain a detailed, all-encompassing picture of a child’s health.”