Category: Press

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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As reported in the Boston Globe, Farzad Mostashari, at the Health 2.o conference, observed that “The investments in research and development that are going on in the consumer technology space are now dwarfing the investment and innovation that are happening in, say, the military.” As an approach the government can take to promoting improvements in HIT, he cites the SMART project “where Zak Kohane and Ken Mandl are developing a system of “iPhone-like” medical apps designed so that they can be easily swapped out when better ones are developed but that allow for easy saving and transfer of data to a new program.”

EHR Intelligence, March 27, 2012 — Kyle Murphy
Over the past few weeks, a debate has broken out between a team of researchers and the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Farzad Mostashari, over the former’s findings in a recently published study in Health Affairs. Dr. Mostashari used his government-hosted blog…
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FierceEMR, March 21, 2012 — Marla Durben Hirsch
The Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies (SMART) platform appears to be a “promising approach” to improve electronic health records now that phase one of the project has been completed, according to its developers. The creators report this week in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association that unlike current proprietary EHR systems, the SMART platform operates as a standard base platform to which users can add or subtract modular third-party applications, similar to the methodology used by iPhone or Android…
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