The Healthcare Information Systems Blog

The Healthcare Information Systems Blog Has Moved!

Jeff O'Connor — Fri, 12 May 2006 23:26:00 GMT

The Healthcare Information Systems Blog has moved to the following URL:

http://healthcareinformationsystemsblog.blogspot.com.

Through email dialogue with Jeff Julian, I've been told that this site can stay active indefinitely if I wish. I'll be leaving it up for the foreseeable future to redirect other healthcare techies to its new location.

Thanks to everyone at Geekswithblogs who helped me get this little project off to such a good start!

New Media for Doctors and Healthcare Geeks - The Medical Blog Network

Jeff O'Connor — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:46:00 GMT

I was very excited to find Healthvoices.com: The Medical Blog Network this morning through Technorati (I couldn't sleep and it was either browse Technorati or play Civ IV for the umpteenth time). As I've alluded to in previous posts, the healthcare field can be a lonely place for a geek because so few people in it understand what it is their IT and IS support are trying to tell them most of the time.

(In my situation I am doubly-damned because my primary customers are the Sales and Marketing department and, to a lesser extent, the Planning and Marketing Support group. Although they're my favorite people within my company to work with, well, suffice it to say that from a geek's perspective there's a reason those organizations' initials are S&M and PMS.)

At any rate, it's nice to see that there's an on-line community and blog aggregator for members of the medical profession. I'm thrilled that there are doctors, nurses, and other folks who are passionate about the health and wellbeing of others who understand the sea change that Web 2.0 and the social software paradigm is unleashing on their vocation.

From their site:

HealthVoices.com is the premier medical blog network and aggregator, that organizes user-generated medical content by easy-to-find categories. Unprecedented consumer access to "unvarnished" medical information created from the first-hand experience of medical consumers and professionals encourages greater trust and confidence in their decisions. The service provides independent medical professionals with unmatched opportunity to build reputation, trust and referral base online.

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Now if I can only someone at work outside of the IS Department to get as enthusiastic about this as I am...

Are You Listening, God? Apparently Not.

Jeff O'Connor — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 06:28:00 GMT

William Saletan summed-up the most recent multi-million dollar study concerning the impact of prayer on one's health in a recent Slate.com piece this way:

Warning: The surgeon general may determine that prayer is hazardous to your health. That's what can happen when faith sets out to prove its power through science.

Mr. Saletan's wry observation is based upon the results of a three-year, $2.4M study of the impact of other peoples prayers on the recovery of patients who recently underwent heart surgery.

Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren't prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all.

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While witty, I prefer the conclusion reached by Dr. Bruce Flamm as quoted in The Washington Post:

"I would hope that these results, combined with similar recent findings, would encourage scientists to stick to science and stop dabbling in the supernatural," said Bruce Flamm of the University of California at Irvine.

Food for thought during the upcoming election cycle. It only takes a single vote to impose the unsubstantiated beliefs of a few concerning important matters of personal privacy and public policy, ranging from a woman's right to choose to stemcell research funding, on all of us.

University of Minnesota Unveils Online Healthcare Publications Portal

Jeff O'Connor — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 09:46:00 GMT

This has been a good week for healthcare in the media. First, Yahoo! launched Expert Blogs on Yahoo! Health, and now this:

MINNEAPOLIS - Newspaper and magazine health coverage will be reviewed online at a new Web site beginning Monday.

Access to the site and its findings, http://www.HealthNewsReview.org, is free and open to consumers. It was created by University of Minnesota journalism professor Gary Schwitzer, who fashioned the site after similar efforts in Australia and Canada.

"For consumers, we hope it will help them improve their critical thinking about claims in health care," said Schwitzer, who directs a graduate program in health care journalism.

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It looks like I have another RSS feed to add to the old start page!

Expert Blogs on Yahoo! Health

Jeff O'Connor — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 23:44:00 GMT

Yahoo! has introduced Health Expert Blogs on Yahoo! Health. I'm not sure if this is part of the “social Web” model Yahoo! is gambling their future on, a symptom of what happens when 1 out of 5 Americans has no health insurance, or merely an outgrowth of the blogging phenomenon. Whatever the company's motivation, Yahoo! has really delivered.

There are fourteen blogs covering twelve topics:

Aging & Caregiving
Asthma & Allergies
Breast Cancer
Child & Family Health
Cholesterol & Heart Disease
Depression & Anxiety
Diabetes and Living With Diabetes
Nutrition & Weight Loss
Pregnancy
Sex & Relationships and Sexual Health
Sports Medicine & Exercise
Yoga

Some of the bloggers are “powered by” very prestigious organizations and institutions. Nutrition & Weight Loss, for example, is provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine. Others, like Sex & Relationships are associated with third-party Web sites.

Yahoo! Health has, in my opinion, always been better than its counterpart at MSN, and the addition of expert blogs has only increased its lead. Yahoo! Health has had discussion boards and has been integrated with Yahoo! Groups for a while now; message boards are the most recent addition to MSN Health & Fitness and the site's health experts don't interact with them. Oddly enough they don't blog either; they selectively respond to email instead (the “Ann Landers” model).

Microsoft to Take-On the Ultimate Operating System

Jeff O'Connor — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:02:00 GMT

Microsoft Tackles Bioinformatics
April 4, 2006

Stacey Lawrence / Ziff Davis Internet

Microsoft on April 4 announced the formation of the BioIT Alliance, a cross-industry group created to enhance the ability to use and share biomedical data, at the Life Sciences Conference and Expo in Boston.

The working group will take on a series of "proof-of-concept" projects to understand how Microsoft's platforms can enhance the integration of the life sciences and IT.

"Advances in our understanding of the human genome promise to revolutionize medicine and open the door to therapies that are tailored to individuals," said Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, in a statement...

Life sciences companies have unique technical challenges that often stymie existing pre-packaged and homegrown software solutions, such as the need for more comprehensive data integration solutions, better technical collaboration and stronger knowledge management capabilities.

For example, at least 15 percent of life sciences research is a duplicate of existing studies largely because all of the most appropriate references can't be found. This is one of the issues the alliance is working to address, according to Microsoft platform strategy advisor Don Rule. "We have just one customer who estimates spending $350 million a year duplicating research that already exists."

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Newt Gingrich and I Find Common Ground! Dogs and Cats Living Together! Mass Hysteria!

Jeff O'Connor — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:49:00 GMT

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks the Henry ford Health System's E-Prescribe system is a model for the nation to emulate.

Health cost savings backed
Gingrich calls for national reform
April 4, 2006

BY KATIE MERX
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich applauded a southeast Michigan effort to save lives and save dollars through collaboration, but said it is just a beginning and called for nationwide reform of the health care system...

"You are as close as any region of the country at beginning to be the health system of the future," Gingrich told about 300 conference attendees. He cited regional advances in electronic prescribing and the collaboration among industry, labor, government and the health industry to improve quality and lower costs in the region's health system...

"I am very impressed with what you have begun to do," Gingrich said. But achieving widespread systemic change at the rate needed to save American businesses from collapsing from the enormous burden of health care costs is "going to be an enormous challenge."

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The current system of employer-funded healthcare puts this country and its businesses at a competitive disadvantage in the global market. While I'm not a big fan of Newt's I'm glad to see that there's at least one registered Republican out there who doesn't think the cure for America's healthcare ills is as simple as throwing more public money at a handful of well-connected public companies.

You are the Missing Link. Hello!

Jeff O'Connor — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 07:09:00 GMT

"Missing Link" Human Skull Found in Africa, Scientists Say
Stefan Lovgren/National Geographic News
March 27, 2006

Scientists working in Africa have discovered a Stone Age skull that could be a link between the extinct Homo erectus species and modern humans.

The face and cranium of the fossil have features found in both early and modern human species. The skull is believed to be between 250,000 and 500,000 years old.

"[This skull] shows the continuity of the evolutionary record, so in that sense it is a link [between Homo erectus and modern humans]," said Scott Simpson, a paleontologist from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio...

The face and cranium of the fossil have characteristics similar to those of an early-human species, such as Homo erectus. But there is anatomical evidence that the fossil is part of modern humans' ancestry. Simpson says, for example, that the shape of the skull's dome, or vault, is similar to that of modern humans.

"If you look at Homo erectus, their vaults tend to be low, long, and angular," Simpson said. "This vault is very spherical, like modern humans'."

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Sure, the title to this post is a bit dated, but then again so is the skull that was found.

Real Life Manga Cares for Japanese Elderly

Jeff O'Connor — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 10:26:00 GMT

Aging Japan Builds Robot to Look After Elderly

TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese-led research team said it had made a seeing, hearing and smelling robot that can carry human beings and is aimed at helping care for the country's growing number of elderly.

Government-backed research institute Riken said the 158-centimeter (five-foot) RI-MAN humanoid can already carry a doll weighing 12 kilograms (26 pounds) and could be capable of bearing 70 kilograms within five years.

"We're hoping that through future study it will eventually be able to care for elderly people or work in rehabilitation," said Toshiharu Mukai, one of the research team leaders.

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Bush Supports Healthcare for the Troops and Seniors Until He Doesn't

Jeff O'Connor — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:47:00 GMT

This has been a bad news week for people who have been promised medical care by the government, either by virtue of simply being Americans or because they put their life on the line for this country and nearly lost it.

Bush Rejects Push to Extend Drug Benefit Deadline
Steve Holland / Reuters

U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday rejected calls to extend a May 15 deadline for the elderly to sign up for a new prescription drugs plan despite complaints that it is too confusing.

At a meeting with residents of a senior citizen community in Silver Spring, just outside Washington, Bush said families of older Americans, particularly adult children, should help them sort out their Medicare options.

One woman, saying she was having trouble helping her 75-year-old mother make a choice, asked whether the deadline should be extended.

"No, and the reason why is there's got to be a fixed time for people to sign up," the president said. "We want people to realize there is — now is the time…. Rolling back deadlines is not going to help your mom make a good decision."

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Ah, yes - the Republican's fondness for adhering to “fixed time.” Like the time they extended debate in violation of parliamentary procedure on a failed bill that gave away public land to oil refineries until it passed. I guess that means some members of the GOP had voted against the bill before they voted for it?

Bush Administration Slashes Veterans Benefits

Over the last year and a half, President Bush has staged more than a third of his major public events before active military personnel or veterans. His rowdy “Hoo-ah”s and policy pronouncements—even when they have nothing to do with military matters—are predictably greeted with rabid applause.

But those easy and unquestioning crowds at military bases and American Legion halls will be increasingly hard to come by as soldiers and veterans start to notice the string of insults and budget cuts inflicted upon them.

With 130,000 soldiers still in the heat of battle in Iraq and more fighting and dying in Afghanistan, the Bush administration sought this year to cut $75 a month from the “imminent danger” pay added to soldiers’ paychecks when in battle zones. The administration sought to cut by $150 a month the family separation allowance offered to those same soldiers and others who serve overseas away from their families. These payments were deemed “wasteful and unnecessary” by the White House.
This year’s White House budget for Veterans Affairs cut $3 billion from VA hospitals—despite 9,000 casualties in Iraq and as aging Vietnam veterans demand more care. VA spending today averages $2,800 less per patient than nine years ago.
This year’s White House budget for Veterans Affairs cut $3 billion from VA hospitals—despite 9,000 casualties in Iraq and as aging Vietnam veterans demand more care. VA spending today averages $2,800 less per patient than nine years ago.
The administration beat back a bipartisan attempt in Congress to add $1.3 billion for VA hospitals to Bush’s request of $87 billion for war and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House is seeking to block a federal judge’s award of damages to a group of servicemen who sued the Iraqi government for torture during the 1991 Gulf War. The White House claims the money, to come from Iraqi assets confiscated by the United States, is needed for that country’s reconstruction.

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When it comes to the U.S. healthcare crisis I have seen the enemy, and he is sitting in the White House.

Send Google Pack Packing Says Paul Thurrott

Jeff O'Connor — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:24:00 GMT

Admittedly not directly related to healthcare information systems, I personally don't know very many people who go oneline and don't use Google's search engine.

Although I'm the first to admit there is no other search engine nearly as capable as Google that I'm aware of it, I try to avoid using it if all possible because I find some of the company's business practices suspect, arrogant, or both. Also, many of their products - from Gmail to Google Talk - are honestly pretty mediocre.

While I give Google credit for the concept behind Google Pack, I agree with Paul Thurrott that Google blew the execution:

While virtually every computer company on earth is scared to death of Google, and virtually every PC user seems to be in love with them, Google Pack serves nicely as a reality check. Not only is Google human, buts the flaws in Google Pack suggest that this company has a long, long way to go before it can ever justify its insanely lofty stock price. Google Pack is a mixed bag of applications, some useful and some not, though virtually all are deficient in some way as packaged here. I applaud Google for trying to make the PC experience simpler and more secure, but shipping out-of-date security products is even worse than not shipping them at all, because users will get a false sense of security and believe they're protected when in fact they are not. Google Pack is still in beta, so the more glaring issues can be fixed by a final release, if there is one. But this initial version of Google Pack is an embarrassment to the company. It's just a mess.

[more]

As someone who is paid to make recommendations to very bright, very capable, but often very computer-illiterate people regarding which software tools to use and which to avoid in order to make their lives easier and more productive, I have to agree with Paul Thurrott and pass on Google Pack.

Singing the Praises of (the Fight Against) Glaucoma. Literally. I'm Not Kidding.

Jeff O'Connor — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:38:00 GMT

Speaking of international healthcare organizations, the Assocation of International Glaucoma Societies Web site sings, dances, and makes gratuitous use of frames.

Seriously.

Check it out here: http://www.globalaigs.org/

In addition to moving bobbleheads of (presumably) well-known researches who study and treat the disease, the site features someone who sounds an awful lot like the person who did the opening score for the original Star Trek theme singing an opera about fighting glaucoma.

No, I am not making this up. Here are the words, and here's a link to the actual audio file:

Glaucoma, Glaucoma, Glaucoma
Constricting vision slowly
Halted by progress of science
Vision of a world united
Beyond all science knowing!

Someone please join a club and beat their Webmaster over the head with it.

Global Strategies for Clinical Trial Information

Jeff O'Connor — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:12:00 GMT

In 2003 the World Health Organization (WHO) began a series of conferences to address the issue of establishing a mechanism for conducting and reporting on clinical trials in a consistent, universally-accessible manner. Based upon internationally recognized scientific and ethical principles, the resulting program - the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform - seeks to achieve the following:

ensure that all clinical trials are registered and thus publicly declared and identifiable
ensure that for all trials, a minimum set of results will be reported and made publicly available
establish a complete and readily searchable register of clinical trials – overseen by an objective international body with the input of stakeholders
assist in making treatment decisions
help increase public trust in clinical research

These lofty goals - among others - will be achieved through a public Web portal intended to serve as a “one-stop-shop“ for clinical trial information from all over Earth! How cool is that?

For an overview of this incredibly exciting and worthwhile effort, check out the Webinar series being conducted by BetterManagement.com.

Sometimes Your Own Dog Food Doesn't Taste So Good

Jeff O'Connor — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 04:12:00 GMT

I'm not too embarrassed to say that I was one of the original purchasers of the original Handspring Visor Deluxe back in 1998 (or was it 1999?) who shelled out nearly $300 for a PDA that looked like it had escaped from a roll of Life Savers. Plus, I had plunked-down nearly another $100 for accessories!

I don't know which of the first 50,000 or so people I was, but I do know that I was a part of the first wave of purchasers who overwhelmed Handspring's servers. Instead of being one of the first people to actually get the PDA, however, I fell way behind in the race to see who would get to play with their new toy first, as Handspring had a hell of a time salvaging the part of their data that pertained to shipping the device.

(Ironically, the part of the data that pertained to billing my credit card worked just fine. Go figure.)

In the end I received my PDA and my other geek swag a little late and a lot free. Handspring refunded my money and let me keep my new toys. How much of their decision had to do with the fact that I had spent the day emailing variations on senior managers' names to @handspring.com, threatening to gripe about my situation on however many bulletin boards and chat rooms I could find I'm not sure. In any case, I was so impressed with that sort of service that I stuck by Handsrpring, buying other Visors for my brother and a friend's son as graduation gifts, and the Treo 300 for myself when it came out.

Over time, I bought a lot of Treo 300s, mostly because the flip-top hinge on the right-side of the device is extremely poorly designed and partly because it was economical - for a while at least - to cover the $39.95 deductible and replace the unit twice per year when the hinge finally gave-out and the top snapped off.

(Sprint, my cellphone provider, acknowledges the design flaw but blames “user error“ whenever it crops-up. I'd drop them, except that my entire family is on their network).

The last time this happened was just over a month ago, and I had decided long beforehand that I would upgrade my Treo 300 rather than replace it for the umpteenth time. The Treo 650 was the obvious choice, but then I noticed the PPC-6600 with its Pocket PC OS, larger screen, and virtually identical price and found myself in a dilemma: Palm or Microsoft?

The senior IS leadership of the organization I work for doesn't particularly care for Microsoft for a number of reasons, several of which have nothing to do with the technical merits of their products (and, to be fair, a few key gripes that do). Like most of the rest of the planet we run Windows and Office on the desktop, but beyond that it's Solaris or Linux, take your pick. We also don't use Outlook or Lotus Notes, which causes a lot of heartache for people who want/need real PIM software, whether they use a PDA or not. On the plus side, since our email and calendaring application doesn't talk to either Palm or Pocket PC devices there's no incentive to pick one sort of device over the other; it's totally the user's call.

Despite the fact that I am unashamedly in the Microsoft camp when it comes to most questions of technology, making a decision didn't come easy for me. Eventually however, I chose to “eat my own dog food“ and purchase the PPC-6600 because it came with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. I figured these applications would make it a powerful tool that would allow me to save some of the trees I murder every year filling-up notebooks with indecipherable chicken scratch. I also liked the idea of being able to take a call and use other applications simultaneously, which is a real limitation of the Treo 300 and, I'm told, of the Treo 650. All-in-all, it seemed like a way to improve my productivity for a bit less than half the price of an entry-level laptop from Dell (after rebates), and only $30 more than the functionally similar Treo 650.

I don't regret the purchase, but I'm nowhere near as thrilled with it, pound-for-pound, as I was with my old monochrome Handspring Visor with its proprietary expansion slot and 8 MB of RAM when it first arrived. The size and weight doesn't bother me - my old Treo 300 was just as unwieldy, less useful, and more fragile (and nowhere near as kewl). The functionality of Pocket Word and Pocket Excel are a bit underwhelming, though - I go through almost as many gyrations cutting-pasting-reformatting the content of Pocket Word documents into regular .doc files as I used to with simple text taken from my Treo's Notes application. And the mess that Pocket Word makes of a regular .doc file when you reverse the process is a real shocker the first time you need to show a Customer a document that has (or in my case, had) a table embedded in it!

The Treo 300 is often criticized as being a PDA that someone stuck a phone onto, and the resulting instability of its Palm 3.x OS often proved that criticism to be justified. To my dismay, my PPC-6600 is nearly as buggy, though it's problems seem to be random and not tied to any particular application that I can tell. In addition to about a half-dozen reboots, I've also had to do two full restores from back-up already. Assuming that half are “freebies“ from being a new user, the amount of “real“ restoration work after just five weeks is still a disappointment. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the very first thing I installed on the PPC-6600 after I brought it home was its OS upgrade from Microsoft, which is supposed to correct known instabilities in the Pocket PC OS.

I once read a review of the PPC-6600 that billed it as a viable alternative to a laptop for a “power user.” Assuming I qualify as the latter, the PPC-6600 isn't the former. It's not bad, but it's not great; it's the Treo 300 of its generation. And for what a PPC-6600 costs, I won't be upgrading it any sooner than I upgraded its predecessor!

Well, This Explains A Lot About the Bush Administration's Approach to Just About Everything...

Jeff O'Connor — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 11:35:00 GMT

'nuff said.

(Click the comic or here for original image)