Neil Versel

Ode to EMRs, in song format

Two North Carolina physicians have decided to have a little musical fun with their EHR-related frustrations. Pediatrician Ken Roberts , M.D., and hematologist-oncologist Jim Granfortuna, M.D., at Moses Cone Health System in Greensboro, N.C., have produced this little ditty entitled, “Ode to Electronic Medical Records, or Our Song of Epic Proportions.” Cone Health just happens to have an Epic Systems EHR.

Roberts and Granfortuna don’t seem like they’re anti-EHR, just anti-EHR that makes their work more difficult. From the song: “Now we ain’t saying the EHR is bad/When all the bugs are fixed I know we’ll all be glad/It’s just by then us pioneers will all be dead.”

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May 21, 2013 I Written By Neil Versel

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Tags:Epic Moses Cone Health System usability

Is this Cisco commercial reflective of the real world?

Cisco Systems is running this commercial about the “Internet of everything,” with a focus on connected healthcare.

It all sounds great, but how much of this is grounded in the real world today and how much is wishful thinking? I mean, connected medical records? It sounds so idealistic.

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May 19, 2013 I Written By Neil Versel

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Filed Under: EMR/EHR health IT Healthcare IT hospitals imaging interoperability mobile remote monitoring video

Tags:ambulance Cisco Systems emergency medicine wireless

Guest podcast: Suzanne Leveille from OpenNotes

I now present the latest health IT-related podcast from Sivad Business Solutions, an interview with Suzanne Leveille, research director of OpenNotes, a project to give patients online access to the entirety of their own medical records, including the visit notes from clinicians. Leveille describes a trial at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. She reported that not one of the 105 participating physicians asked for the access to be shut off after a year. In some cases, patients even discovered errors and prevented adverse events.

Here is the description from Sivad:

A pleasure to welcome Suzanne Leveille to the program today. Suzanne is a professor of nursing at The University of Massachusetts-Boston, and the research director for OpenNotes.

OpenNotes is an initiative that invites patients to review their visit notes written by their doctors, nurses, or other clinicians.

As a patient, you have the right to read the notes your doctor or clinician writes about you during or after your appointment. Having the chance to read and discuss them with your doctor or family member can help you take better control of your health and health care.

As a healthcare professional, you may build better relationships with your patients and take better care of them when you share your visit notes. Our evidence suggests that opening up visit notes to patients may make care more efficient, improve communication, and most importantly may help patients become more actively involved with their health and health care.

Some highlights from the conversation include: the dramatic improvement between patient and doctor communications; how they overcome potential push back and resistance from physicians; patients became more engaged in their personal health care; OpenNotes has been pleasantly surprised at the patient engagement; how advanced technologies and mobile technology are going to impact the future of this idea; and how they are planning to spread the word and get more patients and doctors improving communications and care with OpenNotes!

Health Wonk Review: money talks, but IT helps

The latest edition of Health Wonk Review is hot off the digital presses, with Joe Paduda taking hosting duties on his Managed Care Matters blog. And managed care does matter in this trip around the health blogosphere, with most of the attention on healthcare costs and insurance coverage.

On the quality front, which is my primary interest these days, there is some interesting discussion about whether the new Medicare hospital readmissions policy truly will produce better care or will prod some into providing the minimum level of service to readmitted patients.

(Frankly, hospitals have been overtreating for years. If a minimal level of service gets the job done for the patient, that’s a good thing. And the policy is supposed to cause hospitals to do the right thing in the first place, knowing that they will lose out later if they don’t. I’m all for that.)

My post on consumer ignorance of telemedicine is in there, as is a good one from Vince Kuraitis and Leslie Kelly Hall about the duty providers have to share information with patients. EHRs and wearable sensors also make this edition of HWR. Not bad from an IT perspective.

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May 10, 2013 I Written By Neil Versel

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Filed Under: blogging consumerism EMR/EHR Finance health IT health reform Health Wonk Review Healthcare IT patient safety quality reimbursement Telehealth

Tags:consumer health information healthcare costs home monitoring hospital readmissions Medicare telehealth telemedicine wearable sensors

So many types of telehealth

Here’s a short video (720p HD) I put together from the just-concluded American Telemedicine Association’s annual conference in Austin, Texas. No wonder it’s so hard to get a real sense of the size of the telehealth and telemedicine market when there are so many components and so many different definitions. This is a row of banners outside the meeting rooms highlighting the various types, not to mention some of the ATA’s constituencies and important topics at the conference. I did the voice-over at 1:30 in the morning.

Breaking down ignorance about telehealth

AUSTIN, Texas — I’m at my very first American Telemedicine Association annual conference, which starts later this afternoon. This morning, I gave a short presentation to the ATA’s Industry Council, made up of technology vendors, about trends in the telehealth industry.

My slides are here: ATA 2013 presentation.

I want to draw your attention in particular to slide 9, which is a letter to the editor of the Kearney (Neb.) Hub newspaper. Honestly, it’s one of the most ignorant, poorly argued pieces of garbage I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t believe the editor actually accepted it and published it with such a weak argument. (Really, there’s “no scientific way to diagnose a patient with a mental illness,” but it’s OK to make a diagnosis in person?) Unfortunately, I can believe that someone would be so misinformed about telehealth and healthcare in general (“doctors are being paid millions to visit with patients for five minutes …”).

Thankfully, a commenter took the author, Kearney resident Kristyn Drahota, to task. I took her to task this morning, too. I hope you will join me in helping to combat such ignorance about telehealth.

Health eVillages and mobile health in the developing world

I’m in New York today for a Health eVillages board meeting. It’s a program that provides mobile health tools to help extend the reach and knowledge of health workers in remote and underserved parts of the world — including in rural Southern Louisiana. The meeting opened with this powerful video that explains the power of this program.

I can’t say anything more about Health eVillages now, but there is some big news coming this summer.

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April 30, 2013 I Written By Neil Versel

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Filed Under: international mobile video

Tags:Health eVillages Kenya Louisiana mobile

Patients with complex cases don’t want multiple provider portals, Rady CIO says

How about some real, original content for a change? Yeah, that’s why you started coming to my blog in the first place, isn’t it? You’re tired of nothing but video embeds from others and short, offbeat attempts at humor.

I recently interviewed Albert Oriol, CIO of Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, for a story that will appear elsewhere (read: a paying client) soon, but I had a lot of material I left out of that story. I get to use some of the rest here in a little experiment to see what it does to this site’s traffic.

Obviously, pediatric hospitals aren’t eligible for the Medicare side of meaningful use, which is why the threshold is lower for qualifying for Medicaid bonuses. Pediatricians and children’s hospitals only need to have 20 percent of their visits with Medicaid patients, compared to 3o percent for other providers. Rady meets that standard and already has attested to Stage 1.

Oriol, however, does not like the way the rules are written, calling some of them “well-intentioned mandates with unintended consequences.” For example, providers must offer portals for some of their patients – 10% in Stage 1, rising to 50% in Stage 2. But patients with complex conditions go to multiple providers, each of which may have unique portals. “It’s inconvenient for them to go to many different portals,” he says.

He also is frustrated with having to build reports knowing that many of the items will not apply to pediatric subspecialties. “It’s not the best use of resources,” Oriol says.

The two things at the top of mind for Oriol these days are telemedicine and advanced analytics. Rady is expanding its telemedicine program to support rural areas in Imperial County, a poor, isolated jurisdiction east of San Diego County along the Mexican border. He believes this will provide value and convenience to primary care physicians and patients alike.

On the analytics front, Rady is working on a demonstration project with California Children’s Services (CCS), a managed care program for children in the state’s MediCal system with certain diseases. “We’re going to bring in data from other providers,” Oriol says.

The hospital also is “taking a big step forward” in innovation and discovery by partnering with industry to research technology and the analytics of technology, according to Oriol.

CNN highlights health apps, clinical intelligence

CNN hasn’t exactly shined of late with its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, but the embattled news network got my attention by airing a segment on cutting-edge health IT over the weekend. (Actually, credit goes to Scott Anzel, CEO and co-founder of MDconnectME, one of the three companies featured in the short video.)

MDconnectME makes an app intended to keep people up to date with short, secure messages when their loved ones are in surgery. I actually wrote about Philadelphia-based MDconnectME for MobiHealthNews last fall, after clinicians at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found that the app worked well for keeping frazzled family members up to date on patients transferred there when other Manhattan hospitals closed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Also included in this report are Flatiron Health, a clinical intelligence platform for cancer care that’s backed by Google Ventures and LabCorp., and Mango Health, an app supported by Rock Health to encourage medication compliance through a rewards program.

Watch the video here:

You also can see

Guest podcast: Deborah Gordon of Network Health talks reform with Sivad Solutions

Last September, I was a guest on a podcast hosted by Todd Schnick and Charles Davis of Sivad Business Solutions. Afterwards, we decided to share content if and when it made sense. That hasn’t happened until now (actually last month — I’m just getting around to posting now).

Schnick and Davis interviewed Deborah Gordon, chief marketing officer of Network Health, a health insurer in Massachusetts, to discuss healthcare reform. I wouldn’t be posting this if it didn’t have a focus on real reform of health care, and not just insurance expansion, with a strong element of patient safety and attention to outcomes.

From Sivad:

An honor to welcome Deborah Gordon, the Chief Marketing Officer for Network Health. Debbie joins us to talk about one of the more innovative non-profit health plans one can find across the US. You can learn more about Network Health here, the number three health plan for Medicaid health plans.

Discussion topics included:

1. The challenges of serving a very diverse population and customer base, along with lower income customers as a result of income or job situation.

2. Network Health, and states like Massachusetts, have lead the nation in Medicaid health care. How can that trend, and how can the reforms found in Massachusetts, spread across the land?

3. The creation of the Health Insurance Exchange is the key to success…which brings competition and market forces to bear in health care. “It is like Expedia for health insurance…”

4. A focus on quality patient care going forward…

5. What are the challenges going forward, and how does the heated national debate impact the work they are doing.

6. The innovation that’s possible when market forces are at play… “Regulators spawning innovation…”

7. More technology is available and serving the health care markets, which is exciting. But, will access to that technology be accessible to the low income markets?

8. The e-discharge program…

9. The utilization of analytics…

10. Exposing more information to the consumer makes them better patients, healthier, and more compliant to health recommendations…

11. The patient should be the center of the health care system… not the doctor.

12. Debbie was recently named a 2013 USA Eisenhower Fellow, a prestigious fellowship which recognizes emerging leaders who are making momentous contributions to society. In 2013, she will travel to Singapore and Australia where she will explore how these countries have successfully established systems and supports that allow consumers to make good decisions about their health care. The goal is to gather insights and best practices that can be applied here in the U.S.

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April 16, 2013 I Written By Neil Versel

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.