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An American conquers France

For the Fourth of July, how about a little story of an American conquering France, with a health IT spin?

Smith College in Amherst, Mass., is still an all-female school, so, needless to say, I did not go there. But a graduate I  know showed me the most recent issue of the alumnae magazine, Smith Alumnae Quarterly. There, on the cover of the Summer 2011 edition is a familiar face, Paris-based health IT consultant Denise Silber, a 1974 graduate.

You may recall, I did a podcast with Silber in 2007. We talked about health IT initiatives in Europe in general and in France in particular, and compared progress there to that in the U.S. Since that time, though, Silber has brought the health/medicine 2.0 movement to Europe, in the form of the Doctors 2.0 and You conference. I also learned through the Smith article that Silber in April was admitted to the French Legion of Honor, an order founded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, apparently becoming only the second Smith grad to be so recognized. The first was Julia Child.

How cool is that?

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July 4, 2011 I Written By

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

Filed Under: health 2.0  health IT  international
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Bellagio follow-up in ‘Health Affairs’

There’s been a lot of work done in the field of global e-health since the Rockefeller Foundation‘s series of conferences in Bellagio, Italy, in July and August 2008. I had the distinct honor of attending for the third of four weeks, which focused on electronic health records and on mobile healthcare, two subjects that even more up my alley now then they were a year and a half ago.

I’ve had intermittent contact with some of the participants in those conferences since then, most recently at the AMIA annual symposium last month, and I’ve tried to report on progress from those meetings toward applying information technology to addressing health issues in developing countries. A wider audience will get a chance to read more about some of the projects in an upcoming issue of Health Affairs.

From what I understand, in mid-February, Health Affairs will publish nine papers on global e-health issues related to the work done at and as a result of Bellagio. I’m not privy to any further details, though.

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December 6, 2009 I Written By

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

Filed Under: international
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Peter Murray named acting director of IMIA

The International Medical Informatics Association has named Peter J. Murray as acting executive director. The appointment follows the April 12 death of Executive Director Steven Heusing. (I posted an obituary for Heusing earlier this month.)

Murray, who had been serving as IMIA associate executive director for the last few months, also was the organization’s vice president for strategic planning. He is an independent health informatics and telematics consultant in Nocton, England. He holds a Ph.D. in nursing informatics and educational technology and teaches health informatics at both the University of Winchester (UK) and Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha, South Africa.

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April 29, 2009 I Written By

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

Filed Under: international
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WHO e-health report finally goes online

The World Health Organization today put its global, biweekly “eHealth Intelligence Report” online. Right now, you can only get 2009 issues from the site, but the WHO is promising to have the archives, dating to 2005, up by April.

Seriously, what took so long? The WHO site has Russian, Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish versions, but this report seems to be available only in English.

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March 3, 2009 I Written By

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

Filed Under: international
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What’s in a name?

Just a couple of weeks after the Medical Records Institute launched its mHealth Initiative—quietly admitting failure of its plan to get 10 million people using their cell phones to transfer health information by this spring—a program called the mHealth Alliance has launched in Europe.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Foundation and the UK-based Vodafone Foundation made the annoucement Tuesday at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The global project is an outgrowth of the UN Foundation-Vodafone Foundation “mHealth for Development” report and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Making the eHealth Connection conferences in magnificent Bellagio, Italy, last summer. I was present for the third week, which included the mobile health track.

I am, of course, available for all your conference coverage needs in bucolic European resort towns.

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February 19, 2009 I Written By

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
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Another view on reform—from Oz

I just read another report on healthcare reform. It pointed out some things you probably already know:

  • Healthcare represents a huge and rapidly expanding portion of the economy, and spending continues to outpace inflation.
  • Healthcare is not as safe as it can and should be.
  • Many of the adverse events that result in injury or death are the result of systemic failure rather than human error.
  • Either way, many are entirely preventable.
  • Information technology likely will be a major force for healthcare transformation and improvement.
  • IT can help empower consumers to make better choices about their own care.

The report makes a key point by quoting former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who said in 2004: “The most remarkable feature of about 21st-century medicine is that we hold it together with 19th-century paperwork.” The thing is, most people reading it have never heard of Thompson, a four-term governor of Wisconsin and a longtime Amtrak board member, since the intended audience is Australian.

“It’s an American problem requiring an American solution,” is how one TV commercial on the cable news channels goes right now. OK, but don’t discount an idea just because it came from beyond our shores.

The report, “A Pebble in the Pond: A Vision for E-Health Enabled Healthcare Transformation,” written by Louise Schaper for Australian health IT research firm CHIK Services contains some interesting arguments that seem relevant to the U.S. market right now, including engagement of public and private stakeholders, capable leadership, defragmentation of information, and, yes, substantial financial investment.

And Schaper even has the wisdom to quote from a story I wrote from MedInfo 2007 in Brisbane, Australia.

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January 14, 2009 I Written By

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

Filed Under: health IT  health reform  international
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Gates Foundation to fund global informatics training

The American Medical Informatics Association will announce Monday that it has received a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote health informatics and biomedical education and training worldwide, particularly in developing countries.

This will be the first project of a new program called 20/20, in which the International Medical Informatics Association and its regional affiliates, including AMIA, will attempt to train 20,000 informatics professionals globally by 2020. This is an outgrowth of the AMIA 10×10 program to train 10,000 people in informatics in the U.S. by 2010. IMIA and its partners will discuss details of 20/20 this week at the Wellcome Trust in London.

AMIA will use the Gates Foundation money to develop “scaleable” approaches to e-health education, including a replicable blueprint for training informatics leaders, including physicians, medical records professionals, computer scientists and medical librarians.

“We envision the program will train leaders in low-resource nations by linking them and their institutions to partner institutions affiliated with AMIA to build capacity for managing and improving high-quality, low-cost healthcare in the less-developed economies,” AMIA explains in a statement. AMIA President and CEO Don Detmer, M.D., says this element of 20/20 is aimed at career informaticians “so there won’t be a brain drain.”

Other elements of 20/20 will include individual and degree-track courses at colleges and universities—similar to existing 10×10 curriculum—and skills training, not necessarily specific to medical informatics. “We’re also looking at ways of creating seminars and executive training for people to advocate for this in their home countries,” Detmer says.

Detmer, who is retiring at the end of the year, says the skills training will happen in “bits and bites” to help build incremental capacity in the global e-health workforce. Some planning in this area has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a $500,000 grant the charity gave to AMIA to lead one of the Making the eHealth Connection conferences last summer in Bellagio, Italy.

The 20/20 program is chaired by N.T. Cheung, head of IT for the Hong Kong Hospital Authority. Other confirmed or likely participating organizations include the European Federation for Medical Informatics, the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics and the Health Informatics Society of Australia.

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December 7, 2008 I Written By

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

Filed Under: international
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Mobile phones for HIV/AIDS treatment

In honor of World AIDS Day, I’m linking to a post on the MobileActive.org blog about treating HIV/AIDS patients via mobile phones. The post discusses two programs to engage patients with “virtual call centers,” text messages and, eventually, home testing services, particularly in South Africa, which has the world’s highest population of HIV-positive residents.

(Thanks to Dr. Enoch Choi for alerting me to this post.)

I’ve covered mobile health in the developing world several times on this blog and elsewhere, notably from one week of the the Making the eHealth Connection conferences in Italy last summer, and subsequent follow-up coverage. See “The Davos of health IT?” and “Desmond Tutu Presents e-Health Call to Action.”

Those who attend the 25th annual TEPR conference in February should expect to hear a progress report on a project to promote health information interoperability in the U.S. by cell phone. The Medical Records Institute, the group behind TEPR, also is pushing mobile technology in healthcare through the Center for Cell Phone Applications in Healthcare.

Looking ahead, I’m hoping to get a closer look at mobile technology for HIV treatment at MedInfo2010 in Cape Town, South Africa. But that’s a long way off. The HIV epidemic is not going to wait.

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December 1, 2008 I Written By

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
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Medicine 2.0, day two

Travel and deadlines got in the way of me posting about the second day of last week’s Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, but I saved my notes.

Something super-cool I saw there: Medting.com, a “global” repository of medical images, developed in Spain and soon to branch out to the U.S. Is it another YouTube for medicine? Not exactly. Miguel Cabrer, president of the company, sees it as more like a Snomed for multimedia.

In Canada, they’re getting interactive with physicians.

Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association launched a social networking portal called Asklepios—named after the Greek god of medicine—on its site. Access is limited to physicians, but CMA online content director Pat Rich says it’s partially in response to doctors who bemoan the demise of the staff lounge.

In the spirit of Facebook and MySpace, it is more than just a professional site; physicians can use Asklepios for blogging, discussing hobbies, posting photos and even, theoretically, dating.

Rich says the CMA is staying pretty hands-off when it comes to content. He also says the association made sure the site was hosted in Canada and not the U.S. because physicians otherwise might be subject to surveillance under the USA Patriot Act. Really. This is not the first time I’ve heard of Patriot Act concerns in healthcare outside the U.S., and it’s a topic I’d like to explore some more.

Physicians in Ontario specifically have another networking option for professional issues, as the OntarioMD.ca point-of-care resource portal recently added a “groups” function. Groups can create a public Web presence and also set up a private members area for sharing files and calendars. Jason Aprile, web contact manager for the government-run OntarioMD site, says there are 8,400 registered physician users now.

Dr. Chris Paton, a UK native who now is at the University of Auckland, says the Next Big Thing might just be social networking for mobile devices. He’s particularly bullish on the mobile clinical assistant and PDAs and smartphones with Wi-Fi capability. One of the benefits of Wi-Fi is that users can connect to more powerful computers, such as for image manipulation, overcoming one of the long-standing shortfalls of PDAs, Paton says.

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September 11, 2008 I Written By

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
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Podcast: Judith Rodin and Ariel Pablos-Méndez of the Rockefeller Foundation

As regular readers know, I was fortunate enough to be invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to Bellagio, Italy, last week for the third of four weeks in a series of conferences called Making the eHealth Connection. The goal was for a small group of technology and healthcare informatics leaders to come up with actionable ideas to use IT to improve the health of people in the developing world.

The week I was there focused on electronic health records and mobile health.

While I was in Bellagio, I interviewed Judith Rodin, Ph.D., president of the Rockefeller Foundation (and former president of the University of Pennsylvania), and Ariel Pablos-Méndez, M.D., managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation and the head of health programs. Unfortunately, there was an echo in the room that found its way onto the recording. And unfortunately the battery ran out of my recorder before I got done chatting with Dr. Pablos.

We also take a while getting into the discussion about IT, but I still think it’s an interesting interview.

Podcast details: Interview with Judith Rodin, Ph.D., and Ariel Pablos-Méndez, M.D., of the Rockefeller Foundation. Recorded July 29, 2008, in Bellagio, Italy. MP3, mono, 64 kbps, 14.5 MB, running time 31:41.

1:05 Rationale behind the conferences
1:55 Harnessing the beneficial aspects of globalization to fix the negative effects
2:50 Why e-health in the developing world?
5:00 Affordability, accessibility and quality of care
5:28 “Leapfrog” strategy for bringing technology to underserved areas
6:50 Market opportunities from public-private partnerships, even in poor countries
8:02 E-health as a remedy to globalization of diseases
10:30 Bold, actionable ideas
12:22 “Game-changing ideas” from previous Bellagio conferences
13:15 Welcome to Dr. Ariel Pablos-Méndez
14:05 The foundation’s current attempt to strengthen health systems and long history of creating global programs
15:15 Breaking down the silos of health programs in developing countries
16:05 Worldwide concerns go beyond HIV/AIDS
16:40 Problems with access to care, and the role of telemedicine
17:10 Problems with affordability and efficiency
18:20 Good health at low cost
19:15 Theory that the future will be about more health for the money rather than more money for health
19:45 Current Rockefeller Foundation health programs: access
20:35 Role of the private sector in health systems in developing countries
22:45 E-health in the developing world
23:50 Challenges and opportunities in e-health
24:55 Interoperability issues with legacy systems
26:20 Technology transfer from U.S. institutions to Africa before legacy systems become a problem
27:34 Why the timing is right for IT and for these conferences
28:10 Needs: collaboration, agenda setting, capacity building, evidence, applications
30:00 Bold ideas: British NHS and a system in Sao Paolo, Brazil, sharing code with South Africa and developing a framework strategy for e-health

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August 8, 2008 I Written By

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

Filed Under: international  podcast
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