Free Healthcare IT Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use, ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Get all the latest Health IT updates from Neil Versel for FREE!

Video: ‘Meet the Bloggers’ panel from HIMSS12

As promised,  there is some video from the “Meet the Bloggers” panel I appeared on, and it comes to us from Dr. Chuck Webster of EHR Workflow Inc. and the EHR.BZ Report. (You may know him from his previous job as CMIO of EHR vendor EncounterPro, formerly known as JMJ Technologies.) Webster was there in the front row capturing parts of the session with a Bluetooth camera strapped to his hat.

The moderator is Brian Ahier and the panelist are, from left to right: Healthcare Scene boss and full-time healthcare blogger John Lynn; fellow Healthcare Scene contributor Jennifer Dennard (real job:  social marketing director at Billian’s HealthDATA/Porter Research/HITR.com); myself; and Carissa Caramanis O’Brien of Aetna.

Here are the results, hopefully in chronological order:

For the record, I do not use Google+. I have an account, and some readers have added me to their circles, but I have not posted a single word there. Google’s terms of service—both old and new—essentially gives the Don’t Be Evil company the right to use my content in any way it sees fit. From “Your Content in our Services”:

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

You can find more information about how Google uses and stores content in the privacy policy or additional terms for particular Services. If you submit feedback or suggestions about our Services, we may use your feedback or suggestions without obligation to you.

As someone who makes a living creating content, this scares me. Google effectively can steal and modify my content without compensation. No, thanks.

I also should give a belated shout-out to Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters, who hosted last week’s Health Wonk Review. My HIMSS12 wrap made the review of healthcare news from the blogosphere.

 

March 6, 2012 I Written By

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

CDS commentary on EMR and HIPAA blog

I’ve just written my first post for the well-established EMR and HIPAA blog, one of the flagship sites for the Healthcare Scene network. (This site belongs to Healthcare Scene as well.) My post is a commentary about public perceptions of clinical decision support and a critique of failures by health IT developers, the healthcare industry and the media to design easy-to-use technology and communicate the purpose of CDS to the public. I’ll be writing weekly for that site, usually on Thursdays.

I quote Dr. Larry Weed in that post. If you want more on this pioneer in health informatics and healthcare quality, check out some of my previous posts and stories about him:

April 21, 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.

Healthcare Scene is on LinkedIn

As you may know, this site is part of John Lynn’s new Healthcare Scene blog network. In the spirit of building a community, John has started a Healthcare Scene LinkedIn group to promote the network and his flagship EMR and HIPAA blog. Join up and start networking with us.

Last week on that EMR and HIPAA blog, John ran a poll asking readers about their experiences with personal health records. (I’ve long been a critic of the “untethered” PHR that’s not connected to a specific healthcare organization or EMR. An empty PHR doesn’t help patients, while physicians aren’t likely to use one not directly tied to an EMR because it doesn’t fit their workflow and they often can’t trust the data inside.)

Not surprisingly, 60 percent of the 53 respondents had never started a PHR. Another 17 percent had created one but haven’t added much data to it. Just 13 percent say they have PHRs that are mostly updated.

It’s an unscientific survey, but I’m sure usage among readers of a health IT blog are far more likely than the general public to have or use a PHR. Despite what some vendors or consumer-facing publications might have you believe, PHRs are a tiny, almost insignificant segment of health IT right now.

March 9, 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.