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!

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.

Post a Comment(0)
May 10, 2013 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: blogging  consumerism  EMR/EHR  Finance  health IT  health reform  Health Wonk Review  Healthcare IT  patient safety  quality  reimbursement  Telehealth
Tags:              

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.

Post a Comment(11)
May 8, 2013 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  Healthcare IT  Innovation  international  mobile  remote monitoring  Telehealth  video
Tags:                

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.

 

Post a Comment(2)
April 28, 2013 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: data mining  EMR/EHR  Healthcare IT  meaningful use  regulations  Telehealth
Tags:            

Chart: Current state telemedicine legislation

Here’s a handy chart from the American Telemedicine Association showing the current status of telemedicine legislation in all 50 states plus D.C. Specifically, it shows which states have already mandated private and Medicaid insurance coverage for telemedicine services, as well as which states are considering such a law. (Medicare policy of course is set at the federal level.) This information is current as of this month.

 

State telemedicine legislation

Post a Comment(1)
February 21, 2013 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: Legislation  reimbursement  Telehealth
Tags:        

Telemedicine from the 1920s?

I saw an interesting article today on Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog, suggesting that an early radio and publishing professional may have predicted telemedicine as early as 1925.

According to the article, that person, Hugo Gernsback, predicted that within 50 years, by 1975, there would be a contraption he called the “teledactyl.” With this device, physicians would be able to see patients on a television screen (TV did exist in 1925, though it hadn’t reached the masses) and also “touch” patients with radio-controlled arms.

Gernsback wrote:

The busy doctor, fifty years hence, will not be able to visit his patients as he does now. It takes too much time, and he can only, at best, see a limited number today. Whereas the services of a really big doctor are so important that he should never have to leave his office; on the other hand, his patients cannot always come to him. This is where the teledactyl and diagnosis by radio comes in.

Here’s how Gernsback visualized it, on the cover of the February 1925 issue of Science and Invention magazine, which he published.

Incidentally, according to the Smithsonian article, Gernsback just a year later launched a new magazine called Amazing Stories, supposedly the first publication fully dedicated to science fiction. Clearly, though, there was more than a little truth in the 1925 forecast.

Post a Comment(4)
March 27, 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.

Filed Under: media  Telehealth
Tags:

Bet on videoconferencing growth before PHR ubiquity

Last week, I reported in InformationWeek on a Manhattan Research study showing that 7 percent of U.S. physicians were chatting with patients via videoconference. What the research didn’t say is how many consultations actually take place by videoconferencing. My guess is that it’s minuscule, but virtual visits will soon become commonplace.

According to Australian online healthcare community eHealthSpace, technology vendor Siemens is forecasting that 20 percent of all medical consultations in Australia will take place online by 2020. Much of that growth will come from rural and remote areas of a vast country that’s full of remote, sparsely populated areas.

I find that much more believable than another Siemens prediction that 90 percent of Aussies will have a “personally controlled electronic healthcare record” (whatever that means) by 2020. I’m guessing that videoconferencing with doctors will boom long before there’s widespread adoption of any health record controlled by patients.

 

Post a Comment(1)
June 3, 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: EMR/EHR  PHR  Telehealth
Tags:        

Skype for ‘redneck telehealth’?

Kudos to Barbara Duck of The Medical Quack blog for coining a new term: “redneck telehealth.”

A friend of hers had an outbreak of gout while getting ready to board an overseas flight. “He had called his doctor who was not set up with any of the new telehealth programs and software that is just now becoming available so I said ‘get your doctor on Skype and put your foot up there for him to see,’” Duck explained in a post over the weekend. “Obviously this is not a perfect situation for either side for a real diagnosis, but as the old saying goes a picture is worth a 1000 words and that’s what this would do.”

Actually, I’ve heard that because a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is worth 1 million words. Since laptops tend to have built-in webcams these days and a lot of 3G smartphones can transmit live, mobile video (hey, even some 2.5G phones can do so over a Wi-Fi connection, like you might find in say, an airport), why not fire up Skype or FaceTime or similar videoconferencing program and show your foot to your doctor? If you don’t like the term “redneck,” just call it a video call or an ad-hoc network.

Or are we expecting far too much by assuming that the doctor would one, be available on short notice, and two, voluntarily share his/her mobile number or Skype screen name with a patient?

Post a Comment(2)
May 16, 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: mobile  Telehealth  video
Tags:    

Commentary on media coverage of telemedicine

Let’s face it, the mainstream media mostly suck when it comes to covering health IT. (They suck even more for not realizing it and not giving me the time of day when I pitch a freelance story to them.)

I tried unsuccessfully to place an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today about misunderstanding of what telemedicine and telehealth really mean. But one publication near and dear to the hearts of editors everywhere, Columbia Journalism Review, published my commentary today. Click here to read it. And pass it on to any editors you may know.

While you’re at it, let other journalists know about a piece I had published last year offering tips for journalists covering EHRs and related health IT topics. It’s over on the site of the Reporting on Health project at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Post a Comment(3)
January 6, 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: media
Tags:

Even more ‘Fierce’

As I mentioned earlier this month, I’m writing the new FierceMobileHealthcare, which premiered last week.

I’m particularly proud of this week’s Editor’s Corner, in which I expound on the Hospitals & Health Networks story I wrote about the videoconferencing and telemedicine technology in ambulances in Tucson, Ariz., and Baton Rouge, La. (I blogged about the same thing on Monday, but the Fierce piece adds many details.)

I still think the story belongs in the national, mainstream press. I guess I risk having a staff reporter steal the story, but I’m still the only reporter outside Arizona or Louisiana who’s seen the technology in action. I also have some insights about which other cities are considering systems of their own. Another Arizona municipality has approved a bond issue to build a similar network.

While I continue to shop that story, I’ve also been busy on a prototype issue for yet another FierceMarkets publication, called FierceEMR. If you go to that site now, you can register for a free subscription. I’m awaiting word on the launch date, but it seems like the e-newsletter will debut June 4 and be published on Thursdays.

In a comment on this very blog last week, FierceMarkets COO and Publisher Maurice Bakley explained the rationale behind launching new titles in a crowded marketplace.

Personally, I can think of about 19.2 billion reasons why new health IT publications are popping up and established ones are thriving even as the wider publishing industry tanks.

I’m leaving Friday morning for a wedding in Toronto and will be there through Monday, which is Victoria Day in Canada. Apparently, they do have the Internets (“das Internetz” in German) north of the border, so I’ll try to post while I’m up there, but I’m not going to make any promises.

Post a Comment(1)
May 13, 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: media  mobile
Tags:  

Live video from ambulance to ED

Attention editors of technology and general-interest publications: Hospitals & Health Networks this month has a short InBox item I wrote about live video links from ambulances to emergency departments and trauma centers. Emergency medical services in Tucson, Ariz., and, more recently, Baton Rouge, La., make use of municipal Wi-Fi networks to triage and diagnose trauma cases before patients even arrive.

This is a story I’ve known about for more than a year and a half and only recently, when Baton Rouge turned the first piece of what soon will be a parish-wide system, did any editor, HHN Senior Editor Matthew Weinstock, show interest in this story. All he had the room or budget for was this 450-word InBox item, though.

If you believe the telemedicine experts I interviewed, this kind of technology may become the norm in urban and suburban areas within a few years, and that, IMHO, makes it worth a much longer feature story in a publication that reaches beyond healthcare. There was some MSM coverage of the Baton Rouge launch, but nothing that examined the big picture.

I toured an ambulance and got a live demonstration of the technology when I was in Tucson in February, and have leads on other municipalities that are considering such a system, plus some cities that are using different technologies to achieve the same results. I’ve got photos, too.

Editors, I await your call.

Post a Comment(1)
May 11, 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: media  mobile
Tags:      


    • Next