Beyond Medical Informatics

There are many news about National Healthcare IT Plans for different countries.

• Australian state forms e-Health agency
• Health minister highlights Taiwan’s e-health services
• Sri Lankan govt to computerise patient information
• First phase of Singapore National EHR goes live
• NZ creates national health IT plan

But the Philippines also has its initiatives. I just hope it’s on a more national scale.

• The Philippines to deliver rural e-health services
• Philippine city automates health centres

Dr. John Halamka, in his blog, describes some of the ways healthcare is different from other industries—and these things help explain why Healthcare IT is more challenging.

It’s a two part post: Healthcare is Different and Healthcare is Different Part II.

Here are some of the ones I found interesting:

• Workforce: Many doctors are not hospital employees. It’s not easy to get compliance.
• Funding: Healthcare has complex funding and payment structures. This makes it challenging to fund IT innovations.
• Product Standardization: Clinical quality is hard to standardize. Many results are based on patient response and not all patients respond the same.
• Domain expertise: It takes years to be an expert in a particular field.

He ends his first post with an optimistic outlook of the challenges facing Healthcare IT. He ends his second post with this:

My personal goal is to build software and workflow processes that make the complex seem easy, reducing the burden on providers so that they can focus on what’s really important, the patient.   That’s why the work for a Healthcare CIO will never be done.

I have to agree completely.

In his Life as a Healthcare CIO blog, Dr. John Halamka shares his HIT lessons and experiences from his recent trip to Scotland. I found it interesting that the same challenges (and lessons) can be found here in the Philippines.

I recommend you read the whole article but let me highlight what I found most interesting for Philippine settings.

• There is a national healthcare identifier in Scotland. It would be great to have this one here in PH.
• EMRs and Data Exchange are document-centric. This is easier to implement than data element exchange where mapping becomes a big concern.

We need to learn from other countries when it comes to National HIT implementations. At this point where HIT best practices are yet to be set, the successes of different groups, hospitals and countries become important resources for our own projects.

Singapore moves forward with their National EHR Project.

Singapore Awards US$144M EHR Contract

A consortium made up by Accenture, Oracle, and Orion Health has won Singapore’s National Electronic Health Record project, a credible source has told FutureGov.

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The National EHR project aims to connect all the EMRs in Singapore and achieve the “one patient, one record” vision.

Healthcare IT professionals all over the Asia-Pacific region should watch the progress of this project closely. I know I will. I can only hope we can start something similar in the Philippines.

Here are 2 interesting Nursing-related links:

• MEDLINE/PubMed for Evidence-based Nursing
• SPOTLIGHT: Nursing inefficiencies

Excerpt from the 2nd link:

A new survey… finds that hospital-based nurses across the country can devote as much as 25 percent of their time filling out forms, documenting patient encounters in multiple locations and hunting down supplies and medical devices.

Here in the Philippines, we’d be lucky if our nurses ONLY spend 25% of their time outside of patient care. Some nurses might spend more than 50% of their time doing non-patient care activities.

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I’d like to hear from  you. What do you think about the inefficiencies in Philippine nursing? Do you think HIT can provide improvement? Do you have success stories?

The big hospitals are now slowly building healthcare networks. They are going all around the country forging partnerships and collaborations. Here are relevant links:

• St. Luke’s inks MOA with Silliman Medical Center | The Philippine Star
• Medical City buys 2 more hospitals – INQUIRER.net

Of course, we already have the growing MPIC Hospital Group.

The healthcare networks include provincial hospitals from Dumaguete, Iloilo and Davao.

How will these networks impact the quality of care throughout the nation? Will it provide long-term benefits? And for whom?  What are the cost implications for the provincial hospitals?

Here’s a list of news, links and articles about Medical Informatics, Healthcare and IT that I found interesting these past few weeks.

All items from Healthcare IT News:

• Standards group offers 10 guidelines to make HIT adoption easier

• Children’s Hospital Boston launches ‘Text 4 Kids’ campaign

• Acute appendicitis – There’s an app for that
  

And 2 conflicting reports:

• White House pushes IT as ‘pillar’ of cost-containing health reform

• Health IT savings estimates are ‘wishful thinking,’ say Harvard researchers

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Is there an interesting Healthcare IT-related link you’d like to share? Please post them below. Thanks!

I was on vacation last week so this week’s HIT List is 2 weeks worth. Here are some interesting Medical Informatics, Healthcare and IT links I found in the past 2 weeks (May 24 – June 6, 2009):

Report: Health IT could help reform U.S. primary care system
Reports like these help fuel the growing awareness of Healthcare IT not only in the US but also in other countries. In the above article, electronic medical records were mentioned as a way to help in coordination of care. Here’s the direct link to the report: Remaking Primary Care: From Crisis to Opportunity (PDF). I’ll read the complete report and give feedback soon.

Google adds automatic translation to Gmail
"Google added automatic translation technology to Gmail, allowing users of its email service to translate messages in another language with a single mouse click." Cool! Automatic translation technology like these will surely be advantageous in a country like ours with multiple dialects. Imagine if our electronic medical records can translate medical histories and patient instructions to different local dialects, we’d probably improve our patient care processes.

5th Annual Games for Health Conference
The conference aims "to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for health care applications. To date the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy." Pretty exciting! I wonder if these would spread to our local gaming development industry. Hmmm… I might need to brush up on my PS2 skills.

Hospitals Turn to Web 2.0 Technologies as Marketing Tools
It’s about time! When I spoke at a Health IT conference, one speaker from Hong Kong describe their experience implementing an internal Wiki and adopting the collaborative content nature of Web 2.0. It would be good to start something like that locally. This iHealthBeat article links to a New York Times article about a brain surgery webcast.

Newly Released CCHIT Guide Outlines Criteria for EHR Certification
The CCHIT Guides give excellent starting points as to what functions and features an Electronic Health Record should have. Here’s the very recent Concise Guide to CCHIT Criteria (PDF).

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Do you have an interesting Healthcare IT link, news or resource you’d like to share? Please post below. Thanks!