PatientCentral Technologies Blog

January 17, 2010

Give patients their records – See it on CNN

Filed under: Health Information Technology — adavies @ 2:16 pm
adavies

The future of medicine is to have empowered patients who participate in their healthcare. There is a rising movement in the US and internationally that seeks to make easier the process of obtaining medical records. A recent article on CNN emphasizes the passion and need for patient access to enhance patient satisfaction, reduce risk and injury, and improve higher quality care (http://tiny.cc/tV7y9). It is archaic to continue the concept that hospitals own the medical records. A more modern concept is that hospital and doctors own their copy of records, but the content of the information held within the records belongs to the patient.

However, it is a small victory to merely access medical records. One has to bring life to the information by actually using the data to impact daily living. Wellness ToolBox (http://tinyurl.com/yfnn7p8 ) is a powerful and sophisticated way to utilize medical information to promote wellness and manage illness. MyHealthArchive Ultimate (http://tiny.cc/OsktM) is a highly sophisticated personal health information management system that includes both Wellness ToolBox and personal healthcare information archiving systems.

The time has come to move into the 21st century in attitudes about how we access out medical information as well as how we take an empowered, active role in sustaining our wellness.

January 10, 2010

Wellness ToolBox Helps You Keep an Eye on Your Health

Filed under: Health Information Technology — adavies @ 12:16 pm
adavies

PatientCentral Technologies, LLC releases Wellness ToolBox Jan 10, 2010 to make any wellness program more effective. (http://tinyurl.com/yfnn7p8). “The best way to promote good behavior is to shine a light on it. MyGraphs is your personal floodlight. Wellness Tools gets you to pay attention, and once you are paying attention, you are more likely to do the things necessary to sustain your wellness. Both healthy and sick people need to use these tools.”- Al Davies, MD.   

Don’t delude yourself. Know how healthy you really are. How do you know when you are slipping off your Wellness Program? Monitor your health effects with Wellness ToolBox. Tools include:

     MyCalendar is a private calendar for health and personal matters. You can set email alerts for upcoming events.
     MyGraphs was developed to show how your wellness program works, and get early signs when it does not.
     MyLogs helps show several views of how healthy you are. Gives you insight into what to change and how.

It is wise to take an empowered patient approach to your health. Do something about your health and move one step further. Promote both your sense of wellness and actually show that you are actually on a higher level of wellness. Don’t wait for next New Years to make a resolution. Do something now.

November 9, 2009

A picture is worth a thousand words

Filed under: Health Information Technology, Patient safety — matt @ 5:10 pm

We’ve all heard the old adage “a picture is worth a 1000 words.”

I think we all have pictures in our mind of things just working.  I’d like to focus on the picture in my mind’s eye of healthcare.

I recently was diagnosed with H1N1.  That variant of the flu was the worst I’ve ever had.  I have never felt so sick, been incapacitated for so long, and have never visited the ER for my own treatment.  It is quite different being the patient with the IV in one’s arm than being the support system for the patient.

The triage nurse asked the standard set of questions. Thinks like “what medications are you taking daily” and “are you allergic to anything?” I know many of us probably know these questions by heart.  Sometimes I want to just say “Yes to #1, No to the rest.”

So here comes my mind’s picture.  I already know what medicines I am taking. I already know my immunizations and allergies. So, why do I need to go through a long(ish) questionnaire when this information is readily available through electronic communications? This is what we’ve been trying to solve for years at PatientCentral.

Here are some things that have already been solved requiring electronic data exchanges:

  1. Pulling my credit report and merging all 3 reporting agencies data into a single document.
  2. Determining where to route the call to my cell phone even though I’ve switched carriers several times and have retained the original number.
  3. Issuing a credit to a store when I pay by credit card or draft.  This is in the virtual world and brick and mortar.
  4. Pharmacies know when I pick up an RX what the entire bill will be before I leave. (wouldn’t that be nice if you visit the doctor and know before you leave what the bill will be?)

Seems like we should be able to have one’s health information move around the ether and be available when we need it. I visit one care provider and next month I visit another. They both use electronic systems to enter my vitals and progress notes, but why can’t they see the other’s data? Why do they rely on me reciting the data back to them? Isn’t that inherently unreliable?

I picture all care providers being able to access my information, with my consent, and having a unified view of my medical information.  Seems easy, but why aren’t we doing it? Most vehicles take unleaded right? Can’t we just use some common fuel for the medical engine?

Turns out we can’t.  Whether it be politics (hospitals and care providers are intensely political and don’t like to share when they don’t have to), technical challenges, fiscal challenges, willpower or just plain laziness there are many reasons it is not being done today.  Some say that it can’t be done. It is too daunting. It is too large.

Well, when faced with such monumental challenges it pays to break things into manageable chunks to process and have successes. That is what is happening now with the stimulus dollars funding health information exchanges (HIE’s).  The feds are asking the states to come up with a plan and help organize the regional activity.  I know many states operate exchanges. Soon, we will all be able to see how HIE’s will benefit us. After HIE’s are up and running we will see Regional Exchanges, and ultimately, we will see the national exchange. We are all mobile, right?  I could live in NY and work in DC, right?

So what do we do in the interim? There are plenty of stories about people running into brick walls and suffering. For instance, I heard this story http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120028213 on the radio about a woman and her husband with cancer and how treatment was delayed because of a hospital transfer. The crazy thing to me is that in an electronic environment this poor woman was told to wait 21 days to get a copy of the medical record. Isn’t that one of the point’s of electronic systems – to be able to access it immediately?

This is just plain laziness and poor policy. Information is available immediately, and as the owner of the data you should see and have access to it immediately. MyHealthArchive is a personal health information management system that can collect this information in real-time from a wide range of sources.  Imagine if this person could pull up the information from MHA and let the new care providers make assessments immediately.  How much suffering could have been avoided?

Back to my hospital visit.  I was treated and out the door in under 2 hours.  My information is all recorded before I left. I received printed copies of my discharge notes.  Everything is stored in servers. If I go to visit my regular doctor can he see the information? No.  Is this my information? Yes.

Let’s get the word out that your information is available and may be stored under your care for your treatments.

October 27, 2009

Patient Technology for Healthcare: Big Picture Issues

Filed under: Health Information Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — vpurcell @ 2:54 pm
vpurcell

Involving patients in their own health care and helping them to use technology for monitoring, management and communication can improve treatment outcomes. So says the AHRQ in their recent study, “Innovations in Using Health IT for Chronic Disease Management.” In the big picture there appear to be some problems we must contend with:  

1) Although some health care organizations may actually achieve a means to communicate and work with patients and providers internally, they are not actually achieving this externally. The ambulatory realm between patients and health care providers still holds a large void. Thus, the silos still exist and disable effective communication and coordination of care between health care providers with each other and health care providers with their patients. Thus, the silos continue to exist. Health information technology which enables bi-directional communication platforms between patients, providers and health organizations can help facilitate information sharing so that information becomes patient centered and relevant from anyplace at any given time.

2) Convincing patients to get beyond privacy and security concerns involves stringent encryption and authentication standards as well as patient education about the utility of these standards. Once that is achieved, patients can begin to appreciate how they can contribute to patient-centered care through a personal health record which is shared with and between health care providers. If the personal health record is sophisticated and includes physician prescribed and patient self-managed wellness, prevention and disease management features, this technology can enable more seamless flow of information from patients to health care providers and vice versa. It is important that health care providers begin to utilize these technology tools to improve coordination of care and that patients begin to consider their own personal responsibility to use these technology tools to ensure that their own care is optimized.

3) Patients will be more likely to use technology which incorporates them in their own health care if there is a third party payor.

October 26, 2009

Patient Centered Care

Filed under: Health Information Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — adavies @ 9:02 am
adavies

October 24, 2009

What about patient-centered care? Does it really exist? Does technology help? Or is it just semantics?

Filed under: Health Information Technology — Tags: , , — vpurcell @ 8:48 am
vpurcell

I’ve come to recognize through my 28-year clinical career, some at the bedside as a clinician, some in quality and risk management, and the over the past few years in technology, that very few health care organizations can truly say that they place the patient in the center of their own health care. Much of what we do as clinicians is use data to make decisions about care and treatment and much of what we do in quality and risk management is design processes to prevent errors. But is the patient truly the reason, the actual center of our focus?

I would challenge you to evaluate how your information systems are used in your organization-whether they are used solely for the purpose of documentation, rather than for the purpose of ensuring collaboration not only between health care providers but with the patients themselves. Patients should be included in the information-management process not only from the perspective of obtaining accurate demographic and medical history, but for ensuring that the patient actually is provided the appropriate tools for education, clinical updates, monitoring, and optimization of treatment outcomes. There are very few health information technology products that have taken on this perspective. Please share in this discussion.

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