Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Everyware Health Care: Real Life Examples

I'm devoting some of the posts I write for this blog on the topic of "Everyware Health Care", an over-arching concept that emphasizes how existing and emerging technologies can help to improve delivery of health care and also enhance health-care user experience.

About 182,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic use MyChart, an in-house electronic medical record. More recently, the hospital is testing out Google Health Records with 1,500 patents and Microsoft's Health Vault with 500 patients. According to an article in the Plain Dealer, the hospital supports the use of electronic medical records because it can reduce costly mistakes and redundancies.

Checking blood pressure






The video above shows how blood pressure can be charted and tracked daily, providing the physician with information that can better monitor and adjust medications. With Microsoft's Health Vault system, patients can upload medical information via a glucometer, pedometer, weight scale, or blood pressure monitor, depending on the nature of their health concerns. The system provides a means for uploading information to the system wirelessly, which is important for people who travel a lot for their jobs.

My Family Health Portrait is an on-line tool provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that allows people to enter their family health history, create drawings of family health history to share with health care providers or other family members, and to integrate the health history of other family members into your own. The source code for developers is available for free.

Some of the basic work related to integrated electronic medical information systems is hospital-focused Microsoft's Amalga software, which has been rolled out in several hospitals around the world. The following video shows how the system works at Bumrungrad International Hospital, and how it improves the hospital user experience, not only for the patient, but for the medical staff as well:



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Cleveland Clinic makes electronic medical records personal, more accessible
Sarah Jane Tribble, Plain Dealer 3/31/09

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from Healthcare Informatics

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Microsoft plans big move into European healthcare market
Tola Sargeant, Ovum
"Amalga does not complete with electronic health or patient records, it compliments them. As well as providing a single view of the patient, it enables analysis of all data from across the organization, which in turn can be used to drive change and performance improvement."


Microsoft releases hospital IT system as Amalga
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Healthcare 2/13/08

Will Behavioral Health Be Left Behind?

David Raths, Healthcare Informatics 3/30/09

"While the stimulus bill was being written, Scalia said, his company worked with the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare to try to have the Medicaid incentive language changed. They were not successful, he added, because there was a concern that it would increase the cost of the incentive section above the $20 billion mark.
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1 comment:

Thomas said...

From 1985 to 2006, I would often go to Longs Drugs to check my blood pressure. During my long bike rides, I would still do this. In 2006, I purchased a home BP monitor.