Archive for the 'EMR' Category

Google unveils plans for online personal health

October 17, 2007 (Computerworld) — Less than two weeks after Microsoft Corp. announced plans to support online personal health information records, Google unveiled plans to follow suit.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said Wednesday here at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google plans to support the “storage and movement” of people’s health records.

Although she provided only scant details on the effort, she noted that Google became interested in the personal health record market as it watched Hurricane Katrina take aim at the Gulf Coast and all the paper-based records stored in various medical offices and hospitals in the region.

“In that moment it was too late for us to mobilize,” Mayer said. “It doesn’t make sense to generate this volume of information on paper. It should be something that is digital. People should have control over their own records.”

Wow, Google does vaporware? This is a lame attempt, and invoking Katrina a) is a cheap rhetorical gambit and b) points out that even if it were true they’ve had over 2 years to come up with their answer, and it’s not even at a Beta stage?

Weak response from Google. Embarrassing, really.

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To swipe a lead-in from the WSJ Healthcare Blog, “Microsoft finally beat Google at something”.

From the straight reporting:

A new Microsoft Web site announced Thursday, called HealthVault, includes a secure way to upload data such as blood-pressure readings so consumers can keep record of their health information. The “personal health center,” as Microsoft calls it, is designed to allow consumers to share such information with physicians and other medical professionals. The site also offers Internet search and a Web page for viewing and organizing articles and other information on health.

HealthVault is the latest step in a two-year effort by Microsoft to build software and services in the health field, targeting both consumers and health-care organizations. The company has quietly built a group of programmers and professionals with related expertise, and purchased several companies to help speed its move into healthcare.

I think this could be a very important development toward a more-universal EHR.  The current focus on internet-connectible BP monitors is weird, and what I’d like to see it used for are things like your latest EKG, etc.  I would guess major clinics and hospitals will partner with MS as a ‘value-added’ feature to entice patients to use their health system (”we’ll make your results available to all your doctors 24/7″ sound more reassuring and less like a threat to privacy).

We’ll see how this plays out, and I think it’s got a lot of promise (and some talented deep-pockets behind it), so here’s to MS for getting out in front on internet storage of health care information.

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Medpundit

Birth Pangs: There aren’t too many hosannas being sung to electronic medical records at Kaiser these days:

Kaiser Permanente’s $4-billion effort to computerize the medical records of its 8.6 million members has encountered repeated technical problems, leading to potentially dangerous incidents such as patients listed in the wrong beds, according to Kaiser documents and current and former employees.

At times, doctors and medical staff at the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization haven’t had access to crucial patient information, and system outages have led to delays in emergency room care, the documents show.

There’re a lot of ‘ifs’ in the upside to the EMR.

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Fast on the heels of my endorsment of PEPID over Epocrates comes this stunner, from Epocrates (in my email):

We think it’s important to let you know that many Palm® OS and Windows Mobile® (Pocket PC) OS software applications, including all Epocrates products, cannot at this time be installed or synced via computers with the new Windows Vista operating system. 

We strongly recommend that if at all possible, you postpone installing Vista or upgrading to a new PC with Vista installed. 

Since resolution of this problem depends upon software changes by both Palm and Microsoft, we regret that we cannot give you a firm date for a fix.

If you are already using Windows Vista, please review our FAQ for the latest recommendations from our customer support and engineering teams. Read FAQ »

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

The Epocrates Team

Huh?  Did they not know the biggest maker and most aggressive distributor of operating systems was coming out with Vista?

I’m not using Vista (I’ll wait for SP1 before I even look at it), but this seems particularly clueless for a medical software company.

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…what to do with that information you want to keep, but keep in a truly confidential manner.  The Blog That Ate Manhattan discusses it in Notes to Myself.

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