Why Say No to Paper Medical Records?

via practicefusion.com

Why should doctors and patients across the US should “just say no” to paper charts?

• Illegible handwriting on medical documents kills 7,000 people a year.3.2 billion prescriptions are sent annually – the majority still written on paper.
• Managing paper charts, from transcriptions to labor needed to pull and re-file charts, costs medical practices $116,375 a year on average.
• Paper charts are vulnerable to being lost, stolen or destroyed in a disaster. EMRs make patient records securely accessible anywhere, anytime when needed.
• Physicians using Practice Fusion’s EMR save valuable time by charting digitally. Dr. Lynn McCallum, a family physician in Redding, CA, says charting in real-time saves her two to three hours a day.

 

Emerging Technologies and The Future of Healthcare: Video

via youtube.com

Dr. Kent Bottles spoke at CPM’s 2011 Client Symposium on emerging technologies and the future of healthcare. Hear some of his thoughts on mobile health, social media strategy, computer simulation and other emerging technologies that have the potential to change the face of healthcare.

 

The Future Of Medicine

Meaningful use of ever increasing medical data, mobile monitoring devices, personalized medicine, Telemedicine, HCSM and lots more! The future of medicine is going to be mind blowing.

via ted.com

Daniel Kraft offers a fast-paced look at the next few years of innovations in medicine, powered by new tools, tests and apps that bring diagnostic information right to the patient’s bedside.

 

U.S. and Global Survey of Health Care Consumers 2011: Key Findings

via deloitte.com

In the United States, three in four (75 percent) consumers say the recent economic slowdown has impacted their health care spending.

In an effort to save money, 36 percent of prescription medication users say they asked their doctor to prescribe a generic drug instead of a brand name drug.

Between 4 in 10 and 5 in 10 respondents experienced an increase in household spending on health care in the past year with the exception of the United Kingdom (22 percent), Canada (29 percent) and China (37 percent).

Consistently throughout the 12 countries surveyed, many consumers see their health care systems as wasteful, with redundant paperwork, individuals not taking responsibility for their own health, and defensive medicine being the top causes of wasteful spending.

Less than one in five consumers surveyed say they maintain a personal health record (PHR) electronically, with the exception of consumers in China where one in three have such a record.

Consumers are open to alternative approaches to traditional health care, such as visiting retail clinics or traveling outside their local community for care.

 

Medical Simulations in Emergency Medicine : Study

Using virtual reality or simulations in medical training can be a wonderful tool. Especially in medical situations which are difficult to replicate with possibilities of making errors during training. A recent prospective observational study on use of virtual simulation technology in emergency medicine is revealing of the open acceptance of such tools by young medical professionals.

Twenty seven EM residents of the Ohio State University completed mock oral examinations in a traditional format, conducted face to face with a faculty examiner. All residents were invited to participate in a similar case scenario conducted via Second Life for this study. The examinee managed the case while acting as the physician avatar and communicated via headset and microphone from a remote computer with a faculty examiner who acted as the patient avatar. Participants were surveyed regarding their experience with the traditional and virtual formats using a Likert scale.

None of the examinees had used SL previously. SL proved easy for examinees to log into (92.6%) and navigate (96.3%). All felt comfortable communicating with the examiner via remote computer. Most examinees thought the SL encounter was realistic (92.6%), and many found it more realistic than the traditional format (70.3%). All examinees felt that the virtual examination was fair, objective, and conducted efficiently. A majority preferred to take oral examinations via SL over the traditional format and expressed interest in using SL for other educational experiences (66.6 and 92.6%, respectively).

View Full Article with Supporting Information (HTML) ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE 2011; 18:559–562 © 2011 by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine

Do check out eMedsimulations , an innovative medical eLearning company from Rhode Island with development center in Mumbai, India.

Also See:

Learning in a Virtual World: Experience With Using Second Life for Medical Education

The results of this pilot suggest that virtual worlds offer the potential of a new medical education pedagogy to enhance learning outcomes beyond that provided by more traditional online or face-to-face postgraduate professional development activities.

 

When HIPAA applies to mobile applications

 

The HIPAA Rules only apply to HIPAA “covered entities” and their “business associates.” They do not apply to health care consumers or to other types of entities. Covered entities include health plans (including employer-sponsored group health plans), entities known as health care clearinghouses (which convert health care claims and other administrative transactions into or from a standard format), and health care providers — but only if the health providers electronically conduct certain transactions, such as submitting claims to health plans electronically. A business associate is an entity that handles “protected health information” on a covered entity’s behalf, such as a health information exchange organization sharing health information on behalf of a health care provider, or a pharmacy benefit manager operating a health plan’s prescription benefit.

Additionally, the HIPAA rules only apply to “protected health information,” information that identifies an individual and that relates to an individual’s physical or mental health, health care services to the individual, or payment for such health care services.

via mobihealthnews.com

 

 

Next Step in EMRs: Automated de-identification of free-text medical records

Text-based patient medical records are a vital resource in medical research. In order to preserve patient confidentiality, however, the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that protected health information (PHI) be removed from medical records before they can be disseminated. Manual de-identification of large medical record databases is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming and prone to error, necessitating automatic methods for large-scale, automated de-identification.

 

via biomedcentral.com

We have developed a pattern-matching de-identification system based on dictionary look-ups, regular expressions, and heuristics. Evaluation based on two different sets of nursing notes collected from a U.S. hospital suggests that, in terms of recall, the software out-performs a single human de-identifier (0.81) and performs at least as well as a consensus of two human de-identifiers (0.94). The system is currently tuned to de-identify PHI in nursing notes and discharge summaries but is sufficiently generalized and can be customized to handle text files of any format. Although the accuracy of the algorithm is high, it is probably insufficient to be used to publicly disseminate medical data. The open-source de-identification software and the gold standard re-identified corpus of medical records have therefore been made available to researchers via the PhysioNet website to encourage improvements in the algorithm.

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making Volume 8

Viewing options:  Abstract  Full text  PDF (343KB)  Additional files

 

Global Survey of mHealth Initiatives: W.H.O Report

The World Health Organizations (WHO) recently released the findings of a comprehensive survey on the state of mHealth usage in 112 member states. For the purposes of the survey, the Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) defined mHealth or mobile health as medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless devices.

The survey results highlight that the dominant form of mHealth today is characterized by small-scale pilot projects that address single issues in information sharing and access. A vast majority (83%) reported at least one mHealth initiative in their country. Of this 83%, most Member States reported implementing four or more types of mHealth initiatives.

The four most frequently reported mHealth initiatives were: health call centres (59%), emergency toll-free telephone services (55%), managing emergencies and disasters (54%), and mobile telemedicine (49%). The least frequently reported mHealth initiatives were health surveys (26%), surveillance (26%), awareness raising (23%), and decision support systems (19%).

The study identified 6 major types of mHealth initiatives:

1) Communication between individuals and health services

• Health call centres/Health care telephone help line

The African, Americas and Eastern Mediterranean Regions reported health call centres/ health care telephone help lines that address specific health issues such as HIV/AIDS, H1N1, reproductive health/family planning, pandemics, and drug abuse.

• Emergency toll-free telephone services

The South-East Asia Region reported the highest percentage of emergency toll-free telephone services (88%).

2) Communication between health services and individuals

• Treatment compliance

Approximately one third of responding Member States across all WHO regions reported conducting treatment compliance initiatives.

• Appointment reminders

Countries in the high-income group reported the largest proportion of appointment reminder initiatives (71%). The majority of these initiatives were established (42%) using various functionalities including voice, SMS, and the Internet.

• Community mobilization

SMS was the primary method of communication used in the initiatives. The Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and South-East Asia Regions reported the highest adoption for community mobilization and health promotion.

• Awareness raising over health issues

Awareness raising initiatives showed relatively low levels of uptake across WHO regions, though the Eastern Mediterranean (28%), European (28%) and Americas (25%) Regions reported using this initiative the most. Main health topics for these initiatives were women’s health, drug and alcohol abuse, smoking cessation, and HIV/AIDS.

3) Consultation between health care professionals

• Mobile telemedicine

The Americas (75%), European (64%) and South-East Asia (62%) Regions reported high rates of adoption of mobile telemedicine initiatives, though a large proportion of these initiatives were informal or in the pilot phase.

4) Intersectoral communication in emergencies

• Emergencies

The use of mobile devices for emergency communications was one of the most frequently reported initiatives across all WHO regions. The African, South-East Asia, and Americas Regions, have the highest levels of adoption at 48%, 75%, and 67% respectively.

5) Health monitoring and surveillance

• Surveillance

mHealth surveillance activity is more prevalent in countries in the low-income (40%) and lower-middle income groups (27%) than those in the higher-income groups.

• Patient monitoring

Patient monitoring initiatives were most prevalent in the European Region (47%), followed by the Region of the Americas (33%). Countries in the high-income group reported the highest levels of activity in this area (58%).

6) Access to information for health care professionals at point of care

• Information and decision support systems

The South-East Asia (62%) and Americas (58%) Regions had the highest proportion of Member States with information initiatives. There is low global uptake of mobile decision support systems within WHO regions; no region reported adoption of over 25%.

• Patient records

The level of adoption of mobile patient records was moderate across all WHO regions and World Bank income groups.

Competing health system priorities was consistently rated as the greatest barrier to mHealth adoption by responding countries

One Indian mHealth initiative merits special mention. mDhil is a health promotion organization launched in India with a for-profit business model. For 1 rupee a day, consumers receive to their mobile phone three health messages created by registered nurses and physicians on topics such as weight management, sexual health, and H1N1. At the end of 2009, mDhil had 150 000 paid subscribers, and closed a ‘series A financing round’ with a venture capital firm. mDhil sent out 1 million public health SMS messages by the end of 2010

You can Download the report here:

http://www.who.int/entity/goe/publications/goe_mhealth_web.pdf

 

Web 2.0 in health

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=web-20-in-health-a-practical-overview-1193786769524678-2&stripped_title=web-20-in-health-a-practical-overview

via digital-medicine.blogspot.com

 

Ten Noteworthy Pharmaceutical Marketing Guidelines For Indian Pharma Industry

Ten Important and Comment-able Points in the Code:

1. Brand names of products of other companies must not be used in comparison unless the prior consent of the companies concerned has been obtained.
2. All promotional material issued by a product authorization holder or with his authority, must be consistent with the requirements of this Code.
3. Where a pharmaceutical company pays for or otherwise secures or arranges the publication of promotional material in journals, such promotional material must not resemble editorial matter.
4. The names or photographs of healthcare professionals must not be used in promotional material.
5. Extremes of format, size or cost of promotional material must be avoided.
6. Audio-visual material must be accompanied by all appropriate printed material so that all relevant requirements of the Code are complied with.
7. Samples should be provided directly to prescribing authority, shall be limited to prescribed dosages for three patients and in response to a signed and dated request from the recipient. Each sample pack shall not be larger than the smallest pack presented in the market.
8. The (medical/educational) events (for doctors) have to be organized in India only and all expenses…, must be incurred only for the events held in India.
9. Companies must not organise meetings to coincide with sporting, entertainment or other leisure events or activities.
10. Outline of a detailed Complaint Lodging and Redressal mechanism (Committee for Code of Pharma Marketing) to ensure following of the marketing code.

via edrneelesh.blogspot.com