Dear mobile health app developers,
We—patients and caregivers—need your help to reduce the demands of self care. Mobile health (mHealth) apps have enormous potential to lessen our burdens. But our needs are often only loosely related to what clinicians and/or the evidence expect us to do. Most mobile app developers have ignored this fact by designing tools that primarily reflect the imperatives of ...
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IBM’s Dr. Watson of Jeopardy! fame has finally completed its residency and fellowships and, presumably to its creators’ utter delight, is now a practicing oncologist.
The prodigy “cognitive system” completed its training in less than a year at the illustrious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and although only proficient in lung cancer right now, Dr. Watson’s career as an advisor ...
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A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
–Wayne Gretzky
Recently, I attended an end-of-year review with one of our hospital partner’s executive team. We reviewed our performance for the past year, and discussed mutually strategic goals and how to improve upon our excellent service. As part of the conversation turned ...
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It happened, of all times, when I was in the car driving the kids to violin practice. My pager buzzed with a message from one of the medical floors. I waited till the car was parked, and dutifully pecked the numbers on my cell phone.
Hello doctor, we have your patient, can you please put admitting orders into EPIC?
I, of course, like most doctors, wasn't sitting by my phone waiting at a computer terminal. ...
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The big news at HIMSS13 was the unveiling of CommonWell (Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway and RelayHealth) to “get the ball rolling” on data exchange across disparate technologies. The shame is that another program with opaque governance by the largest incumbents in health IT is being passed off as progress. The missed opportunity is to answer the call for patient engagement and the frustrations of physicians with EHRs ...
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For the record: I am a geek. I love technology. I adopted EMR when all the cool kids were using paper. Instead of loitering in the “in” doctors lounge making eyes at the nurses, I was writing clinical content and making my care more efficient. I was getting “meaningful use” out of my EMR even when nobody paid me to do it.
But ...
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A few months ago I wrote a post about the 159 page digital fax that I received, containing records for a patient's recent lengthy hospitalization.
I've now discovered something even more time-consuming and annoying: a 202 page paper record mailed to me by a major medical system. (I won't name names right now; suffice to say this system uses
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Today I’m doing anesthesia for colonoscopies and upper GI scopes. Nowadays we have three board-certified anesthesiologists doing anesthesia for GI procedures every single day at my institution. I’ll probably do 8 cases today. I will sign into a computer or electronically sign something 32 times. I have to type my user name and password into 3 different systems 24 times.
I’m doing essentially ...
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Since I started my new practice, it’s been an über hectic and very draining time, but I am happy to report that the end of the week was significantly better than the beginning.
Here are some things I am learning.
1. Starting a business is really, really hard. I did my best to make my business as simple as possible, mainly because I understand my own deficiencies when it comes to business-related activities. ...
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Somewhere between the 20th century bank ATM and the 25th century Tricorder, lays the EMR that we should have today. Somewhere between the government-designed meaningful use EMR and the holographic doctor in Star Trek, there should be a long stretch of disposable trial-and-error cycles of technology, changing and morphing from good to better to magical. For this to happen, we must release the EMR from its balls and chains.
We must ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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