The following infographic outlines the growth of mobile tech, which is revolutionizing healthcare with mobile devices and also the growth of Medicaid enrollees with a few interesting stats, including:
Smartphones will account for almost 70 percent of mobile traffic data in next five years.
Fifty-two percent would use a mobile phone to monitor their health.
About 35 percent of folks are concerned about security of the electronic health records.
However, surveys show that 66 percent of adults would consider switching to a physician who offers access to medical records through a digital connection.
According to CNSI, publisher of the graphic, “as the population ages and smartphones become more ubiquitous, we can expect that the number of people who wish to access and work with their healthcare providers through mobile tech will also rise rapidly.”
CNSI developed the myHealthButton app, which extends the CMS Blue Button initiative for use on iPhones, iPads and Androids. With this technology and more like it, how will this space continue to adapt?
Guest post by Tyler Hayes is co-founder and CEO of Prime, the personal social network for your health.
Despite numbers the VA and ONC have shared, Blue Button is effectively not being used. Consumers haven’t heard of it. Developers aren’t implementing it. It’s not blossoming into what it can and should be.
This is happening for several reasons. I’d like to share some brief thoughts on our industry’s relationship with Blue Button, why it lacks adoption, and its currently troubled future.
First, there’s its identity crisis.
Blue Button is not the same as Blue Button+. Blue Button+ is Blue Button on steroids. That’s a good thing. But Blue Button+ is really two things, which makes it more confusing. That’s a bad thing. Blue Button+ is really Blue Button+ Push and Blue Button+ Pull. I hear the former may be renamed to Blue Button+ Direct and the latter to Blue Button+ REST API. Thoughts on the names aside, this is again more room for confusion.
This confusion, just from these few terms, is turning developers off from adopting Blue Button. When developers are confused, you can guarantee consumers are confused. We’ve seen both first hand in non-trivial amounts. That’s very bad.
From this point forward, I’m going to refer to all of these as just one whole: Blue Button. To do otherwise is to descend into madness. This is how Blue Button should exist right now anyway.
Second: Fragmentation.
Even if Blue Button were to fix its identity crisis, it would still suffer from fragmentation of resources like documentation and community efforts.
Guest post by Arron Fu, vice president of software development at UniPrint.
CIOs and IT professionals in healthcare organizations are tasked with achieving a balance between the demand for universal access to information and the need to ensure security. A recent report published by the Ponemon Institute and the Health Information Trust Alliance shows that the healthcare industry continues to struggle with curbing data breaches. According to the report, about 94 percent of the 80 participating healthcare organizations experienced at least one data breach of which they were aware in the past two years. Such breaches cost healthcare entities about $7 billion annually in the US alone.
While there is no shortage of companies that state that they go to great lengths to protect sensitive digital data, it’s rare to find a company that extends security measures to documents once they have been sent to a printer. Within an enterprise network, access to certain digital documents is restricted and limited only to those who are assigned the right to access those documents. But even a simple mistake like collecting the wrong document from a shared printer can also lead to a serious security breach. Why then does the security conversation stop when it comes to printed documents?
Profile of a Healthcare Professional
Healthcare mobility. Historically, healthcare professionals have always been mobile workers. Healthcare personnel rarely stay in one location, as they are often moving from one patient’s room to another, etc. This mobility also extends to the way documents are exchanged between staff, which creates a unique workstyle requirement where medical professionals need secure, location-based access to information at any given time.
Guest post by Mike Hoaglin, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
“Patient engagement” is a phrase that reinvigorates the doctor-patient relationship and prioritizes the patient experience. With many designers scrambling to “engage” patients in their healthcare journeys, it is easy to get lost in the chaos. But what lies at its core is simple: healthcare leaders need to find easy methods that better connect people with the environment and the technology.
One way this is already proving effective is with the smartphone physical. Led by medical students from John Hopkins and University of Pennsylvania, quick diagnostic tests using devices connected to a smartphone are changing the face of the traditional physical and begging the question as to why modern medicine struggles to become more patient-centric.
The smartphone physical uses a series of peripheral devices attached to a smartphone to measure and analyze patient data ranging from weight to blood pressure to even heart activity. Patients are then able to receive an overall health picture and potentially electronic health record (EHR)-ready results from the smartphone physical immediately after the experience. Essentially these robust handheld digital devices are re-engaging patients because they promote more personalized, data-driven decision-making at the point of care.
Money magazine offers five things to know about electronic health records. It’s a very high-level overview, mostly for the consumer market, and is a piece designed to get some skin in the healthcare game. The piece pithy and concise, which is good, as the publication is clearly unable to dig into health IT topics like a site like this, but is it worth the ink?
You decide. Let us know. Tell us if it’s a “me too” moment, which I happen to believe is the case. I think the magazine should stick to covering money and leave health IT alone, but that’s a lone opinion.
And so, without further ado, here are five things to know about electronic health records, if you don’t already:
Chances are, patients will see them, if they have not already and will ask about them.
According to Money, “more than half of physicians have started keeping electronic medical records, the federal government announced this year. About 80 percent of hospitals have gone digital, too, with urban institutions leading the way.”
A variety of factors influence the success of healthcare organizations. From quality patient care to well-trained staff and the ability for administrative professionals to work efficiently, healthcare organizations must be able to provide patient care affordably, quickly and thoroughly.
Healthcare IT professionals can support their organizations by investing in and implementing technology that helps employees provide a positive patient experience. Although we typically think of improvements to the patient experience as outward-facing, like providing thorough medication information, scheduling appointments efficiently and friendly staff, adopting the right technology for “behind the counter” tasks can improve the patient experience exponentially.
Healthcare IT professionals should invest in cloud-based document management solutions and streamlined hardware and software that allow administrative employees, nurses and doctors to work quickly and comprehensively with access to forms, medication information and patient data where and when they need it. When a healthcare organization’s employees are able to work with accuracy and focus on patients, the patient experience, in turn, improves. Patients then receive the responsiveness and care they need when asking questions about medications, ailments and making follow-up appointments.
HIMSS Analytics recently released a new report on the barriers, challenges and opportunities of healthcare information exchange (HIE). The report, sponsored by ASG, examines the current state of information exchange among U.S. hospitals and explores the opportunities for improving the collection and exchange of patient data.
Survey respondents – 157 senior hospital information technology (IT) executives – indicated that there are two major challenges in the collection and sharing of patient information despite high levels of HIE participation:
Healthcare facilities that are participating in some form of health information exchange organization (HIO) reported difficulties in exchanging patient information in robust, meaningful ways.
Additionally, respondents indicated sharing information outside of HIOs is constrained by budget limitations and staffing resources.
More than 70 percent of respondents reported that their organization was part of a HIO, meaning that they participate in HIE with other hospitals and health systems. Approximately half of those respondents also reported improved access to patient information. However, the benefit did not result in robust data sharing, as 49 percent of the respondents cited this as the primary challenge to sharing patient information.
As has been heavily reported, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued its final guidance for developers of mobile medical apps, which are software programs that run on mobile communication devices and perform the same functions as traditional medical devices. The guidance outlines the FDA’s approach to mobile apps.
According to the agency’s release, it intends to exercise “enforcement discretion” (meaning it will not enforce requirements under the Federal Drug & Cosmetic Act) for the majority of mobile apps as they pose minimal risk to consumers.
The FDA says it intends to focus its regulatory oversight on a subset of mobile medical apps that present a greater risk to patients if they do not work as intended.
Even though some guidance is offer (loosely below), does this not create a slippery slope type of situation? The mobile app market is vast and it is ever changing, literally every day there are new advancements. Give then overwhelming changes, why is the government so confident in its assumption that this rule – now set in stone – will remain relevant with the ever present changes facing the mobile tech and app markets?
