Health care is one of the basic requirements for any human society. Proper health and medical care, appropriate use of vaccination techniques to prevent diseases, and knowledge of other hygienic and safety procedures that help protect humans against disability, disease and death; should definitely be amongst the topmost priorities of any nation.

Pathetic health care situation in the 3rd world nations:

This should be the common criteria for every nation of the world; be it completely developed, developing or still underdeveloped and grouped under the mortifying tag of 3rd world nations. But sadly enough; this is not the situation that greets us in the actual and practical world.

Leave alone advanced technologies and innovations; even simple and rudimentary health care facilities like timely availability of medical attention or presence of a basic primary health care unit etc are being denied to the unfortunate members belonging to many 3rd world nations.

What has changed in the past decade?

But things seem to be improving a tad bit for the better, in the past decade. Yet, the most pathetic fact remains that any medical or health care technology if at all being applied in 3rd world nations, costs more than an arm and a leg for the government and thus tends to end up eating dust on the back of the shelves.

So this post is aimed at describing some of the technologies or innovations that work fine for these so called 3rd world nations, and do not cost much and hence are both applicable for practical use and affordable too.

1) Birth mat: …click here to read more

Microsoft Health has a very innovative idea, quit sticking your finger to get a blood sugar reading.  In this cross between really terrifying and just drop your pants cool, Microsoft is working on a contact lense with augmented realty that can also give you medical information.

Health care delivery has evolved in the past few years along with the demand of new medical technologies and more sophisticated treatment options. However, lapses in quality as well as skyrocketing costs have resulted to a number of negative responses from the general public. This in turn paved the way for an increase in new health care organizational models whose aim is towards the improvement of coordination as well as efficiency of health care delivery. It led the way towards the inception of accountable care organizations.

The Accountable Care Organization (ACO): Its Goals And Significance

The ACO has the ultimate goal of improving coordination among physicians, nurse practitioners, hospitals and other health care providers. An integrated medical group is identified as an organization within an ACO which is held accountable for care coordination, quality and efficiency.

There are at least 3 characteristics of an ACO and these are:

• Ability towards patient management and provision as well as care continuity across various institutional settings. This includes ambulatory and in patient hospital care and post acute care.

• Capability of planning budgets and resource needs.

• Sufficient size to support comprehensive, valid and reliable performance measurement (Berenson).

Owing to this the ACO can act as a reform tool for incentivizing more efficient and effective health care. The ACO can also help combat overutilization and overbuilding of health care facilities and technology.

Accountable Care Organization Models

Some types of practice arrangements which can serve as ACO models are the following:

1.  Integrated delivery systems – These involves common ownership of hospitals, physician practices and even an insurance plan. It is characterized to have aligned financial incentives, electronic health records and resources to support cost effective care.

2. Multispecialty group practices- These usually own or have affiliations with hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic. They do not have health plans but have contracts with multiple health plans in their area and are identified to have strong physician leadership and developed mechanisms that provide coordinated clinical care.

3. Physician-Hospital Organizations – These are subsets of a hospital’s medical staff. Some function like multi specialty group practices that focus on reorganization of care delivery to achieve cost effective coordination.

4. Independent practice associations – These are individual physician practices that come together for the purpose of contracting with health plans. Most of these evolve to network of practices that engage in practice redesign and implementation of electronic health records among others.

5. Virtual Physician Organizations- These are small, independent physician practices mostly in rural areas which come together to form virtual physician organizations such as the Community Care of North Carolina. They can provide resources, leadership and infrastructure to aid practices in developing disease registries, implement electronic health records and provide better coordinated health care among others.

The Need for Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s) …click here to read more

Five new technology businesses walked away
as winners at last night’s finals of the Cambridge Wireless
Discovering Start-Ups 2011 competition. Advanced Balance Systems,
Blu-Wireless Technology, Mindings, Proxama and Qiqqa were selected
from 20 start-ups invited to pitch their innovative wireless
technologies and business plans to 25 leading venture capitalists,
angels and industry investors. Senior representatives from companies
including Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, Qualcomm Ventures, Innovacom,
Broadcom, Orange, O2 Telefonica and ARM were there to judge the
finalists and provide expert advice.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=1043

MacMall has announced a Medical Office Makeover Contest that has a benefit of $23,000 if you are the winning practice,

The Medical Office Makeover Contest features a prize for larger offices with 11 or more employees

valued at nearly $17,000, and a prize for offices with 1-10 employees valued at over $6,000. The highly

sought after products featured in the contest include Ergotron carts; HP workstations, monitors and

digital signs; Fujitsu scanners; Wasp time and attendance tracking; Nuance medical dictation, and other

high-value hardware and software from Xerox, Plantronics, Fellowes, ioSafe, Meraki, and Dymo.

More info at:  www.macmall.com/medicalmakeover.

5 Monkeys experiment:

I really really wish to the pastafarian Gods that this was not true in humans, but I can’t even count the number of times I have heard “but we have always done it this way”. 

This type of mindset gets in the way of progress.  We all need to battle this mindset (in ourselves and others) everyday.  Methods like LEAN, Six Sigma, Performance Improvement, and others all try to help us concuer our “inner monkey”. 

Battle on! 

The “most wired” assessment is a great way to obtain an assessment of where you are on your mission of building towards an electronic medial center and meaningful use. 

I have completed the Most Wired assessment several times over the last few years.  I find that the feedback is very valuable.  The feedback includes the averages of medical systems in your size and area range and how you compare to them in clinical system deployment, FTEs employed for IT / Informatics use, and the overall cost of your system in comparison to others. 

The whole survey typically takes my teams ~16 hours of time to complete.  The time is well worth the comparitive information. 

Survey Opens January 17, 2012. Discover more at:  www.hhnmostwired.com

Prince Andrew last week visited DocCom to find out how its
healthcare communications model for the Facebook generation will save
countless lives. On a tour of the company’s Bristol offices, the Duke
of York met the team of medics and software developers behind the UK’s
first secure and private social networking platform exclusively for
healthcare professionals. He learned how the highly mobile frontline
NHS workforce, in particular, was still heavily reliant on outdated
media such as fax machines, bleeps and legacy email systems. The
result, he was told, was increasingly poor and inefficient internal
communications which jeopardised patient safety and quality of care.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=965

Ireland, homeland of my last name, has some great ideas to improve health technology.  The following three videos are from the “big ideas” showcase 2011. 

First up, Dr. Padraig McAuliffe, with a splint for your teeth.  His splint idea should decrease tooth grinding, mouth pain, and recurring dental costs:

 
Second, Dr. Gerard Lacey with an improved endoscopy tool for colon cancer screening:

 

And finally, Dr. Dominic Murphy with a highly improved optical measurement system. Dr. Murphy isn’t exactly thrilling to watch in this video, but his new concepts certainly have some excitement:

 Isansys Lifecare Limited, the provider of complete real-time
physiological patient data services and systems, today announces the
opening of Isansys Lifecare Systems Pvt Ltd., a new venture that
offers access to Isansys’ real-time vital signs data solutions to
the fast-growing Indian healthcare market. Located in Bangalore –
the high technology capital of India and a rapidly growing centre of
medical equipment and biotechnology – the new company was formally
incorporated in July this year and is now fully operational. Earlier
this year Isansys debuted its Lifecare Platform, a secure web-based
framework for intelligent vital signs data collation and
interpretation and, in May, Isansys announced full availability of the
first wireless body-worn monitor to run on the platform – the
LifeTouch HRV011, a multi-function, unobstrusive body-worn cardiac
monitor that adheres to the patient’s body and analyses the ECG
signal of every heartbeat. For more information read the full news
release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=960

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

A daily reminder from HeartMath

After years of being chief whipping boy for sluggish anti-movement, video games are starting to become a new vector for encouraging health.  Everyone is familiar with Wii Fit and its “first to be healthy and entertaining” model.  New games have a wide variety of purposes.  Some health games simply encourage movement, others encourage health eating habits, and still others help teach physicians newest best practices for blood transfusions. 

A health informatics manager takes on a myriad of tasks and functions that prove beneficial to carry out the job with utmost responsibility. Like any other major position in any given career, it should be exercised with discipline, concern and thorough knowledge and skills. However, to further delve into the skill sets and functions of a health informatics manager it is best to know, explore and familiarize oneself with health informatics, first and foremost.

Health Informatics: What Is It?

First thing first, an Informatics person IS A MEMBER OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.  So many people try to say “oh, I am just a nurse”, or some other drivel as to why they are clinical but have no technical background.  If you have no technical background, then you are a clinical provider, NOT a Health Informaticist.  Technology immature organizations rarely can figure out the difference.

Health Informatics is also popularly known as health care informatics or medical informatics that combines the inputs of computer science, information science and health care. It caters to the resources, devices and methods needed to optimize acquisition, storage, retrieval and information usage in biomedicine and health care.

Some of the widely known health informatics tools include:

• Computers & Technical Computing Knowledge

• Clinical guidelines

• Formal medical terminologies

• Information and communication systems

Applications of health informatics are evident in the following fields:

• Nursing

• Clinical care

• Dentistry

• Pharmacy

• Public health

• Occupational therapy

• Biomedical research

Why Is There a Need and Demand for Health Informatics?

We are all witness to the medical advances and discoveries in health care and medicine. Along with this is the demand for medical and health technologies to augment the demand for more up to date services. Despite the delay in the adoption of health care technologies there is a continuing push to adopt innovations and this has been highly initiated by governments from developed countries all around the world.

The US Government for instance, way back  in 2003 and 2004  highly recommended the adoption of technological advances  in health care  to reduce medical errors and also to make the health care technology standard popularly known as SNOMED  CD to be widely available in the United States.

The British Government has followed suit by allocating a budget mainly towards the improvement of delivery of medical and health care services. The same scenario has been observed in Australia and Canada. Owing to this, there is a similar rise and demand for qualified and knowledgeable professionals in the field of health informatics who have complete grasp and understanding both of health care and information technology.

Health Informatics and the Skills Needed For Health Informatics Managers

The ongoing need for the application of health informatics has created a lot of career opportunities in this field. One such career opportunity is that of the health informatics manager. The job entails high-end dedication and commitment therefore it involves a select crop of highly qualified individuals who can handle the tasks with utmost independence.

Just some of the skills needed to become a qualified health informatics manager, among others, include:

1. Complete (or as complete as possible) understanding of the health care industry

2. Communication skills

3. Strategic planning and management skills and leadership

4. Information Technology (and not just a ‘hey, I like computers’ attitude)

5. Information Analysis and Organization

6. Health care professional training

7. Knowledge of  system infrastructure design and networking

8. Programming skills

Just like all the rest of other career paths available with health informatics, being a health informatics manager requires a lot of dedication and drive. Being a management position, a health informatics manager should possess the skills of a leader and a risk taker who is not afraid to take on challenges and sacrifices if a situation calls for such.

Some Pertinent Areas That Require the Need for Health Informatics Professionals

While health informatics caters mainly to the medical field it is not entirely limited to clinical settings. After all, it is a broad field that also includes electronic medical records, digital imaging systems and digital libraries, telemedicine as well as health policy and decision making. Therefore, health informatics professionals are likewise highly in demand in a wide array of areas.

A few of the opportunities that health informatics professionals can avail of are in areas such as the following:

• Pharmaceutical companies – Health informatics professionals are needed in these companies to aid in the analysis of information gathered regarding drug use and prescription pattern reports.

• Hospitals and health care providers – Health informatics professionals are needed in the implementation and management of electronic medical records systems in such institutions. Such professionals are also helpful in the analysis of systems information making it available through knowledge management skills.

• Public health organizations – Professionals in health informatics are highly in demand in these organizations for the collection and analysis of population and community information. This is beneficial in the function of these organizations which is to carry out the design and implementation of surveillance and disease reporting systems.

• Insurance companies – The work of health informatics professionals involves the analysis of health records and insurance claims.

 This particular zombie wasn’t much of a challenge given 15 of us were shooting at it at once.  The next wave of zombies (likely to show up on the 5th of November) will likely require a rifleman’s skillset. 

 The rifleman works in six steps:

1.  Sight Alignment

2.  Sight Picture

3.  Respiratory Pause

4.  Focus

5.  Squeeze the trigger

6.  Follow Through

Sight Alignment

In short, site alignment is putting the front and rear site into proper alignment to ensure you are firing straight.  This alignment looks different for multiple types of sites.  The picture below shows what you would see from a “wing & ring” type of site.  The “Tek-Sight” is one of the most popular for the Ruger 10/22

Sight Picture

Sight Picture boils down to what you are aiming at.  Know your target, be able to call your shot.  This is a major component of accuracy and of safety. 

Respiratory Pause

If you breathe, your body moves.  Breathing is a good problem to have, but it is not a fun problem when you are trying to top a zombie’s head at 400 meters.   The simple sounding but very complex way of handling this issue is to pull the trigger when you exhale.  Your body will be at a predictable place and movement should be minimized. 

Focus

Focus your eye on the site, but focus your mind on the target. 

Squeeze the trigger

Squeezing the trigger sounds so simple.  It isn’t.  Most people automatically jump their finger off the trigger.  Many of us were even taught to do that from our safety classes long ago.  Practice with a pen.  Hold back the clicker, do not take your finger off of it. 

Follow through

Each of the steps before must be learned, practiced, and repeated.  You have to follow through every step so you can reset for the next shot that you intend to blast a zombie with.

Good zombie hunting.

My first guess is NO.  However, the good folks over at ElectronicHealthRecordRescue.com believe they he could have been saved had Jackson’s physician been using an electronic medication record (or more likely, a Bedside Medication Verification) system. Sadly the courts will have to decide this one. 

Yes, a group of doctors thought is was a good idea to put a cheese head on grim reaper and stick it on a billboard down the street from Lambeau Field, where the Packers football team calls home.  Personally, being an “anyone but the Packers” fan, I think it is funny.  Apparently the silly folks from Wisonsin didn’t like it and made the physician group take the billboard down.  The whole point of the billboard was to drill home that cheese isn’t a very healthy food.  Well, those physicians did get some PR! 

Today’s pain meter is a very “rub the belly, pat the head” type of meter.  We ask the patient on a scale of 1-10, how much pain do you have?  This type of pain meter is very imprecise and is prone to all sorts of problems for both patient and caregiver alike.  Dr. Sean Mackey from Stanford has come up with a new way to look at this problem with a predictable and reliable technology.

Dr. Sean Mackey is chief of the division of pain management at Stanford University School of Medicine. Using a neuro-imaging scanner, his team has been able to look at patterns of brain activity and determine whether somebody is actually in pain. Think of what that means for someone who has suffered a stroke and is unable to speak. Think of what that means for newborn babies in a neonatal intensive care unit.

FULL STORY

Thoughtified Limited, a SETsquared start-up company created
by graduates of the Department of Computing, University of Surrey has
won a major grant from the Technology Strategy Board. The grant will
enable the Surrey Research Park-based company to work in the
development of a participatory sensing system that will improve the
management of NHS patient records in remote patient treatment. The web
and smartphone hybrid system will enable significant cost savings for
the NHS, through improved utilisation of resources and reducing the
inefficiencies that are typically incurred in the treatment of
patients at home. The total finance raised for the project amounts to
£94,000.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=920

Robotic Surgery is cool, it is evolving, and it is getting great adoption throughout the globe.  LSU is the latest large institution to adopt robotic surgical procedures.  Learn more about Robotic Surgery:

Going under the Robotic Surgeon’s Knife

The History of Robotic Surgery

LSU Robotic Surgery:

Leaders in the health information technology field gathered on Sept. 16 to discuss the state of health information technology in Arkansas, especially how the government is working, through incentives and other means, to facilitate conversion to electronic health records (EHRs) among eligible providers and hospitals.

The health and wellness of mankind is one of the most important areas that is constantly being upgraded over the years. This is because health care is a basic concern for every family and individual.  It   includes a wide coverage of specializations such as general medicine, pediatrics and obstetrics among others.

Pediatric Care and Its Scope

Pediatric care is solely devoted towards the cure, sustenance and upliftment of infants’ and children’s health. It is  a major field of specialization  in health care  that  has  continuously received  special attention  because of the  vulnerability  and  sensitivity of  its recipients. For this reason  the  people and  organizations   that are  responsible for its  administration  are  steadily  undertaking  innovations and  worthwhile research  for  its betterment.

Pediatric Care and Worthy Innovations for Tomorrow’s Generations

More and more health and medical institutions are realizing the need for constant research and innovation in pediatric care. These covers a  wide  spectrum of  interests  involving cancer and disease treatment,  proper  handling and administering of pediatric patients as well as  pediatric drugs  and medicine.  Here are some of the most recent innovations in pediatrics that aim to make pediatric treatment a more patient-friendly experience:

• Stem cell transplant innovations of University of Chicago’s Comer  Children’s Hospital  that aim to improve  the quality of  children’s lives  after treatment  of cancer which include  post-transplant therapy to prevent relapse, transplantation for non-malignant diseases as well as  advances in stem cell biology.

• Continued innovation and research on existing medicine and drug patents in India for a more effective administration to pediatric patients especially on common diseases and ailments such as tuberculosis and malaria which are prevalent in the said country.

• Medical device innovations coupled with research and development  currently undertaken by the  Pediatric Medical Device Institute in Virginia, USA in consortium with various hospitals  to  greatly improve  pediatric care and patient  treatment

The Role of Health and Medical Summits in the Advancement of Pediatric Care …click here to read more

Imprivata^®, Inc., and PhoneFactor today announced a reseller partnership to provide phone-based authentication services to Imprivata customers. The partnership builds upon existing technology integration between the two platforms, creating a joint solution that is offered along with Imprivata OneSign^® , an award-winning authentication and access management platform, and OneSign Anywhere™, which extends the benefits of OneSign to remote & mobile workers from a variety of endpoint devices. Leading healthcare organizations such as OhioHealth and EMH Healthcare have deployed the joint solution to provide physicians and nurses with the convenience of authenticating via their phones to access Protected Health Information (PHI).

Full Release