http://healthtech.accordingtome.com nine floors up, looking at healthcare from an IT perspective Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:16:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Actor George Clooney was admitted last month to the the Palisades Medical Center after a motorcycle accident. The temptation to look at Mr. Clooney's medical file was just too much a couple dozen unauthorized employees to withstand. 27 people looked. 27 people are now suspended for a month without pay ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/10/10/celebrity-or-not-hipaa-applies/ Microsoft, the megalithic, oft-hated vendor of  only marginally-useful software, announced today in the Wall Street Journal that it would be offering free personal health records on the Web via its HealthVault system. Why *anyone* would trust the likes of Microsoft with their health information is beyond my comprehension. Still, ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/10/04/healthvault-microsoft-insecurity/ It's no secret that many doctors are, if not technophobic, at least VERY SLOW to implement new technologies. To wit, according to the report called "Health Information Technology in the United States: The Information Base for Progress," only one in four doctors (24.9 percent) use EHRs to improve how they ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/09/22/generation-x-doctors-to-the-rescue/ Recently a number of websites have been offering "real age" calculators which, upon asking a number of health/lifestyle questions, attempt to predict how long you will live. The difference between how long you are going to live and how long people live on average determines your "real age." If, ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/08/23/dissecting-the-real-age-phenomenon/ What does the healthcare blogosphere look like? That is, how are all the healthcare IT blogs interconnected? To begin to answer this question, we'll need some idea of the composition of health IT blogs. Fortunately we have HITSphere, a growing list of about healthcare IT blogs (now numbering about ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/08/07/health-it-blogs-all-mapped-out/ Summer is just about over and that means a return to school for many children around the nation. Mixed into the stack of papers your child will bring home might possibly be an immunization form from the school health office. Do you remember where you last placed the immunization cards?!? ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/08/01/back-to-school-health-records-for-kids/ There was once a time when doctors did house calls*. Then a population boom, decreasing physician/patient ratios and new hospital technologies largely obsoleted personal house visits. For the past 50 years, nearly all contact with one's physician has occurred in a doctor's office. Recently, EHR patient portal software has allowed ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/07/28/black-bags-to-robots-100-years-of-medical-progress/ The World Wide Web is terrifically empowering because it carries a nearly infinite wealth of knowledge on innumerable entwined topics right into the leisure of your home. The caveat to this blessing is that intermixed in this wave of data is erroneous, incomplete and misleading material. Also, a deluge of ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/07/18/more-data-better-data/ We've talked before about the importance of universal metrics and standards (e.g. IT security metrics (see: HIPAA intro and HIPAA enforcement) and EHR functionality.) Well, now that you have patient encounter data safely in your hosted EHR database, you'll need some way to measure how well the medical practitioners are ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/07/10/how-good-is-your-hospital-jcaho-cms-to-the-rescue/ QuadraMed (a Medical billing company) published a list of ten reasons why consumers should care about health information technology. I was happy to see such a list and I've included a few of their reasons below: Health information technology: improves the quality of care prevents some medical errors empowers consumers to make smarter healthcare ... http://healthtech.accordingtome.com/2007/07/08/why-healthcare-it-should-matter-to-you/