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Consumers and Health Information Technology: A Top 10 List

In honor of National Health IT Week (May 14 – 18), a week-long forum dedicated to increasing the awareness and impact of IT for healthcare, QuadraMed compiled a list of the Top 10 reasons consumers should care about medical technology. All the healthcare IT (HIT) vendors are out in force this week pushing their wares but I thought QuadraMed’s focus on why consumers should care was unique. Consumers and Health Information Technology: A Top 10 List

Shahid N. Shah

Free tool to help identify iPods, USB sticks on the network

I’ve written previously about PodSlurping and portable storage devices being a security hazard on our healthcare networks. I ran across this tool called EndPointScan. GFI have just released this online scanner, which is basically a free tool that can show which portable storage devices have been and are being used on an organization’s network, where on the network they’re used and by whom. If you’re in the information assurance or security group in your department or enterprise you owe it to yourself to get a tool like this so you’re not caught off guard.

Shahid N. Shah

EHRs Fix Everything – and Nine Other Myths

I read this article recently published by American Academy of Family Physicians and found it quite useful. As a health IT professional, I also talk about many of the ideas written up in the article but perhaps coming from a fellow physician (the author an MD), it will mean more to other physicians considering EMRs and EHRs. Here are myths the article debunks (along with some of my own comments):

Shahid N. Shah

WorldVistA EHR CCHIT Certified

I wanted to thank Fred Trotter for sending me this note yesterday: Now you can download and use an FOSS EHR under the GPL that is CCHIT certified. The days of the proprietary EHR systems are OVER. I love Fred’s enthusiasm about open source software in healthcare, it’s definitely the direction of the future. While CCHIT certification doesn’t actually improve a product or make it any more applicable to a particular client, it’s great to see that a free and open source solution can no longer be derided as “not being certified” by other vendors.

Shahid N. Shah

Change management and versioning of services

We’ve been having a nice discussion on the management of services and how services should be versioned on our Microsoft Architect MVP discussion list. This morning I saw a note from Martin Fowler pointing to an article on Consumer-driven Contracts. The article is definitely worth reading, and here’s the abstract: This article discusses some of the challenges in evolving a community of service providers and consumers. It describes some of the coupling issues that arise when service providers change parts of their contract, particularly document schemas, and identifies two well-understood strategies – adding schema extension points and performing “just enough” validation of received messages – for mitigating such issues.

Shahid N. Shah

IT implications of Wal-Mart’s 400 new in-store clinics

Reuters reports that Wal-Mart is planning to open 400 in-store clinics in the next few years, climbing to about 2000 within the next 7 years. They said that Wal-Mart plans to contract with local hospitals to provide the personnel and service and that made me curious. What are the IT implications and opportunities here? Could Wal-Mart become a pseudo-RHIO in some areas since it will need to have some connectivity with hospitals, labs, and other ancillary service providers?

Shahid N. Shah

Microsoft’s Internet Service Bus

We’ve probably all heard about the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) but I’ve been playing with Microsoft’s new Internet Service Bus and like the idea. Instead of installing an ESB within your own firm (which is not a trivial job), you can use a publicly hosted service bus infrastructure managed by Microsoft. With a good identity federation architecture, the security is “good enough” for most uses and you should check it out.

Shahid N. Shah

Privacy preserving data mining

I love all things Google, especially Google Talks where they have smart guys presenting tech topics to Google staff and they record it for the rest of us to view later. Recently I ran across this video on privacy preserving data mining. Seems like an esoteric topic, but it’s important to us all in healthcare for sharing data without revealing private information. The speaker it talking about data mining for internet traffic but all the algorithms are useful in our industry, too.

Shahid N. Shah

How to do positive patient ID in consumer and kiosk settings

I often get asked about how to positively identify a patient in a consumer or kiosk setting (shared computer environments also). For example, if a patient comes in and you want to hand them a computer to do some data entry with, how would be able to positively identify the patient as a specific person? And, you need to be able to do this without “logging them in” or require them to remember a password.

Shahid N. Shah
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