Tag: healthcare

Resistance is Futile: Smartphone Apps Coming to Health Care

How Smartphones are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers is the topic of an excellent report just out from Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (@HealthyThinker) and the California Healthcare Foundation. It begins…

The topic of smartphones in health is an intersection of two fast-evolving ecosystems: health and technology. The junction is a dynamic one in which a particular communications platform is advancing both consumers’ and providers’ engagement with health information technology.

The speed of the uptake has been remarkable for a nation that has been traditionally slow to adopt HIT…. Two-thirds of physicians used smartphones in 2009. About 6 percent of these were using a fully functional electronic medical record or electronic health record system — while only 1.5 percent of hospitals had a comprehensive electronic health record system as of 2008.

On the consumer side, 42 percent of Americans owned smartphones as of December 2009, despite the recession that began a year earlier. In fact, according to cnet, the smartphone market was “unfazed by the recession.”

I’m glad to have put Jane in touch with my colleague Scott Eising (@ScottEising), who is coordinating our Mayo Clinic mobile ventures, and that Scott’s comments are featured in her thought-provoking report.

Here are a few of the thoughts it provoked in me:

  • With such broad adoption of smartphones, corporate blocking of social networking sites in the workplace will be meaningless within a year. If two of three physicians – and more than two of five consumers – already have smartphones and can access the Internet, there is no way social network blocking can be effective unless employee phones are confiscated during work hours. Therefore it would be more profitable for IT departments to facilitate the right kind of social networking usage instead of trying to hold it back.
  • Rapid Growth. The low cost of developing smarthphone apps, combined with the amount of funding being devoted to health IT and the speed with which apps can be deployed, means we will continue to see rapid growth in innovation in apps for both providers and patients.
  • The iPad will make a significant difference in mobile health IT adoption. OK, it wasn’t really Jane’s report that provoked me to think this. I stopped at Best Buy and played with one. Beautiful device. Super fast. Great interface. I probably won’t buy one until the next generation (just as I waited until the second generation of the iPod and the iPhone 3g), but I see it really changing the way people interact with computers.
  • Is it Health Care or Healthcare? The report’s title is How Smartphones are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers but the sponsoring organization is the California HealthCare Foundation.

What other thoughts does the report provoke in you?

Zurich Presentation and a 36th Thesis

Here are the slides for a presentation I’m delivering via videoconference this morning to a large gathering in Zurich, Switzerland. It’s entitled, “Why Social Media are Essential to the Future of Healthcare,” and it led me to develop a 36th thesis that may work its way into future presentations.

Zurich Presentation

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

Air Travel and Health Care

Somehow I missed this post from @ePatientDave late last week (I’ll blame it on the visit from @zorg20, @jknl and the rest of their Dutch delegation, which was excellent but left my inbox overflowing. That and lots of high school basketball games.)

Anyway, enough blame shifting. Dave embedded this great video, which is only 20 days old as of this writing, but already has amassed nearly 40,000 views.

Lots of people have made the connection between air travel and health care from the safety perspective, noting that with 100,000 people dying each year because of medical errors, that’s like a fully loaded 747 crashing every day of the year. Making a similar argument from the patient service/customer service perspective is brilliant.

Thanks to Dave for highlighting this, and to my colleague Jim for bringing it to my attention.

Closing the Gap with ICSI

[ratings]

I’m attending a conference in Bloomington, Minn. this morning, called “Closing the Gap: Innovative Strategies to Patient Involvement,” sponsored by ICSI, Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement. I’m doing a presentation on…you guessed it: Social Media.

Here are my slides:

Patient Involvement Through Social Media

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

I’m encouraging participants in the conference to get involved with the discussion through the #ICSIgap hashtag on Twitter.

Case Study: Text Messaging from the Operating Room

At the Healthcare Internet Conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, I got to hear about some innovative projects being implemented by other hospitals and systems. One of these was shared by Owen DeWitt of Las Colinas Medical Center in Irving, Texas.

Owen is Director of Marketing for this hospital, and he wanted to be able to provide text message updates to family members waiting for information about a loved one having surgery. In the video below, he describes how he went about getting the system established, using a freelance programmer:

This seems like a really nice service, and I like the way he went about getting it set up. I think sometimes internal IT staff get an undeserved bad rap as being obstructionist or foot-draggers, but in reality they need to focus on the institution’s priorities. A text message update system is a “nice to do” but things like the electronic medical record (and the payroll system) are essential activities.

So it makes a lot of sense to hire a freelancer to work on these extra projects, and the Las Colinas group should be commended for understanding that and enabling Owen and his team to work with outsiders to provide this service to patients and their families.