adoption

A coalition of health plans led by Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and America's Health Insurance Plans said it is launching a pilot program that will offer personal health records to consumers. The move appears likely to satisfy critics within the industry who have called for insurers to do more to encourage IT adoption. Privacy advocates, however, may be displeased by the implications of allowing insurers to share data on patient medical histories.

- read this article from Modern Healthcare

Remote monitoring has become one of the hottest buzzwords in healthcare IT. But how is the industry really reacting to the technology? Jane Sarahson-Kahn writes that obstacles abound. In her take on the technology for iHealthbeat, Sarahson-Kahn notes that "reimbursement, licensure, clinician resistance and lack of demonstrable return on investment are the most formidable market impediments." And there's plenty of evidence to back that conclusion up. She points to a recent report …

So David Brailer has had enough of traveling to every healthcare meeting and wants to go home to San Francisco. Who can blame him? In the past I've jokingly compared him to Stalin--they share a penchant for 10-year plans! But he's clearly had a major impact in the recognition that healthcare IT has received from both the Bush administration and the market. In some ways this has been …

The Henry Ford Health system will participate in a pilot project designed to test the effectiveness of online consultations. The University of Michigan is participating in a concurrent but separate project. Supporters have argued for years that online consultations can help improve physician efficiency and improve the quality of care. Several players, including RelayHealth, have been trying to develop a business in online consultation technology, but adoption has been slow.

- read this Detroit Free Press article

Doctors in smaller practices are falling behind their counterparts at larger groups, according to the Boston Globe. The newspaper examined physician EMR adoption patterns in Massachusetts, home of some of the best-known technology initiatives in healthcare, and concluded a new digital divide is shaping up. With top shelf EMR systems costing between $10,000 and $60,000 per physician to implement, most simply can't afford the expense of wiring their practices.

- see this Boston Globe article

For a preview of the kind of world which many health policy wonks in Washington want, just take a look in the direction of Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Intel, Cisco and Oracle announced an initiative that will encourage local physicians to adopt electronic health records and other health IT systems. The Silicon Valley Pay-for-Performance Consortium will award $150,000 annually to practices that excel in using technologies like electronic health records, ePrescribing and secure messaging to …

> HealthImaging.com has a story about the long, hard but apparently ultimately worthwhile road to EMR adoption. Article

> The shift towards customer empowerment in healthcare is leading to new opportunities for software companies that make customer relationship management, according to one hopeful vendor. …

The Washington Post looks at the success of MyConsult, a web-based second opinion service developed by the Cleveland Clinic. For a fee of $565, a specialist will conduct an online consultation and provide patients with a written second opinion. The newspaper also examines a similar service run by Partners Healthcare in Boston.

- read this article from The …

A $21 million Epic implementation at clinics in the Oregon Health and
Science University system will cause a 25 percent to 50 percent decline in productivity over the first six weeks of use, officials rather candidly admit. The gains afterward make the sacrifice worth it, they argue, even though it will take up to 10 years to break even. The problem of lost productivity during the "switch" period has been a major roadblock to the adoption of the EMR by docs in solo and small practices. …

This week has been personal health record survey week. Both the Markle Foundation and Manhattan Research came out with survey results showing that there is widespread approval of the concept of personal health records among the public, and a minority are even likely to use one. This, of course, is news in the wake of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, which showed the need for better medical …