The KHIT Blog: Off to the Big Apple

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Off to the Big Apple

UPDATE: Nice flight on JetBlue, SFO to JFK nonstop. had an entire exit row to myself. :)

Interesting, I was born in NY (Rockeville Centre, western Long Island), grew up in Jersey, have flown all over the place, and yet this was my first time through JFK.

First time I've been back in NYC in about 25 years. An immediate great feeling.

Above, 6th Avenue near the Hilton, looking south. Cold today. Below, a quick meander to Times Square.

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Have made a new blogging acquaintence:

Charlene Ngamwajasat, MD

We'll be meeting at the conference. She has some great ideas. She's been involved with Mana Health. I blogged about them back in August.
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NEWS UPDATE

Six Predictions for How IT Will Impact Healthcare in 2014
On the eve of the NYeC Digital Health Conference, 2014 is shaping up to be a tumultuous yet promising year for digital health technology.
By Practice Fusion
Published: Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2013 - 10:47 am

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 12, 2013 -- /PRNewswire/ -- As health IT leaders make their way to New York for the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) Digital Health Conference, certain trends are emerging that will define healthcare in 2014. Practice Fusion, the nation's largest healthcare platform, looks at these key trends from 2013 and predicts what they might mean looking forward. With the ongoing Meaningful Use incentive push for health technology and the recent difficulty of many vendors to deliver on new and upcoming requirements, it's looking to be a big year for upheaval in the health IT sector.

Key predictions for the new year include:

Health IT incentives are here to stay - The Meaningful Use program incentivizing doctors and hospitals to use electronic health records (EHR) technology to improve care has already paid out billions for successful implementations. Requirements will grow tougher in 2014, not just for providers but also for vendors who may not be able to upgrade their products in time.

Many practices will switch their EHR solutions - As many EHR vendors struggle to meet Meaningful Use requirements and keep medical professionals satisfied with their solutions, the next year will see competition and consolidation across the market. One in three practices are already dissatisfied with their existing EHR, half of whom plan to switch in the next year. Among current Practice Fusion providers, one in four say they have switched from other EHRs.

Health care will become more networked - Meaningful Use requirements demand that EHRs interface with labs, imaging centers, referrals and patients. For small practices maintaining their independence from hospitals, this will help give them the resources they need to thrive.

Billing will be easier in the cloud with ICD-10 - With new billing code changes from ICD-9 to ICD-10 causing anxiety for providers, those equipped with flexible cloud-based systems will have more resources to make the change than those on paper or legacy EHR systems.

EMRs will power accountable care - A majority of doctors are now using EHR systems in their practices. The next few years will see those EHRs grow into more powerful clinical tools that will assist providers in improving outcomes. Cloud-based EHR vendors will be able to make these changes more rapidly.

Independent practices will emerge as the vanguard of innovation - With smaller teams and the ability to provide services like online housecalls, independent providers will soon be able to take advantage...

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UPDATE FROM MY BLOGGER FRIEND JOHN LYNN

Got Healthcare IT Jobs? We Do…Now
When I first started blogging 8 years ago, I never thought I’d become a full time blogger. 8 years and 6000 blog posts later, it’s safe to say that blogging is a big part of my life. In fact, I’ll probably be a blogger until the day I die. If you asked me a month ago what I could do for organizations looking for healthcare IT talent or individuals seeking healthcare IT jobs, I wouldn’t have much to offer beyond advertising. Today, that all changes.

I’m really excited to announce Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today are now part of the Healthcare Scene family of health IT websites. You fan find the full announcement press release on EMR and EHR News.

I can’t tell you enough how exciting it is for me to start working with Gwen Darling, the founder and creator of Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today (Check out her thoughts on the acquisition here). Anyone that’s worked with Gwen or Healthcare IT Central knows how much she cares about those who’ve used Healthcare IT Central to find jobs or fill positions. Much like me, she takes a personal interest in so many members of her community. It’s thrilling to think about how Gwen and I together can help even more people find their dream jobs at the top healthcare companies...

John is also here to attend #DHC13. We'll have to hook up.
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2 comments:

John LynnNovember 13, 2013 at 1:18 PM
It's such a great event. I'm excited to see you there. I love NYC like you.
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AnonymousJanuary 7, 2014 at 6:28 AM

I would rather pay than compromise my patient's privacy. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/24/practice-fusion-reviews-whoops/
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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
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"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
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"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
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"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
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"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
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"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
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"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
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"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Off to the Big Apple

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