The KHIT Blog: More "transformation" hype? Salesforce Health Cloud?

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

More "transformation" hype? Salesforce Health Cloud?

During my HealthInsight REC tenure ONC made us use Salesforce as a CRM tool via which they could monitor RECs' activity and progress. It was clunky and stiff, with a boring, pedestrian UI. We mounted our own redundant internal system using Microsoft CRM in order to capture and retain the hard-won business intel post-REC.

Now comes "Health Cloud." Snazzy UI at first blush, I have to say. Will it be "transformative"? I've been hearing endless exuberant exhortations about "transforming the healthcare system" since my first QIO tenure in 1993. What I continue to see looks like increasing "fragmentation," including chronic, persistent workflow travail at every turn.

From HuffPo this morning:

Salesforce Wants To Give Health Care 21st-Century Customer Service
Could this be the key to making health care more like every other service?

WASHINGTON -- Health care has long been stuck in the past when it comes to customer service, making it hard for patients and their doctors to communicate and share information. One prominent technology company aims to change that.

Salesforce.com, the San Francisco-based firm that specializes in cloud-based customer relations systems for a variety of other industries, is rolling out a new product for big hospitals and medical practices that emphasizes patients' access to their health information and to their medical providers.

Salesforce Health Cloud pulls data from hospitals' and doctors' offices' electronic medical systems, connected medical devices like blood glucose meters used by diabetics, and even wearable fitness trackers into an interface that evokes familiar services like Facebook and Slack. An internal messaging system allows medical providers to communicate and share information, and lets patients and their family members join or initiate those conversations.

"We're so spoiled by everything else in the outside world that we come to health care and we're like, 'Ugh, this is terrible.' But that just means it's going to change," said Joshua Newman, a physician who is chief medical officer and general manager of Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences. "Every single other industry is moving to this."

Salesforce is trying to be the company that solves some of health care's most annoying problems and makes it act more like the rest of the economy, where customers have access to their own information and can engage with service providers in real time.

But it's merely the latest entrant into the field of health information technology, which has flourished but failed to achieve its promise of making health care match the level of service consumers expect from other sectors....

One dubious HuffPo commenter:

"Tell me what physician even has TIME to look at some "new and innovative" software..."

Yeah, like, say, Health IT glommed up with "Omics" data?

So, will this be The Real Deal, or just more marketing copywriter hyperbole? You can download some of their Health Cloud literature here.

apropos of "workflow," Dr. Jerome Carter has a fine new post up.

Workflows with Friends…
by JEROME CARTER on SEPTEMBER 7, 2015

Clinical workflow has finally become a big deal. Everyone is talking about workflows these days. Workflow issues are widely recognized as underlying factors for a range of problems that impact clinical work and affect software design. Consequently, ONC, AHRQ, and NIST have jumped into the fray with grant money dedicated specifically to clinical workflow research. Concurrent with the federal government’s interest in clinical workflow has been the rise in the business process management (BPM) community’s interest in automating healthcare processes. Of course, software vendors, informaticists, and clinicians have also staked out territory in the clinical workflow landscape...

Much more to come. I'm off shortly for my first dose of nine weeks of M-F prostate cancer Calypso IMRT this morning. I've named my tumor "The Donald."

Nuke The Donald.
___

More to come...

No comments:

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
___

"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
___

"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
___

"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
___

"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
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"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
___

"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.

The KHIT Blog

Search the KHIT Blog

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

More "transformation" hype? Salesforce Health Cloud?

No comments:

Post a Comment