Isaac Kohane

See the following -

Clinical histories reveal surprising evidence of multiple, distinct 'autisms'

Jake Miller | Harvard Medical School | December 19, 2013

Electronic medical records shared in a flexible, open-source database like SHRINE [Shared Health Research Information Network] provide a bird's-eye view of the medical system that offers researchers unique insights into disease and treatment. Read More »

EHR Innovation Gap Threatens Healthcare Progress

Nicole Lewis | InformationWeek | June 19, 2012

EHRs remain stuck in the pre-Internet age and dominated by entrenched vendors, according to recent New England Journal of Medicine commentary. Read More »

Health Care Is Better as a Game

So many counter-intuitive findings recently.  For example, a new study claims 7 of the 10 most profitable hospitals in the country are "non-profit."  Let me say that again, most profitable hospitals in the country are usually nonprofit.  Or, despite the drive to improve surgical quality by limiting surgeries at low volume hospitals, it appears that the relationship between volume and patient outcomes is not as clear as had been thought, once "more advanced statistical modeling" is used to analyze the data.  Wait, what? Either one of these would be a good topic to write about, and many others have done so already (e.g., KHN and Modern Healthcare, respectively)...

How SMART on FHIR Grew Vendor Support for Interoperable HIT Apps

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | February 18, 2017

Kenneth Mandl, MD, and Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, both big players in creating SMART on FHIR, a major interoperability project, have recently recounted key details to the project and its successes in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. This paper first explained the project, stating that the Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART) project aimed to create a platform on which developers could make healthcare applications that could run interoperably across different health IT systems...

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i2b2 Open Source Software Boosts HIE, Biomedical Research

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | November 16, 2012

The health informatics software i2b2 — Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside — was started in 2006, and has become something of a building block for several health information networks and research projects in genomics, pharmaceuticals and population health. Read More »

Is HIT Interoperability In The Nature Of Healthcare?

Edmund Billings | Medsphere | February 12, 2013

The proprietary business model makes the vendor the single source of HIT for hospital clients. Complexity and dependence are baked into both solutions and client relationships, creating a “vendor lock” scenario in which changing systems seems almost inconceivable.
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It’s About Time: Open APIs Finally Burst Onto Healthcare’s Sluggish Scene

Sue Montgomery | Nuviun | June 9, 2014

In the midst of the struggles that we face with interoperability, efforts that support open API use may well hold the keys to the HIT Kingdom...

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Merger of TranSmart, i2b2 Aims to Provide Informatics Boost to Precision Medicine Efforts

Neil Versel | Genomics Web | April 28, 2017

As genomic tools continue to make their way from the research lab into clinical practice, the recently announced merger between the TranSmart Foundation and the Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) aims to provide researchers and clinicians with an open-source resource that could benefit precision medicine efforts. Earlier this month, the two organizations announced their plans to combine into a single foundation focused on providing open-source biomedical software and databases for precision medicine...

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Moving Health IT Innovation Forward: A Vision For Substitutable Components

Tom Krohn | Eli Lilly Clinical Open Innovation | November 4, 2012

In the March 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Kenneth Mandl and Isaac Kohane of Harvard Medical School introduced the idea of a health information technology platform that works more like the iPhone than a traditional system. Read More »

The Staggering Cost Of An Epic Electronic Health Record Might Not Be Worth It

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | June 18, 2012

...[B]ecause it is no small task to deploy [Epic, Judith Faulkner] is there all the way to hand-hold jittery CIOs, and help them get millions of dollars in government subsidies by showing meaningful use of her EHR. Her not-for-profit clientèle will need every penny of those taxpayers’ dollars, but they won’t cover anywhere near the staggering cost of an Epic EHR. Read More »