During my CIO career, I’ve worked on a few Harvard Business School case studies and I’ve had the “joy” of presenting my failures to Harvard Business school students for over a decade. I enjoy telling stories and inevitably the cases I teach are about turning lemons into lemonade. In this post, I’d like to tell a story about a recent experience with Marvin Windows and lessons learned that apply to healthcare...
John D. Halamka
See the following -
Halamka Summarizes the CMS Meaningful Use Final Rule
By John D. Halamka, MD | October 21, 2015
I’ve been asked to summarize the 752 page CMS Meaningful Use Final Rule...Between the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and the publication of the CMS Final Rule, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) passed to include sunsetting the Meaningful Use payment adjustment for professionals at the end of 2018. Also, MACRA requires the establishment of a Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) which would incorporate Meaningful Use. The comment period will be used in an attempt to align the Meaningful Use program and the MIPS program...Stage 3 is more controversial and I will focus on that.
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Halamka's 2016 Predictions for Health IT
By John D. Halamka, MD | December 26, 2015
As the year ends and we archive the accomplishments and challenges of 2015, it’s time to think about the year ahead. Will innovative products and services be social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC)? Will wearables take off? Will clinicians be replaced by Watson? Here are my predictions...Apps will layer on top of transactional systems empowered by FHIR...a better approach is crowdsourcing among clinicians that will result in value-added apps that connect to underlying EHRs via the protocols suggested in the Argonaut Project (FHIR/OAuth/REST). One of our clinicians has already authored a vendor neutral DICOM viewer for images, a patient controlled telehealth app for connecting home devices, and a secure clinical photography upload that bypasses the iPhone camera roll. That’s the future.
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Halamka's Advice to the Trump Administration
By John D. Halamka, MD | January 11, 2017
As I've listened to the confirmation hearings for cabinet nominees, I’ve realized that no one with healthcare IT expertise has yet been identified by the transition team. I continue to ask all my colleagues about any contact they’ve had with anyone advising the new administration - so far, no one has been asked anything by anyone related to healthcare IT. At this early time in the administration, it’s important to offer advice as to the priorities ahead for the next few years. What would I recommend to the new administration?
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Halamka's Cautionary Tale for Healthcare
By John D. Halamka, MD | April 5, 2017
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Halamka's Dispatch from HIMSS
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 4, 2016
Every year I walk the HIMSS floor and speak at HIMSS events with the hope that I can distill the conference sensory overload into a few key themes. In the recent past, big data, interoperability, personalized medicine, population health, and wearables were buzzwords in every booth. This year, the buzzwords were replaced by one overarching concept - providers and vendors must innovate or die. In the next 24 months we’ll see an accelerating evolution of fee for service into alternative payment models fueled by MACRA and MIPS
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Halamka's Dispatch from HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 22, 2017
As I wrote last week, I expected 2017 HIMSS to be filled with Wearables, Big Data, Social Networking concepts from other industries, Telemedicine, and Artificial Intelligence. I was not disappointed. 42,000 of my closest friends each walked an average of 5 miles per day through the Orlando Convention Center. One journalist told me “It’s overwhelming. You do your best to look professional and wear comfy shoes!” After 50 meetings, and 12 meals in 3 days, here’s my impression of the experience...
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Halamka's Dispatch from Israel
By John D. Halamka, MD | December 14, 2016
This week Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker led a trip of clinicians, industry leaders, government officials, academics, and entrepreneurs to visit Israel (not at taxpayer expense) on a mission to establish Massachusetts as an incubator for the US growth of Israeli companies. I represented the healthcare IT innovation work we’re doing at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School. Israel is a remarkable place. With 8 million people in a nation the size of New Jersey situated in an unstable part of the world, Israel has no choice but to be a start up nation, creating companies that generate economic impact world wide...
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Halamka's Health IT Forecast in a "Time of Uncertainty"
By John D. Halamka, MD | June 8, 2016
The upcoming presidential election has everyone spooked - what if Donald Trump is actually elected? What will the transition of administrations, regardless of who is elected mean to healthcare and existing healthcare IT regulations? Will our strategic plans and priorities need to change? I’ve spoken to many people in government, industry and academia over the past month about the rapid pace of change stakeholders are feeling right now. Here are a few of their observations:
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Halamka's Health IT Observations from Japan and New Zealand
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 8, 2017
This week I’ve taken vacation time to help my colleagues in Japan and New Zealand with national IT planning. As I often say, the healthcare IT challenges are the same all over the world, but the cultural context is different. In Japan, I spent 2 days in Tokyo and 1 day in Kyoto, lecturing, meeting, and listening to stakeholders. There is a great desire to share data for care coordination and clinical trials/clinical research. Telemedicine/telehealth is increasingly important in an aging Japanese society that has increasing healthcare needs but a limited number of caregivers and few opportunities to increase healthcare budgets. Here are a few of the current issues we discussed...
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Halamka's Next Steps for the National Healthcare IT agenda
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 1, 2017
At HIMSS, I listened carefully to payers, providers, patients, developers, and researchers. Below is a distillation of what I heard from thousands of stakeholders. It is not partisan and does not criticize the work of any person in industry, government or academia. It reflects the lessons learned from the past 20 years of healthcare IT implementation and policymaking. Knowing where we are now and where we want to be, here are 10 guiding principles.
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Halamka's Notes on the November HIT Standards Committee Meeting
By John D. Halamka, MD | November 20, 2014
The November HIT Standards Committee focused on “asynchronous bilateral cutover” - the compatibility of different CCDA payloads, healthcare IT that supports long term services and support, an update on the Standards & Interoperability projects, a discussion of data provenance efforts, and the HITSC workgroup organization. Read More »
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Halamka's Recommendations for Effective Care Management
By John D. Halamka, MD | January 25, 2017
I recently joined the advisory board of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions, a leading provider of analytics, decision support, and workflow enhancement services. At my first advisory board meeting there was a rich debate about the marketplace for care management and population health tools. I’ve spent years studying such solutions at HIMSS and found most of the products are “compiled in Powerpoint”, which is a very agile programming language, since it’s so easy to change…
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Halamka's Reflections on US Health IT Policy Trajectory
By John D. Halamka, MD | July 6, 2017
I’m in China this week, meeting with government, academia, and industry leaders in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou. The twelve hour time difference means that I can work a day in China, followed by a day in Boston. For the next 7 days, I’ll truly be living on both sides of the planet. I recently delivered this policy update about the key developments in healthcare IT policy and sentiment over the past 90 days. I’ve not written a specific summary of the recently released Quality Patient Program proposed rule which provides the detailed regulatory guidance for implementation of MACRA/MIPS, but here’s the excellent 26 page synopsis created by CMS which provides an overview of the 1058 page rule...
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Halamka's Report on The April 2015 HIT Standards Committee Meeting
By John D. Halamka, MD | April 26, 2015
The April 2015 HITSC meeting focused on the Certification Rule NPRM and a comprehensive review of the Federal Interoperability Roadmap. I suggested that a guiding principle for the committee’s work is to emphasize the enablers in the proposals while reducing those aspects that create substantial burden/slow innovation. As a federal advisory committee our job is to temper regulatory ambition with operational reality.
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Halamka's Report on the August 2015 HIT Standards Committee
By John D. Halamka, MD | September 1, 2015
The August 2015 HIT Standards Committee marked the beginning of an important transition. As work on Meaningful Use winds down, it is being replaced with work on Obama’s signature precision medicine initiative and planning for the 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory. At the same time, many of the longstanding HIT Standards Committee members of have reached their term limits and are being replaced by new experts. I will leave the group in January.
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