Leonard Kish talks with patient privacy advocate and expert, Dr. Adrian Gropper, about his work in providing better patient control over their health data and the role of agency, identity and existing internet tools to fulfill better patient control. Dr. Gropper's take on The Pledge for interoperability and patient access: it's a deflection to try to skirt around government action. According to Gropper, who was interviewed during the HIMSS16 conference, the patients' right of consent around their data has been seen as too risky, but the converse is now that there is zero accountability and massive amounts of data are being sold on the black market.
It is widely agreed that the future of digital health lies in an “Open Platform”. However, it’s not clear as to exactly what an Open Platform is or how we get there. This blog aims to answer the first question and to provide some guidance on the second. While any given instance of an Open Platform will be a specific implementation of a set of software components owned and operated by a particular organisation (this might be a health and social care organisation or a third party, operating the platform on behalf of a local health and care community), it is most usefully defined by a set of principles rather than the specific details of a particular implementation.
Shahid Shah, the CEO of Netspective, is one of the most knowledgeable healthIT voices in the world, and he's also is optimist when it comes to open source in health care. Leonard Kish talked with Shahid about open source in health care and where it's headed in the hallways at HIMSS16. Shahid believes open source is just picking up steam because open source is about building connections and driving middleware. That's just the place that healthcare is at at the moment.
And that’s why today, to deliver on the commitment made in the Second Open Government National Action Plan, we’re releasing for public comment a draft Federal Source Code policy to support improved access to custom software code. This policy will require new software developed specifically for or by the Federal Government to be made available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies. It also includes a pilot program that will result in a portion of that new federally-funded custom code being released to the public.
With the yearly bluster and promise of the annual HIMSS conference (HIMSS16), I still find there have been few strides in solving interoperability. Many speakers will extol the next big thing in healthcare system connectivity and large EHR vendors will swear their size fits all and with the wave of video demo, interoperability is declared cured. Long live proprietary solutions, down with system integration and collaboration. Healthcare IT, reborn into the latest vendor initiative, costing billions of dollars and who knows how many thousands of lives.
I've previously expressed my concern that Oscar and some of its fellow health insurance start-ups might be more about repackaging than reinventing. I'm more concerned than ever after Bloomberg reported that Oscar is adopting a new network strategy: moving to "tight, exclusive networks with hospitals." Oscar CEO Mario Schlosser said: "The bet we made in going deep with a couple of health systems, I love what we’re doing there. We’ve got a very good blueprint now to go into new markets."
Next week is HIMSS16! I’m very excited to go to Las Vegas this year and see so many friends and colleagues and am ready to engage in conversations that will help drive the future of our industry. We have a lot of new technology to show at our booth - changes many of you have been asking to see in Health IT. This kind of change is now necessary because Health IT is running in circles. For too long, Health IT vendors have replaced old technology with different outdated technology. As an industry we can’t tolerate this anymore. 
Communicating the IT strategic plan is one of the primary responsibilities of a CIO. Most importantly, the IT strategic plan should be seen as an enterprise wide activity and not just an IT centric exercise. IT should be an enabler for the strategy of the business and every IT tactic should tie back to a high priority of the business. In 2016, the BIDMC IT strategic plan has five pillars that align with quality, safety and efficiency imperatives (instead of Meaningful Use, ICD10, and the Affordable Care Act as was the case 2013-2015). The pillars are:
This year at HIMSS in Las Vegas there was no shortage of talk about the “lack of usability” in EHRs. In the final HIMSS16 show daily (Thursday March 3, 2016) there were four articles (“When EHRs cause Harm,” “5 UX steps to Healthy Clinical apps,” “Nurse: We face severe IT usability problems,” and “The leading health IT issues? Poor usability and missing safeguards”) that addressed some aspect of EHR usability...Over the past few years we’ve worked with a number of EHR vendors on improving the usability of their solutions. We’ve noticed a number of items that seem to common to many of the systems, and this list contains some of the most common and highest priority usability issues that should be avoided in your EHR designs.