We recently published this guideline at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) based on the input from a multi-disciplinary working group. I thought it might be useful to share with the community, since many healthcare organizations are at the early stage developing social media policies...We receive reviews on all our social media sites. Some are informal, like a tweet. Some are formal reviews, like on Facebook, Yelp, Google+, etc. BIDMC monitors all sites 24/7 using a social media dashboard. To maintain our integrity, BIDMC follows the same social media guidelines as the universal online community. This means...
Feature Articles
Real Business Innovation Begins with Open Practices
By Steve George | October 24, 2016
To business leaders, "open source" often sounds too altruistic—and altruism is in short supply on the average balance sheet. But using and contributing to open source makes hard-nosed business sense, particularly as a way of increasing innovation. Today's firms all face increased competition and dynamic markets. Yesterday's big bang can easily become today's cautionary tale. Strategically, the only viable response to this disruption is constantly striving to serve customers better through sustained and continuous innovation. But delivering innovation is hard; the key is to embrace open and collaborative innovation across organizational walls—open innovation...
Halamka Outlines Social Media Guidelines for Beth Israel Clinicians
By John D. Halamka, MD | September 28, 2016
Grahame Grieve's FHIR report from Baltimore HL7 Meeting
By Grahame Grieve | October 4, 2016
Last week, HL7 held it’s annual plenary meeting in Baltimore at the Hyatt Regency...For the FHIR project, our main attention was the ballot. Across the core standard, and multiple implementation guides, we received >800 detailed comments as part of the ballot. This represents a slight increase over the last ballot, but there was a clear change in the focus of the comments – there was a significant drop in the number of comments relating to the infrastructure, and much more focus on the domain content, and it’s applicability to real world problems. This is a clear marker of the growing maturity of the standard. We continue to expect that we’ll publish FHIR release 3 at the end of this year.
Health Care Needs Some Spectacles
By Kim Bellard | September 26, 2016
I've never written about Snapchat. I didn't really get the point of its namesake app, the point of which was to post content that automatically disappeared. I knew it was wildly popular among teens and celebrities, both of whom undoubtedly had more content they wished wouldn't persist than an old fogey like me, but it just seemed purposely trivial. With their recent introduction of Spectacles, though, I figured Snap Inc. (as the company renamed itself) deserves a closer look. The Wall Street Journal broke the story (as Business Insider also did) with an in-depth look at Spectacles. It is not a new app, nor some new service on its existing app (which continues to be called Snapchat), but rather a piece of hardware: a pair of sunglasses that can record short videos. Users can record ten to thirty second videos, taken from the sunglass's perspective...
Reducing My Digital Burden
By John D. Halamka, MD | August 14, 2016
Last weekend, I started a process that some may consider regressive. I began deleting my social media accounts to improve the signal to noise ratio in my life. 10 years ago I wrote about the importance of social media and building networks of colleagues, collaborators and relationships. During that decade our social norms have changed to the point that we walk off cliffs, text while driving, and document every microsecond of our lives on devices that have become the centerpiece of our waking hours. The problem has gotten so profound that Google has introduced artificial intelligence technology to respond to messaging for you - “LOL”, “cute dog”, “a movie at 7pm is great”...
How A Free Mobile App Fights Ebola And Other Global Epidemics
By Amanda McPherson | September 22, 2016
The enormity and severity of the West African Ebola epidemic that began in 2014 is hard to fathom. The outbreak resulted in more than 11,000 deaths, and hundreds of thousands of people affected by loss. Providing adequate care for any medical condition depends on information, but even more so when dealing with an epidemic that is as severe, dangerous, and fast-moving as Ebola. This is the story of how a dispersed global health IT community banded together to solve the enormous, unique information challenges presented by Ebola...
I Really Wish You Wouldn't Do That
By Kim Bellard | September 18, 2016
Digital rectal exams (DREs) typify much of what's wrong with our health care system. Men dread going to go get them, they're unpleasant, they vividly illustrate the physician-patient hierarchy, and -- oh, by the way -- they apparently don't actually provide much value. By the same token, routine pelvic exams for healthy women also don't have any proven value either. The recent conclusions about DREs come from a new study. One of the researchers, Dr. Ryan Terlecki, declared: "The evidence suggests that in most cases, it is time to abandon the digital rectal exam (DRE). Our findings will likely be welcomed by patients and doctors alike"...
Got the Writing Bug? An Introduction to Bibisco
By D Ruth Bavousett | October 16, 2016
A couple of years ago, when I started tinkering with long-form fiction writing, I attended some events for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Among the attendees there was a lot of talk of using Scrivener as a tool for organizing your writing, and as a place to keep your details. I looked into it, but it was kind of pricey—and the license was such that to use it on my Windows PC and my MacBook, I'd need to buy it twice, which did not appeal to me at all. So I muddled along for a year or so, starting my novel with a pair of LibreOffice Writer documents: one for the novel, and one for my notes on people, places and things, along with some ASCII sketches and a folder full of pictures and scans of drawings I'd made...
Good Things Can Come from Open Source Projects that Fail
By Brent Phillips | September 16, 2016
Without realizing it, I joined the open source movement in 1999 during the midst of the Kosovo refugee crisis. I was part of a team helping route aid supplies to local humanitarian organizations running transit camps across Albania. These are the camps that refugees often arrived at first before being moved to larger, more formal camps. We found that refugees in the transit camps were not being registered or provided with any way of alerting family members of their whereabouts...
Global Group Communication and Culture Tips
By Pete Herzog | October 13, 2016
If open source needed a new slogan it whould be: Think Globally, Act Globally. Probably with a semicolon instead of a comma, but what slogan uses a semicolon? A semicolon is slogan poison. Just like thinking locally is open source poison. The thing is, when you create a tool you need and decide to throw a Creative Commons license on it to allow others to add to it or make fun of your lousy source code, you can't be thinking locally. You know that it will now reach anywhere and everywhere. And, if you didn't realize that, then you're probably on a different Internet than me...
Clarifying MACRA Certification Requirements for Hospitals
By John D. Halamka, MD | September 14, 2016
With all the changes happening to Meaningful Use, Quality Measurement, and MACRA in 2016, I’ve been asked many questions by many organizations to help them plan for the future. As I’ve said many times, one of the great challenges we have is that the 2015 Edition final rule has an enormous scope extending beyond Meaningful Use with the notion that it can be coupled to every government healthcare IT program. Standards need to be based on requirements and specific use cases with little optionality, so creating a broadly scoped rule before the use cases are known just doesn’t work...
Navigating the Challenges of International Teamwork
By Tony McCormick | September 14, 2016
I started my open source work from Oregon, USA working on a project in the "Republic" of Texas. While that, at first glance, does not sound international in nature, I can assure you that Oregon and Texas might as well be different countries. I experienced both the joy and frustration of working with users from both places that had big cultural differences, as well as overlapping needs. This early experience laid the groundwork for the future, where I got to work at the international level on OpenEMR, an electronic healthcare records system...
4 Big Ways Companies Benefit from Having Open Source Program Offices
By John Mark Walker | September 13, 2016
In the first article in my series on open source program offices, I took a deep dive into what an open source program office is and why your company might need one. Next I looked at how Google created a new kind of open source program office. In this article, I'll explain a few benefits of having an open source program office. At first glance, one big reason why a company not in the business of software development might more enthusiastically embrace an open source program office is because they have less to lose. After all, they're not gambling with software products that are directly tied to revenue...
Artificial Intelligence Docs May Need Some Good AI Lawyers
By Kim Bellard | September 8, 2016
A recent post highlighted how artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing important roles in health care, and concluded that expanded use of AI may be ready for us before we are ready for it. One example of the kind of problem we'll face is: who would we sue if care that an AI recommended or performed went wrong? Because, you know, always follow the money. Last week Stanford's One Hundred Year Study On Artificial Intelligence released its 2016 report, looking at the progress and potential of AI, as well as some recommendations for public policy...
The Joy of Mentoring
By John D. Halamka, MD | September 7, 2016
Since 2016 is the 20th year I’ve served as CIO, I’ve given a great deal of thought to the various careers I’ve had and the roadmap for the 20 next years of my working life. In my late teens and 20s I was an entreprenuer running a 35 person software company while doing my medical and graduate school training. I was also a winemaker, home builder and engineer. In my early 30’s I was an Emergency physician, software coder, and data analyst. In my mid 30’s as a CIO, I focused on architecture, high reliability computing, and centralization of IT service delivery. In my early 40’s, I focused on disaster recovery, interoperability, and educational technologies..
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