by Chad Hyett
There’s a storm brewing around the regulation of medical apps. The FDA has been skirting the issue for too long and it’s having detrimental effects on the potential for such apps. Recent FDA hearings have revealed that the agency is watching the apps stores for potential alarms and that they are drafting guidance. Whatever that means.
The FDA needs to make a decision quickly if …
Should the FDA regulate medical apps?
In 2003 our practice had a rare opportunity to build EMR functionality into the floor plan of our new office. I thought I had the perfect design for the EMR-based exam room.
The spring-loaded, cantilevered arms used to hold monitors and keyboards in ICU rooms would be perfect. Fitting a touch screen monitor to a standard PC would allow the provider to work without a mouse. I could turn the screen …
Build EMR functionality into the exam room
by Ray Carlson
Two recent articles posted here at KevinMD.com regarding the inclusion of discussions about the cost of health care services between doctor and patient highlighted the growing emphasis on not only the quality of care but the cost of that care to the patient as well. The first article was written by Dr. Leslie Ramirez, who advocated for a more proactive stance by doctors regarding …
Online tools to help shop for the most affordable health care
by Donald Burt, MD
Many hospital CIOs face an uphill battle winning the hearts, minds and fingers of physicians. It’s not because doctors are technology phobic. Quite the opposite: physicians are some of the most ravenous consumers of new information technology. Smartphones and tablets are becoming as ubiquitous as stethoscopes at many hospitals.
The truth is doctors are happy to make screen touches, mouse clicks and keyboard strokes if the application is …
Physicians love a CIO who lets them focus on patients, not technology
by Diana E. Lee
Some are free, others are not, but there are some great, off the beaten path apps on this list that are well worth downloading to your iPhone.
1. iHeadache (free version, with ads).This app isn’t bad, but I did find some features less than ideal. You’re limited to their list of symptoms, which may not include all of your symptoms. It didn’t include all of mine, …
iPhone medical apps for patients with migraine headaches
Electronic medical records and pay for performance are among the ways health reformers are going to improve patient care.
It’s a fundamental shift in how doctors practice, with more practices adopting expensive EMRs. And with the advent of Accountable Care Organizations, doctors will soon be compensated in part by quality measures.
But will they work? Well, the jury’s still out.
Two articles caught my eye recently.
The first, from the WSJ’s Health Blog, reports …
Electronic medical records and pay for performance don’t improve care
Adoption of electronic health records (EHR) systems remains a challenge, both for hospitals as well as for physicians in ambulatory practice. The process of adoption, implementation, and meaningful use of EHRs (let us keep in mind) is actually quite different between those two setting.
Much has been written concerning EHR adoption within hospitals. Much of the experience in computerized physician order entry (CPOE) comes from hospital EHR adoption, and many of …
EHR implementation in the ambulatory or hospital setting
One of the most promising uses of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is research.
As EHRs become more and more widespread and the clinical data previously held in silos of paper charts becomes fluid, exchangeable and duly collected, large clinical repositories should emerge and be made available to those engaged in research, presumably medical research. The results of such research are expected to help us identify cost effective therapies, health care trends …
EHR data is currently ill suited for clinical research
Many doctors roll their eyes whenever patients bring in a stack of research they printed out, stemming from a Google search of their symptoms.
A piece by Zachary Meisel in TIME.com describes a familiar scenario:
The medical intern started her presentation with an eye roll. “The patient in Room 3 had some blood in the toilet bowl this morning and is …
Patients Google their symptoms, doctors need to deal with it
Electronic health record (EHR) systems are big news (and big money) these days.
Our government is pushing adoption and “meaningful use” of EHR systems because computerizing patient-specific clinical information can benefit our nation’s health care system. The primary focus has been on the benefit to the care of individual patients, but computerizing patient-specific clinical information can also benefit other parties in the health care system.
I believe that there are 6 major …
Who benefits from computerization of patient-specific clinical information?
by John Rossheim
To many physicians, it may appear self-evident that electronic records will improve the patient experience. After all, the doctor has speedier access to notes, labs and other patient data, and that’s got to increase the patient’s confidence in the doctor’s understanding of his health status.
But whether patient records are confined to a private-practice EMR or live in an EHR system, the usefulness of …
How to improve patient satisfaction with electronic records
I love computers. Really, I do. Despite my oft-repeated claims about the shortcomings of electronic medical records in their current form, I do believe that information technology has the potential to be of great help to me and other physicians in providing quality care to Americans.
Stop laughing. I really mean it.
I do not believe, however, that IT best serves the medical needs of our patients when …
A modest proposal for a truly useful EMR
We have an intuitive sense of what is meant by those urging medicine to “go digital.” It seems to refer to modernizing, becoming more flexible, and basically following the path of modern computing and information technology.
Is it useful to think more rigorously than this hazy conception, without necessarily reading a special report from The Economist?
Digital information is special because it can be transmitted to and instantiated within any number of …
Explore information technology and safely digitize medicine
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I interviewed Tania Schlatter, one of the best designers I know and a guest-lecturer for Web Strategies for Health Communication, about color, imagery, and other aspects of health website design.
Lisa: How is the design of health websites different than for other types of sites?
Tania: The design of any site goes back to the goals of an organization and what people coming to a site need. Healthcare consumers can …
Secrets of good health website design
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
by John Tooker, MD, MBA, MACP
The recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, 2009) and Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, 2010) contain provisions that, if implemented, will fundamentally change the way that medicine will be practiced in the future.
As I indicated in a …
ACP: Clinical decision support – is it time?
Merry Christmas!
I’d like to thank everyone for your continued readership.
Doctors, patients and other health care professionals need to be heard, and there’s no better place to do so than here, on social media’s leading physician voice.
This year, KevinMD.com had a regular rotation of 175 guest contributors, and surpassed 1.75 million visits, 2.95 million pageviews, 33,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter, and 40,000 RSS subscribers.
I am truly …
Posts of the year on KevinMD.com, 2010 edition
by Kal Shah
Kal Shah, a first year medical student at the University of California Irvine who received his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in Bioengineering, has given iMedicalApps the scoop on how the iPad is being used by himself and classmates.
He highlights how medical textbooks are being utilized, along with an app he feels is better at note taking than the popular Read more…
How an iPad is replacing medical textbooks
Recently, I had my first visit with my new primary care doctor.
I picked him based on recommendations (plus he’s one of the few that accepts my insurance), and also because he seemed to be an eager adopter of electronic medical records (EMR). On his website, there was a portal for making appointments on-line, asking questions of the doctor and staff by e-mail and once a registered patient, I could also …
Physician barriers to EMR acceptance
EMR software is a data repository for clinicians. Rather than being just a simple database, what would the ideal software package look like? What exactly is the perfect electronic medical record?
Every clinician that interacts with the medical record has a specific need. Whether that is an emergency physician which is looking to track down a specific problem or a family practice physician who is looking to keep track of hundreds …
What the perfect EMR would look like
At “Background On The ‘Ecosystem’ of Commercial Healthcare IT” I wrote:
… In reading about HIT difficulties it is important to understand the “ecosystem” of commercial health IT, that is, the identity and nature of the principal constituents and stakeholders, and their interrelationships. Familiarity with this environment is useful in order to place the social and organizational issues affecting HIT diffusion in the proper context.
By implication, I made the case that the …
The commercial health IT ecosystem and its implications for patients
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