News From the Healthcare Innovation Front

Can innovation cure what ails us? It better. We've tried everything else.

Innovation in primary care, from Hope Street Group: "Using Open Innovation to Reinvent Primary Care: White Paper." Download the white paper here.

Innovation in state-level health care, from MedCity News: "Obamacare is spurring healthcare innovation in the states." Example: Utah.

" The House Republicans and three Democrats who voted to ’repeal and replace’ it with something that provides ’lower health care premiums through increased competition and choice’ might want to take a look at Utah. Its new internet-based insurance exchange was designed by free-market advocates."

Innovation in robotics and room design, from CNET News: Medical robotics come to Kaiser Permanente's Garfield Center for Innovation. Interesting photo gallery of the health care giant testing robotics and new, more efficient hospital room designs.

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Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

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"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...

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