The News and Nothing But the News

Well, maybe a snide comment or two. In the news today:

Fox News: Hospitals are making progress in reducing the spread of care-related infections.
Reuters and CBC News: Meanwhile, thanks to the vaccination-averse among us, cases of measles hit a 15-year high in 2011 and a whooping cough outbreak is expanding in Canada's Fraser Valley.
WTVG: Another reason to exercise: lower Alzheimer's risk.
And from the Commonwealth Fund (via U.S. News & World Report): "One in four working-age Americans went without health insurance for at least some time in 2011. And the majority of those people—nearly 70 percent—lacked coverage for more than a year..."
Finally, from CBS News: researchers successfully grew hair on a bald mouse.

So many things I could say, but for now I'll just thank all those researchers hard at work on such an important medical mystery. I mean, c'mon, why work on things like CANCER when there's toupee-wearing mice out there needing our help?

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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...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

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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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