Online Health Records Urged
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The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.
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Floating ideas at the CRDB Work has begun on a social care equivalent of the care records guarantee for medical records, paving the way for merging health and social care records. The plans were disclosed as part of a debate at the annual Care Records Development Board meeting in London, yesterday.â¦
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Using the internet to manage a chronic illness can leave you in worse health than before you logged on, a review of recent studies has found.
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Just over a month after the leader of Google&#39;s health information project&#160;left the company, the vice president who stepped in for him on an interim basis reiterated the company&#39;s commitment to this effort.Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Wednesday to explain Google&#39;s motivations for its health initiative, going over some points her predecessor on the health team and other executives have made in the past.&quot;There has been so much speculation about what Google might do [in this area] that we wanted to clarify what are our interests and our intentions,&quot; she said in an interview with IDG News Service after her speech.Essentially, Google recognizes that a majority of people begin health-related inquiries online at its search engine, instead of at a health Web site, so the company sees demand for an improved research experience for these users, she said.At the same time, the healthcare industry generates a massive amount of data that Google is in a good position to help organize and make available to patients and their families, Mayer said.&quot;We&#39;re not trying to be all things to all people, but the majority of users looking for health information are already coming to us. And there is a really interesting computer science problem to solve here with just the sheer volume of data. That&#39;s what&#39;s made it really interesting [for us] to participate in this space,&quot; she said.By digitizing health records and giving control over them to the patients, they will be able to make better informed decisions, she said during her presentation.With health records stored in a central server, patients will be able to access them from anywhere, whether they move to a new city or are traveling while on vacation, so that, in an emergency, unfamiliar health care providers can get a comprehensive view of their health history, she said.People would also be able to quickly and easily share records with friends and family if they choose, she said.When the news of&#160;Adam Bosworth&#39;s resignation&#160;was confirmed by Google, the company made a point of saying that its health project was alive and kicking, and that Mayer would steer the effort until a permanent replacement was found.&quot;Google is moving forward with work on our health products,&quot; a Google spokesman said at the time.The project hasn&#39;t yet yielded a specific service or product, but, in August, The New York Times reported that Google has shown a Google Health prototype to health professionals.According to the Times, the Google Health prototype is designed to let individuals create a health profile for themselves that includes information about medications and conditions. Google Health also features a &quot;health guide&quot; with suggested treatments and drug interaction warnings, pages with health-related reminders and health provider directories, the Times reported then.Google also has given regular updates about the Google Health efforts. In March, Bosworth authored a blog post in which he outlined a series of issues and concerns related to finding and trusting health information on the Internet.In June, Google announced the formation of the Google Health Advisory Council. In that blog posting, a Google official explained: &quot;We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.&quot;Google plans to offer more details about its health project at a future date, Mayer said.Google isn&#39;t without competitors in this endeavor. Rival&#160;Microsoft launched earlier this month an online service&#160;for helping patients take control of their health records and monitor their medical conditions.The Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;
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Doctors need guidance on how to avoid problems using technology to reach patients, says a researcher.
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Motivated by mounting medical costs, lawmakers and executives are urging doctors to embrace a seemingly simple way to save billions of dollars a year: prescribe medications online.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. needs new medical privacy rules as the country moves toward greater use of IT to store health records, a group of health-care experts said Wednesday. "Thousands" of databases that contain U.S. residents' health records exist, and patients don't have any way to keep their personal information from being shared with third parties, said Dr. Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist and founder of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation. Private companies have been data-mining prescription records for years, she added. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996, sets security standards that health-care providers must follow, but the law leaves major gaps in privacy, Peel said at an electronic health-records privacy forum sponsored by public relations firm Dittus Communications. HIPAA gave many organizations with ties to health-care vendors, including offshore transcription vendors, insurance brokers and credit bureaus, authorization to use health care-records, she said. "Because of this confusion that HIPAA engendered, data is being exchanged and used for reasons that have nothing to do with people getting well," she said. "People think this is the wild west because of HIPAA, and every piece of data that's not nailed down can be used for some other purpose." While panelists at the forum seemed to agree that some type of privacy policy for e-health records is needed, they did not agree on how to accomplish it. Peel called for the U.S. government to create a national standard, but David Merritt, project director at the Center for Health Transformation and the Gingrich Group, called for private groups to develop privacy standards. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed moving a privacy commission to the private sector, but a bill sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, would keep that commission in the federal government. In addition, Kala Evelyn Ladenheim, program director for state health policy leadership at the National Conference of State Legislators, called on the federal government to allow states to develop their own privacy policies. Some states may create stronger protections than a national effort would, she said. But 50 state privacy policies would be difficult for health providers to comply with, countered Tom Wilder, senior regulatory counsel for America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group representing health insurance providers. In most other industries, private organizations have developed privacy policies, Merritt said. He called on a public and private partnership to create privacy standards. "The government is really good at creating commissions and creating advisory boards ... and studying an issue," he said. "What the government is not good at, and what we shouldn't ask it to do, is to lead and to act." Peel disagreed, saying health-care providers would have conflicts when creating privacy standards, and HHS employees may not have the public's best interest in mind. "We would actually say the problem is that the government is not in the lead," she said. "Unelected officials, bureaucrats and conflicted industry representatives shouldn't be making decisions about privacy."
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Just like with do-it-yourself taxes, a growing software industry lets patients create their own "personal health records." No more answering 10-page questionnaires every time you visit a new doctor Â just hit the print button before leaving home to arrive armed with your life's medical history.
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With health officials now urging Americans to dig into their family health history, experts advise taking advantage of free Internet tools -- and upcoming holiday gatherings -- to get started on the project.
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Health obsessives will be breaking out in a sweat when they read the latest research: browsing medical websites can be bad for you.
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(InfoWorld) - Doctors would get $3 for every patient signed up to use an electronic health record under terms of a bill introduced Thursday by U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat. The Personalized Health Information Act would require that the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services create a personal health record incentive program to help speed U.S. adoption of e-health records. E-health records can cut health-care costs by consolidating patient information and eliminating medical errors, such as prescription interactions, proponents say. U.S. President George Bush has called on the U.S. government and private health-care providers to work together to provide e-health records to all residents by 2014. Using e-health records would allow patients to avoid filling out forms found in nearly every doctor's office, Kennedy said. The records would allow health-care providers to send messages to patients, such as reminders that a child is due for a vaccine. Some e-health records allow patients to send e-mail to their doctors, schedule appointments online, or view test results. But e-health records have been slow to catch on, partly because doctors haven't embraced them. Kennedy's bill would give U.S. doctors $3 for each patient converted to an e-health record over three years. A spokeswoman for Kennedy didn't immediately have an estimate of how much the program would cost. E-health records "are a critical piece of the puzzle as we move forward in an effort to improve the quality and cost efficiency of the health-care system in this country," Kennedy said. The bill would empower patients to be better informed and would also improve communication between them and their health-care providers, he said. Several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, e-health record vendor Allscripts, and the American Heart Association, endorsed the bill. Patients' ability to access personal health records "is a critical starting point to improved health care," Peter Neupert, Microsoft's corporate vice president for health strategy, said in a statement.
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All very well, but is it worth the fuss? Doctors are still worried that patient confidentiality will be broken if treatment records are loaded onto the patient information network, the care records system, that is intended to span the country as the keystone of the late and great Â£12.4bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT).â¦
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The U.S. needs new medical privacy rules as the country moves toward greater use of IT to store health records, a group of health-care experts said Wednesday.
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PATIENTS who use the internet to find out information about chronic disease rather than listening to their doctor could be putting their health at risk, research suggested today.
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Some people with chronic health problems who seek online advice would be better off just listening to their doctors, new research suggests.
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.
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The first patients' electronic records are uploaded to the NHS online database, part of a Â£12bn IT project.