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“Give us our data”:
my talk at the NeHC board meeting

Last Tuesday, June 2, I was on a consumer panel at a board meeting of the National eHealth Collaborative. This is a heady group to be addressing; as this press release says,  nine of these people are on the advisory committees that are working directly with David...

e-Patients Demand: Put An End To
Data-Hugging Disorder

“Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them” This quote from Hans Rosling is part of a speech where he presented the following: Database-hugging disorder (Dbhd): A...

For Want of a Surge Protector…

It seems somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible for this to happen in this day and age, but Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis had to turn away patients when a power surge took down its electronic medical records system. Yes, that’s right — our...

Meaningful Use: The Elephant IS In The Room

Comparative Effectiveness:  a  comparison of the impact of different options that are available for treating a given  medical condition for a particular set of patients. Such studies may compare  similar treatments, such as competing drugs, or they may analyze very...

EMRs: “Would you take it if it were FREE?”

Blogger John at the “EMR (EHR) and HIPAA” blog posted a musing that caused my business antennas to twitch. A vigorous discussion has started in the comments. Here’s the thing: we’re talking about the billions of incentives we’re offering...

PLEASE, No More Magical Thinking in HIT!

Magical thinking: the ability to draw conclusions that are based on a person’s desire for what reality should be, not necessarily upon what reality actually is. Cargo Cult HIT:  Concepts in HIT that follow all the apparent precepts and forms of evidence-based...

The Markle Foundation’s work on Meaningful Use

Last night I posted my own thoughts on the definition of “meaningful use,” a term that will have significant impact on our next-generation medical records systems. To me it’s vital that the term be defined to include full access for you and me...

The Parable of the Wicked EMR
(guest post by David Kibbe)

Preface by e-Patient Dave: This is a story of bad data gone wild, wrong info that spreads. It starts with a story from the 1600s, which applies all too aptly to our EMR situation today, in which there are inadequate controls on data quality, and errors that leak can...

Applying Participatory Principles to EHRs/PHRs

Neither health professionals nor patients can do it alone. Let’s make no mistake: We are here to participate and to help! e-Patient Dave original story of the health data transfer from his hospital EHR to Google Health PHR is remarkable in many ways and shows...

Completing my list of billing code errors

This post will complete (I hope!) the list of errors that I discovered in the billing data that forms part of my medical records. The original post is here. As I said in the the previous post, “Let me make clear, I personally have only one agenda: to empower, equip...

Quick update on moving my data

A few items before I head off to the day job: As my hospital’s CIO John Halamka posted Monday, we had a concall Wednesday night. He, Roni Zeiger of Google, my physician Danny Sands and I spoke for an hour about this entire broad topic....

Encoding information is a key part of I.T.

Do you know what’s in your medical record? Does it contain mistakes or omissions? The extraordinary response to our April 1 post about data transfer from PatientSite to Google Health (86 comments so far) made us realize that the time has come for patients to...

The I in IT stands for Information

I’ve been thinking a lot about where to take the discussion that’s exploded on my post about moving my data from PatientSite into Google Health. I’m hardly an IT guru, but as I said, I do work with data at my day job. And before we proceed,...

Electronic Medical Records? Yeah, Not So Much

So with all this talk about healthcare technologies and the new budget and Health 2.0, you’d think that electronic medical records (EMRs) were on the rise. Perhaps they are, but as the Associated Press reports, fewer than 2 percent of providers have completely...

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