IT for Healthcare

Sermo - Physician Community for Physicians, by Physicians

Buzz is growing for Sermo, an online information sharing community "developed by physicians, for physicians."  Check it out.

Welcome to the only online community where physicians around the nation exchange the latest medical insights with each other and improve patient outcomes - 24/7.

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Practice Fusion Links Up with Google

We've posted on Practice Fusion before here and the feedback we've heard was that using "de-identified" patient data to subsidize a free EHR was going to be a serious problem.  Practice Fusion just announced a partnership with Google wherein the web-based application will still be delivered for free but now it will be subsidized by advertisements that come up based on keywords in the patients' records.  No word as to whether the initial model has been scrapped or if this new concept is complementary.  One thing's for certain, it still raises the hackles of privacy advocates.

"It still comes down to the fact the company is using people's sensitive, personal information for profit," said Allison Knight, staff attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.

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Security an Ongoing Task

We've seen much debate in the past on security and patient privacy.  Here's a brief reminder that (as we've argued) security is an ongoing process and not a one time fix.

“There’s nothing in security that you can do once,” says Kate Borten, president of the Marblehead Group, a consulting firm in Marblehead, Mass. “Risk assessment never stops. This is supposed to be ongoing.”

Everyone benefits when organizations focus on putting policies in place that make it more difficult to steal (or lose) sensitive data.

Pay-for-Performance Gets Another Punch in the Face

FierceHealthcare.com posts on a recent survey of "550 randomly chosen general internists" that suggests that primary care physicians agree in principle that physicians should be rewarded for a high level of care but are not happy with the current P4P schemes.

While most PCPs felt that physicians should be rewarded for providing high quality care--provided that the measurements were accurate--less than one-third felt that current measures would do the trick. A majority (66 percent) felt that health plans and the government were unlikely to exert the effort to make such measures accurate. Roughly eight out of ten worried that pay for performance schemes would force doctors to avoid high-risk patients--or even kick such patients out of their practices.

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MedTab Reviewed

Tim Gee at Medical Connectivity Consulting reviews the latest entry on the medical tablet scene.

Did I mention it has a 12 hour battery life? Wow, I'm impressed. We have yet to reach perfection, but this device comes close for a clinician carried use model. This is a very, dare I say, sexy device.

Unfortunately the target market is physicians. There are several large institutions that could spring for a device like this, but nothing like a majority of the hospital market. Another bit of a miss is targeting EMR applications - actual EMR adoption is quite a bit behind all the hype - although the early adopters will probably be the large institutions who might actually buy something like this for their physicians (places like Kaiser, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo and large university teaching hospitals come to mind).

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Should Insurance Company CEO Salaries Be Regulated?

Not a big fan of folks that make $125 million in a single year while others have no access to healthcare due to high costs, but Jason Shafrin at Healthcare Economist makes a sound point.

On its website, UnitedHealth Group states that it “serves more than 50 million Americans.”  Thus the amount of cost savings per person enrolled in UnitedHealth Group would be less than $3.

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The Big Move

No posts all week because we just moved our offices and it was a bit hectic around here.  It's a very exciting time here at Calyx.  From a tiny office in Lakewood to over 4000 sq ft in Midtown Cleveland - it's quite a step up for us.  Here's a photo to give you an idea of what we're looking at:

It doesn't give much perspective on the overall space but we've even been too busy to snap many pictures.  I'll have more later - we're definitely looking forward to showing off our new digs!