Seems like people really liked my tweets from yesterday at the Connected Health Symposium. So, I thought I’d do it again today. Here’s some of the interesting tweets I saw and wrote during the Connected Health Symposium.

Information matters when patients are paying for their healthcare. #HighDeductiblePlanMember #chs11

October 21, 2011 10:18 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@techguy

John Lynn

The cost of healthcare was a major theme throughout the entire conference. I agree completely that as patients start to pay more of their healthcare, they need more information and make better decisions.

RT @perficient_hc: Dr Tippet: If #healthit was as strong as IT in Finance we’d save money and live longer #chs11

October 21, 2011 10:30 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@Independa4U

Independa, Inc.

I found this really interesting. Twitter (and even this blog) doesn’t quite capture the irony of the statement. Basically, Dr. Tippets from Verizon really highlights how if we did IT right in healthcare we have the potential of saving lives and live longer. Both noble goals.

“The literature is overwhelmingly positive on the benefits of EHR, but the negative gets more attention.” -Blumenthal at #chs11

October 21, 2011 9:22 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@techguy

John Lynn

I think Blumenthal might have actually said Healthcare IT instead of EHR, but there’s a lot of overlap in this. I agree with Blumenthal that the media and even blogs like mine love to write about the negative more than the positive. It makes for a compelling headline. Maybe the people behind the good research studies need to promote themselves more too.

15% of Internet users track weight diet or exercise routinely online but h/c is not using this #CHS11

October 21, 2011 10:31 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@drnic1

Nick van Terheyden

This kind of hit me on multiple levels. First, I found it interesting that 15% are tracking their weight and exercise. Is that too low? It’s probably the highest level of any other healthcare data tracking app. I wonder where the rest of the apps stand. The second thing that hit me was the fact that doctors aren’t using this data. Finding some way to make it easy and useful for doctors to use all this collected information is going to be a challenging, but important next step. I’ll be interested to see how EHR companies work through the process of taking that data and integrating it into their EHR software. It won’t be easy, but I believe patients will love this type of integration. Plus, it would encourage many others to start using these medical devices.

Maybe two years ago, I saw this interview on TV with this Silicon Valley yuppie who had a camera attached to a cap on his head (or maybe it was a backpack. I digress.) Every 10 seconds, the camera would kick into action and take a snapshot. This way, the yuppie surmised, he would have a repository of pretty much everything he had ever done, even the parts he didn’t like or want to share.

Fascinating as the interview was, to me the $64,000 question was Why? Why, I wondered, would someone want this much detail about his life?

Turns out, there are a whole lot of people who are into this kind of minutiae logging. And they may very well be changing the way medical records are used and stored. At Quantified Self, people believe that self-logged data holds the key to a better understanding of oneself. And some Quantified Selfers are on a mission to make it easier and cheaper to save one’s personal data.

I can think of a myriad things about my health that I might want to log and analyze – blood pressure, weight, mood swings, food intake and (ew! even) bowel movements. Such data might serve to show me the cause and effect, or at least correlations, between my daily choices and the end result of these choices. Such feedback loops apparently work. Last month’s Wired story on this topic shows how innocuous and ineffective seeming reporting can be used for positive behavior change. (There’s an interesting section on how one inventor helps non-compliant patients take their pills as directed.)

This is still a newish area of experimentation. We still don’t know if, and when, and how this trend will play out in the healthcare field. To me, there are several questions that need to be answered:

• How is data going to be stored and transmitted to the EMR?
• Who takes charge of interpreting all this data we will gather? Will my already overworked primary care physician for example want to look through graphs of my self-reported B.P. and weight changes?
• How will this data interface with EMR systems already in place?
• How safe is it to maintain a personal health data journal? What are the HIPAA implications?
• How much is too much?

It will be interesting to see how this form of health-logging will play out.

The following is an expert from the press release by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) about EMR data:

Hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health information are now being collected in electronic medical records, and three-quarters (76%) of more than 700 healthcare executives recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP agree that the secondary use of this information will be their organization’s greatest asset over the next five years. The data that could be mined from the health system can improve patient care, predict public health trends and reduce healthcare costs, but PricewaterhouseCoopers finds lack of standards, privacy concerns and technology limitations are holding back progress.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the healthcare industry won’t see the full value of investments in electronic medical records and other health IT investments until it finds secondary uses for the information being gathered. Yet 90 percent of executives surveyed feel the industry needs better guidelines about how health information can be used and shared, and 76 percent feel that national stewardship over, or responsibility for, the use of the health data should be regulated.

In its newly published report “Transforming Healthcare through Secondary Use of Health Data,” PricewaterhouseCoopers calls for public-private collaboration and a role for government in creating incentives for the private sector to collect, share and use health data; to establish standards; and to redefine technical architecture to allow interoperability.

Today I came across an interesting site which is calling for people to support a “Declaration of Health Data Rights.”  Here’s the basic declaration they’d like people to support:

In an era when technology allows personal health information to be more easily stored, updated, accessed and exchanged, the following rights should be self-evident and inalienable. We the people:

• Have the right to our own health data
• Have the right to know the source of each health data element
• Have the right to take possession of a complete copy of our individual health data, without delay, at minimal or no cost; if data exist in computable form, they must be made available in that form
• Have the right to share our health data with others as we see fit

These principles express basic human rights as well as essential elements of health care that is participatory, appropriate and in the interests of each patient. No law or policy should abridge these rights.

Pretty interesting stuff they’re trying to accomplish. I think this concept is really great. I just hope that their zeal doesn’t overstep and make releasing a patient’s information an enormous burden on a doctor’s office. Seems like you could do so without too much trouble, but it can get out of hand if people aren’t careful. Luckily, those who have an EMR or EHR in their office should be at a big advantage in this regard.