Google is announcing plans for Personal Health Record (PHR) software. Microsoft announced a similar but controversial effort less than two weeks ago. Google’s offering is said to be available in 2008 so no analysis is possible yet. “Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said Wednesday here at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google plans to support the “storage and movement” of people’s health records…Although she provided only scant details on the effort, she noted that Google became interested in the personal health record market as it watched Hurricane Katrina take aim at the Gulf Coast and all the paper-based records stored in various medical offices and hospitals in the region…”

MDNG has an extremely frank article that is noteworthy by who its author is: a medical doctor who is president of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) company. The article states in number 1-4 that: the award an EHR received, the ‘non-biased expert’, the referred EHR using physician, and the respected physician leader of your local society may have been paid off by the EHR company to say favorable things about a product! Others are that they will nickel and dime you to death, they’ll use your data as a bargaining chip to prevent you from leaving, they emphasize Return On Investment (ROI) to distract you from how overpriced the product is, ‘EHRs don’t improve quality of care and often make you less efficient. And since you won’t figure this out until you are actually using the product, EHR vendors won’t let you try-before-you-buy, and there is no return policy!…A Center for Certification of Health Information Technology (CCHIT) CCHIT-certified product, by definition, is often more expensive and less usable than non-certified products.’ No mention of Free/Open Source Software licensed EHR’s as an alternative. Sigh.

Physician Practice has reader survey data (site asks for zip code and some demographics to view the whole article) on Health IT adoption. While the data is not particularly rigorous scientifically, it has some interesting results and comments by respondents: �There are no standard leaders in medical software as in many other industries,� says another. �There are too many variations and vendors. The interfaces are proprietary rather than open. It is difficult to spend that much money, knowing that the support in the future may be limited and that there may eventually be a standardized software out there.�

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Last week I spent the day at eMDs talking with Dr. Winn and the excellent eMDs team.
Sadly, I cannot talk about eMDs Open Source plans yet, but I can say that they will soon be making a big splash. I had some pretty cool pictures from my visit, including one with Robby the Robot, so post also servers to announce that I have migrated FredTrotter.com to wordpress, in order to be able to post pictures with my blog posts.

Although the National Health Council recommends you to keep a personal health record and take it with you to your doctor,it�s one thing to document your medical information�

It�s another to know when and how to use it. Open MedicDrive,a collaborative open architecture based application has launched the educational Wiki for advancing and educating users about the role of Healthcare Information Technology in Personal Health Record Management.

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Slate has a cautionary tale for public/private initiatives or ‘how municipal Wi-Fi is such a flop’. This may shed some light on the failings of RHIO’s:

Today, the limited success stories come from towns that have actually treated Wi-Fi as a public calling. St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. The network has its problems, such as dead spots, but also claims a 77 percent use rate among its citizens. Cities like St. Cloud understand the concept of a public service: something that’s free, or near-free, like the local swimming pool. Most cities have been too busy dreaming of free pipes to notice that their approach is hopelessly flawed.

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We reported on the Advance HIE article: Getting Beyond Economics last week. The article appeared online briefly for free but it now requires a free registration required login. It is very thought provoking: “…Health insurers and medical software companies, not subject to such regulations, have provided free software and hardware directly to providers. New York City recently awarded a $19.8 million contract to a proprietary EHR vendor, which will permit the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to provide free software to physicians and clinics to be used for care of patients (“Big Medical Step, Starting with the City’s Poor,” New York Times, April 16, 2007). While this may be a good idea from the standpoint of affordability and interoperability if the patients all go to the clinics that use this particular system, it won’t be much help when those patients seek care somewhere else. Additionally, it is not clear how much � and for how long � training, technical support and upgrades are to be provided under this grant. But it is a safe bet that additional products and services won’t be provided free indefinitely.

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Modern Health care is reporting that the Oregon RHIO planning has come to a halt: “The health plans were willing to pay, but the hospitals thought it was a more challenging venture,” Gibson said. The project did not get funded because “it lacked a sustainable business model. If you look carefully at his (Witter’s) business plan, sustainable operation was way off in the future. He just said in year five or beyond, there would be services that might be salable. You still had the first few years that might not be sustainable.”

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Public Service Announcement:

“Our Father’s life was shortened by many years because a laboratory test result that showed a reversible kidney failure was lost in the paper shuffle.”

— The Dunn Family

The not-for-profit Harris County Health Information Cooperative (HCHIC) is announcing its inaugural fund raiser at St. Arnold’s brewery September 20th, for a Houston, Texas area, county-wide or state-wide, non-proprietary Electronic Medical Record system: “Much like a lighthouse benefits all of us, your tax-deductible contribution to HCHIC will be used for desperately needed Electronic Medical Record (EMR) unification with proven and robust non-proprietary software that will be implemented, developed and promoted in Harris County and Texas. If you cannot attend the event, your tax-deductible contribution can be sent to HCHIC 4010 Blue Bonnet, Suite 202 Houston, Tx 77025. Individual memberships starting at $100 are available as well as silver ($500), gold ($1000) and platinum ($10,000) Sponsorships. Membership and Sponsorship donations received prior to October 31st will be ‘founding’ memberships. Membership allows voting rights as well as access to internal communications. Current goal: $80,000. 3 year budget goal: $2 million.” All implementation and development products will be FOSS licensed.

Many in Health IT are moving to all over-the-web ‘asp’, software-as-service Electronic Medical Records services with total centralized control of data. John C. Dvorak sounds off a note of caution for such a trend with the recent Windows Genuine Advantage server outage which should be a wakeup call for those moving to ‘online everything’ applications: ‘What is often lost in individual analyses of how to proceed with your data-processing needs is the concept of “being at the mercy of a single company.” It’s something that you need to avoid at all costs. This Windows Genuine Disadvantage pothole should make all users rethink their strategies…’ He further notes that this outage “happened to Microsoft, not to Alabama Joe’s Server Farm and Toaster Repair.” a note of caution indeed.