Solving Big-Data Bottleneck

Cameron, David. "Solving Big-Data Bottleneck." Harvard Medical School, February 7, 2013. 

From the report: "In a study that represents a potential cultural shift in how basic science research can be conducted, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and London Business School have demonstrated that a crowdsourcing platform pioneered in the commercial sector can solve a complex biological problem more quickly than conventional approaches—and at a fraction of the cost." Read more

Using Twitter to Track the Flu: Researchers Find a Better Way to Screen the Tweets

"Using Twitter to Track the Flu: Researchers Find a Better Way to Screen the Tweets." Johns Hopkins University, January 24, 2013. 

From the article: "Sifting through social media messages has become a popular way to track when and where flu cases occur, but a key hurdle hampers the process: how to identify flu-infection tweets. Some tweets are posted by people who have been sick with the virus, while others come from folks who are merely talking about the illness. If you are tracking actual flu cases, such conversations about the flu in general can skew the results.

To address this problem, Johns Hopkins computer scientists and researchers in the School of Medicine have developed a new tweet-screening method that not only delivers real-time data on flu cases, but also filters out online chatter that is not linked to actual flu infections. Comparing their method, which is based on analysis of 5,000 publicly available tweets per minute, to other Twitter-based tracking tools, the Johns Hopkins researchers say their real-time results track more closely with government disease data that takes much longer to compile." Read more

Big Bad Data: Law, Public Health, and Biomedical Databases

Hoffman, Sharona and Andy Podgurski. "Big Bad Data: Law, Public Health, and Biomedical Databases."  Case Western Legal Studies Research paper No. 2012-34, October 30, 2012.

From the report: "The accelerating adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems will have profound impacts on clinical care. It will also have far-reaching implications for public health research and surveillance, which in turn could lead to changes in public policy, statutes, and regulations. The public health benefits of EHR use can be significant. However, researchers and analysts who rely on EHR data must proceed with caution and understand the potential limitations of EHRs. 

Much has been written about the risk of EHR privacy breaches. This paper focuses on a different set of concerns, those relating to data quality. EHR data can be erroneous, miscoded, fragmented, and incomplete. In addition, if causation is at issue, analysts must grapple with the complexities of causal inference. Public health findings can be tainted by the problems of selection bias, confounding bias, and measurement bias. These and other obstacles can easily lead to invalid conclusions and unsound public health policies.

The paper will highlight the public health uses of EHRs. It will also probe the shortcomings of EHR information and the challenges of collecting and analyzing it. Finally, we outline several regulatory and other interventions to address data analysis difficulties." Read more

Consumers Want Health Tech to Connect But Say Docs Don't Deliver

Byers, Jeff. "Consumers Want Health Tech to Connect But Say Docs Don't Deliver." Fierce Health IT, September 17, 2012.

From the article:  "85 percent of respondents said they wanted to communicate with their physician by phone or email and more than 50 percent wanted to schedule appointments and pay bills online. Just more than 10 percent report their physicians offer these services.

And although 65 percent of the 2,311 surveyed adults said access to personal health information is "very important" or "important", only 17 percent said their physicians actually offer it." Read more

See also:

"Patient Choice an Increasingly Important Factor in the Age of the "Healthcare Consumer"." Harris Interactive, September 10, 2012.

The Case for Improving Health Data Liquidity

Anderson, Kristine Martin. "The Case for Improving Health Data Liquidity." Government Health IT, September 17, 2012. 

From the blog: "To date, progress has been made in a few areas but we still stand removed from a truly patient-centric healthcare system. To meet this objective, more should be done with patient data – from how it moves within the healthcare system, to how it is analyzed and presented." Read more

Technology to Play a Bigger Role in Hospital Care

Dance, Amber. "Technology to Play a Bigger Role in Hospital Care." The Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2012.

From the article: "Hospital beds will become the center of a digital network encompassing information as varied as your heart rate and dietary restrictions to vast stores of data that will help predict how you'll respond to treatments…. The medical center is also using modern technology to battle an old scourge: the spread of infections. The best prevention is still simple hand washing; it's getting everyone to stop by the sink that's a challenge." Read more

Fast Access to Records Helps Fight Epidemics

Freudenheim, Milt. "Access to Records Helps Fight Epidemics." The New York Times, June 18, 2012.

From the article: "Public health departments around the country have long scrutinized data from local hospitals for indications that diseases like influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, syphilis and asthma might be on the rise, and to monitor the health consequences of heat waves, frigid weather or other natural phenomena. In the years since 9/11, this scrutiny has come to include signs of possible bioterrorism.

When medical records were maintained mainly on paper, it could take weeks to find out that an infection was becoming more common or that tainted greens had appeared on grocery shelves. But the growing prevalence of electronic medical records has had an unexpected benefit: By combing through the data now received almost continuously from hospitals and other medical facilities, some health departments are spotting and combating outbreaks with unprecedented speed." Read more

Former Governors Douglas, Geringer: States to Transform Care Through HIT

Douglas, Jim and Jim Geringer. "Former Governors Douglas, Geringer: States to Transform Care Through HIT." Government Health IT, June 11, 2012.

From the blog: "During this week’s opening of the HIMSS Government Health IT Conference and Exhibition in Washington D.C., Governor Jim Douglas released the Roundtable’s first report States Will Transform Healthcare through Health IT and HIE Organizations. Our report opens with a historical snapshot of health IT legislation and an overview of innovative and collaborative state initiatives. Critical challenges faced by states are recognized and supported with recommendations for meeting them.

1. States should continue to leverage their state-level HIE and state level health IT infrastructure in new and innovative ways. Close working partnerships between State governmental entities, federally supported RECs, Beacon Communities, Medicaid Offices, Professional Trade Associations and HIMSS National and local Chapters will expedite the implementation of health IT in the States.
2. Health IT transcends political lines and should be on the federal and state agendas over the next several years in order to continue the current momentum and improvement of care quality and healthcare spending.
3. Encourage states to facilitate, engage and educate patients and consumers with the delivery of their healthcare services and promote overall increase in health literacy. The delivery of high quality healthcare requires patient participation and shared decision making in which the patient, families and providers use the most effective steps to improve healthcare outcomes. Population Health Literacy is the essential first step in maximizing improvements in healthcare.
4. Health IT is a necessary and vital precursor to a lot of the other healthcare reform actions that are contemplated by both private payers and public payers both at the state and federal level.
5. State-level HIEs need to be prepared to shift their business models as Federal and State health reform policies continue to shift from fee-for-service to pay-for-quality models in order to develop and maintain sustainability. “Health Information Exchange” will likely need to shift to “Health Care Coordination Facilitation.”
6. Better coordination between and among federal agencies and state health agencies to ensure the value of state-level HIEs and funding sources are aligned to ensure success." Read more

See also

States Will Transform Healthcare through Health IT and HIE Organizations, a report from

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, 2012.   

Dictation Degrades EHR Accuracy

Pulley, John. "Dictation Degrades EHR Accuracy." Nextgov, May 23, 2012.

From the article: "Patient care is “significantly worse” when doctors dictate their notes into electronic health records compared with two other common forms of documenting care, according to a study published online this week by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

The findings suggested that doctors “who more intensely interact” with EHRs based on their style of documentation “may pay greater attention to coded fields and clinical decision support and thus may deliver higher quality care,” according to the article abstract." Read more

See also

Linder, Jeffrey, A., Schnipper, Jeffrey, L. and Middleton, Blackford. "Research and Applications: Method of Electronic Health Record Documentation and Quality of Primary Care."  J Am Med Inform Assoc, May 19, 2012.

Survey: Americans Trust Web-Based Health Information

"Survey: Americans Trust Web-Based Health Information." Healthcare Informatics, May 22, 2012.

From the article: "According to a new survey from healthcare business intelligence vendor Wolters Kluwer Health, Americans trust information about their health that appears online. The survey, which was conducted by IPSOS, which talked to 1,000 consumers in the U.S. ages 18 and older, says three in ten Americans report they “always” or “frequently” turn to the internet to find answers to medical questions.

In addition, 65 percent of those seeking medical information online saying they trust the information they see. Among consumers seeking medical information online, 63 percent claim to have never misdiagnosed themselves using online information. The survey’s authors surmise easier access to online medical information may have a positive impact on the doctor-patient relationship, with two-thirds, 67 percent, of Americans that seek medical information online stating that this has made them better informed as patients. Forty-eight percent of consumers say they turn to the internet to find answers to medical questions in order to be more informed about a medical condition before a doctor’s visit." Read more

See also

Wolters Kluwer Health Surveys Uncover Consumer and Physician Perspectives, a survey by Wolters Kluwer, May 16, 2012. 

High Court Ruling Not Expected To Impair Health IT

Blasi, Paula. "High Court Ruling Not Expected To Impair Health IT." iHealthBeat, May 21, 2012.

From the feature: "Back in March, crowds of people gathered outside the Supreme Court building to proclaim their support for or opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Stakeholders on one side of the political spectrum touted the law's current and future benefits, while stakeholders on the other side called for a complete repeal of the legislation. But despite the heated rhetoric, experts note that one component of the health reform law has had a steady stream of support from across the political spectrum: health IT. … Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the health reform law, experts predict that health IT will continue to be a bipartisan issue." Read more

What Could Revolutionize Health Care? This Database.

Kliff, Sarah. "What Could Revolutionize Health Care? This Database." The Washington Post, May 21, 2012.

From the article: "This morning a new nonprofit called the Health Care Cost Institute will roll out a database of 5 billion health insurance claims (all stripped of the individual health plan’s identity, to address privacy concerns). Researchers will be able to access that data, largely using it to probe a critical question: What makes health care so expensive? The Health Care Cost Institute database is massive. With data voluntarily supplied by Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and Kaiser Permanente, it covers 33 million Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance. In order to store just one of those insurers’ data in paper form, you would need 60 million four-foot filing cabinets. …Now that all the data is in one place, researchers can start to tackle questions like: Where is health care expensive? Are certain procedures driving up prices? Is health care becoming more costly because of higher prices or volume? HCCI’s own economists have tackled that last question, in a report out today, the first to use the new database. It finds that higher prices charged by hospitals and other prices have driven health care cost growth during the recession, rather than Americans using more medicine. Medical prices grew three times faster than the Consumer Price Index, a measure of price inflation, between 2009 and 2010. This confirms similar trends seen in the National Health Expenditures report as well as in Medicare data, both of which show people using less health care as the economy slowed." Read more

See also

Health Care Cost and Utilization Report, a report prepared by the Health Care Cost Institute,

May 2012.

Googling Cancer: Search Algorithms Can Scan Disease for Patient Risk

Choi, Charles, Q. "Googling Cancer: Search Algorithms Can Scan Disease for Patient Risk. Txchnologist, sponsored by G.E., May 17, 2012.

From the article: "The algorithm Google uses to rank which results pop up first in search queries, PageRank, orders results based on how other web pages are connected to them via hyperlinks. Researchers modified PageRank to develop NetRank, which scans how genes and proteins in a cell are similarly connected through a network of interactions with their neighbors — “‘friends’ in the social network analogy… The researchers used NetRank on about 20,000 proteins to see which ones were the best indicators for survival. They identified seven proteins that could help assess how aggressive a patient’s tumor is and guide clinicians to decide if the prognosis was worth trying chemotherapy or not." Read more

 

See also

Winter C, Kristiansen G, S. Kersting, J. Roy, D. Aust, et al. (2012) Google Goes Cancer: Improving Outcome Prediction for Cancer Patients by Network-Based Ranking of Marker Genes. PLoS Comput Biol 8(5): e1002511.