Hope to see you there!

“In real-time polling conducted during both sessions, 70 percent of respondents expressed a very favorable or favorable reaction to the plan.”, from a CCHIT email dated 6/18/2009.

and I agree that the proposed modifications will make the certification process much more friendly to the open source community and open the door to a host of solutions being certified. There was also discussion of the meaningful use guidelines that were released the same day.

The original vendor certification will continue and be updated to include the meaningful use criteria that was pushed forward last week (here).  There are two new certifications and they are EHR-M and EHR-S.  EHR-M or Module allows components of a complete solution to be certified. This allows medication management vendors or lab system to certify their solution without it being a full EMR.  I am most interested in this type of certification as eHIP is not a full EMR but incorporates many components.  I can see individually certifying components within the overall platform.  EHR-S or site certification allows a hospital or physician’s office to self-certify an open source product they have implemented or software that was developed in house.  This is also intriguing because I can easily imagine one of our client’s applying for this certification using eHIP.

Two factors that differentiate the original certification and the new ones are cost and emphasis.  Costs for EHR-M and EHR-S are planned to be significantly lower than the existing certification which is a barrier to many open source solutions.  The EHR-S cost might be as low as a few hundred dollars per provider.  While this is important, the emphasis will also be different.  The traditional EMR certification has concentrated on and while continue to concentrate on functionality.  Can the EMR do X, Y, and Z as well as 1,2, and 3?  With EMR-M and S, the emphasis will be on interoperability, a much more important factor.

I think the original EMR certification has had the potential to stifle innovation. With the rules constantly changing, vendors have had to keep up with the new requirements, limiting their ability to add new, more innovative features. I think the new proposed guidelines open the door to new possibilities and I look forward to seeing what eventually is implemented.

Update 6/22/09 – The conference was rescheduled for Fall 2009.  The decision to do this was based on conversations with the Obama administration and other IT leaders.  No date has been announced.  I find this to be fairly vague and while a lot will change and be formalized in the next few months regarding IT particularly in health care, one has to wonder if there was an attendance issue?

I have always thought working in healthcare was one of the best industries because of the huge challenges involved and the personal satisfaction that what you are doing can help others, but now it is really going to get interesting.  Healthcare and personal healthcare are going to move out of the shadows into the mainstream. Its going to be a brave new world.

The big event of the last few weeks was the American Telemedicine Association Annual Conference in Vegas.  This is an event Estenda has attended for the last five years.  It is a great networking event with lots of technology vendors.  This was their largest conference ever.  In the past vendors have been very focused on remote video technology and only somewhat devices. This year there was an explosion in personal health devices and the associated software to manage the data.  Telemedicine is coming into its own. One keynote speaker noted the fact that there are now over 10,000 articles on PubMed that reference telemedicine. Telemedicine is no longer the up and coming technology. It is here and here to stay.

Finally, I attended a one day seminar sponsored by PAeHI. PAeHI is the Pennyslvania eHealth Initiative.  Several topics were discussed including the Obama Healthcare dollars and how to best use them, an overview of the Medical Home concept, and telemedicine in general.  The closing panel was lead by Mark Frisse.  I am familiar with Mark from working on the RWJF Project HealthDesign Grant. His is a dynamic individual that always brings something interesting to the table.  In part he discussed the initiative he lead in Tennessee to create a state-wide medical record repository.  From the sounds of it, they largely ignored all standards and said let’s just get something done! We will figure it out later.  In the end it worked, they have the data, and have been able to generate some interesting reports.

As for the next session, I will be attending a training session on the NHIN Connect program in June.  It will be interesting to get an indepth look at what it is all about and how it works. From monitoring the messageboards it appears to be having a bunch of issues, but nothing that can’t be worked through.

The important thing to note is that this is not a problem limited to Beth Israel or any particular PHR. It is systemic and related to the coding of medical data for billing purposes. Read the article for the reasoning behind this.

I am attending the 2nd Annual Healthcare Informatics Symposium sponsored by The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia on Friday.  Dr. Halamka, Beth Israel’s chief information officer and part of the Google Health’s advisory council last year, will be speaking at lunch.  I wonder if he will address this?

The Pennsylvania eHealth Initiative (PAeHI) was created to encourage the development and use of electronic medical records (EMR) in Pennsylvania along with health information exchanges (HIE), which will ultimately tie into a national system allowing patients and health care providers to securely access medical records regionally and throughout the country.

The Summit is a one day session covering a broad range of topics including the impact of President Obama’s Recovery Act and information on what is going on in Pennsylvania with respect to HIT.