Robert Wood Johnson Project HealthDesign

The Robert Wood Johnson Project HealthDesign has finally posted the materials created by the grant recipients online. One of the novel concepts behind this grant was that everything produced would be released as open source.  As an advocate and contributor of open source software, this was an intriguing concept.  Estenda participated in one of the projects and the material is now available on-line at their site.

Beth Israel stops sending claims data to Google and Microsoft PHRs

If you haven’t seen the recent news article in the Bostom Globe about the inaccuracy of data being stored in Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault and how it can be confusing, it is definitely worth reading.  Beth Israel was sending the claims data to Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault PHRs.  Sounds good in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work out so nicely.  Because of the resulting confusing, they have decided to stop sending the claims data into any PHR.  The title of the article detailing what happened mentions Google, but it also stopped sending claims data elsewhere.

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?