The Government gets out of the way go Health Information Exchange Development

Last week the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (The ONC) made an important announcement. After conducting an RFI they have decided NOT to continue with creating regulations for Trusted Exchange of Patient Information. 

http://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/electronic-health-and-medical-records/enabling-trusted-exchange-governing-nationwide-health-information-network/

This is akin to the government stepping back from building traffic lights at an intersection where the roads have yet to be built. This is good news. We all know that when Roadworks start everything slows down or people find alternate routes. 

This is a development that should be applauded. But it comes at a price. The Health Care industry can't settle back into complacency. Instead we should re-double our efforts to push forward with initiatives that promote Trusted Health Information Exchange.

We should remain mindful that regulations will eventually appear so we need to build with sensible security, auditability and traceability in mind. In so doing we can work with the ONC to highlight best practices with the potential that those best practices may ultimately form the backbone of a future regulatory approach.

This is common sense and I find it very encouraging, especially when I look around at all the great talent that is currently focusing on the issues of creating flexible, open yet secure approaches to Health Information Exchange. 

I expect some of this to come up at the Consumer Health IT Summit at the Department of Health and Human Services that is being held today - September 10th. I will be at the event because HealthCamp was asked by the ONC to facilitate one of the discussion streams this afternoon. If you are at the event come and say hello! Better yet - jump in to the HealthCamp Sessions this afternoon and join in the discussions that are helping to reshape healthcare.

http://www.cvent.com/events/2012-consumer-health-it-summit-expanding-access-to-health-information/event-summary-0771fbd69e4f41c39e415f922bcf4d33.aspx

The plenary session from 10:00am to 1:00pm Eastern will be live streamed.  Please visit www.hhs.gov/live to view the webcast.  No registration is required.

Here is the Agenda:

2012 Consumer Health IT Summit September 10, 2012 #HealthIT4U

10am - Welcome, Dr. Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health IT, ONC 

10:10am - Blue Button: The Early Days, Randy Watson, Veteran and Peter Levin, Chief Technology Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs

10:20am - ONC’s Strategy for Engaging Consumers, Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health IT, HHS and Lygeia Ricciardi, Acting Director, Office of Consumer eHealth, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, HHS

10:40am - Blue Button: What Lies Ahead, Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Peter Levin, Chief Technology Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health IT, HHS

11am - Federal Initiatives to Liberate Health Data Discussion Panel

Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer (moderator)
Leon Rodriguez, Director, Office for Civil Rights, HHS
Niall Brennan, Director, Policy and Data Analysts, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, HHS
Anne Schuchat, Director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HHS Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HHS
Brad Hesse, Chief, Health Communications and Informatics Research Branch, National Cancer Institute

11:30am - Success and Innovation in the Private Sector: Making Health Data Available and Encouraging Consumers to Use IT Discussion Panel 

Lygeia Ricciardi, Acting Director, Office of Consumer eHealth, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, HHS (moderator) 

Bill Feller, Vice President of Innovations, UnitedHealth

Clay Patterson, Vice President and General Manager, Cerner

Becky Sykes, Chief Information Officer, Catholic Health Partners
Susie Hull, Consumer e-Health Engagement Task Force, Alliance for Nursing Informatics
Alan Blaustein, Founder, CarePlanners
Loyce Pace-Bass, Director of Policy, LIVESTRONG

12:30pm - Closing Remarks, featuring Dr. Bill Moreau, Managing Director of Sports Medicine, United States Olympic Committee and Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health IT, HHS

1pm - Adjourn Webcast

1pm - 1:45pm - Lunch and Transition to Breakout Sessions Working Sessions (for in person attendees only):

1:45pm - 3:30pm Working Sessions

Track 1 – Reaching Audiences Effectively: Outreach, Engagement and Communications for Consumers and Others—Room 325A, 

Led by Jenna Bramble, NeHC; Marsha Dolan, AHIMA; and Jeff Sovel, Patient

Track 2 – Supporting Provider Implementation: Making Meaningful Use Real—HHS Auditorium, 

Led by Eva Powell, National Partnership for Women and Families; Peter Basch, MedStar Health; Rob Anthony, CMS; and Regina Holliday, Patient Advocate

Track 3 – Poised for Growth: Paving the Way for Technical Improvements and New Consumer Markets for Apps and Tools—Switzer A&B, 

Led by Pierce Graham-Jones, HHS; Ryan Panchadsaram, White House Presidential Innovation Fellow; Mary Anne Sterling, Patient Advocate

Track 4 – Unconference – a Participant Driven Meeting—Great Hall, 

Facilitated by Mark Scrimshire, 3M; Content led by you –you help to create the agenda 

My only challenge with the working sessions is that there are some great sessions planned alongside the HealthCamp track. But that is always the way. There is so much good discussion going on at every HealthCamp. 

If you want to experience this for yourself you can come to one of these HealthCamps (or check out the calendar as we plan 2013):

• HealthCamp/Boston on Friday September 14th at the Microsoft NERD Campus in Cambridge, MA
• HealthCamp/KansasCity on Sunday September 23rd at CERNER in Kansas City, MO
• HealthCamp/SFBay on Friday October 5th at Kaiser Permanete's Garfield Innovation Center in San Leandro, CA

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One voice can change the world - Join in at HealthCa.mp #HCBOS #HCKC #HCSFBay

I was driving home this evening listening to C-SPAN and caught the story of "Fired Up and Ready to Go!" a story about how one voice can change the world.

It makes you think about the power of a single voice.

What really touches a chord for me is when I think back to the origins of HealthCa.mp in 2008. We started with a few people in a room but the idea of empowering health care engagement caught people's attention.  From those humble beginnings HealthCamp has grown. It has grown not by large donations from companies (although we would not refuse those offers) - No - the drive has been from a wonderful community of participants. People have gotten involved and built a comraderie that survives long beyond the event. 

So, you can get fired up and redy to go! Together we can change health care for the better.

When I look at BlueButton and offshoot ideas like Rainbow Button and the friendships and partnerships that have sprung up from connections made at HealthCamps around the country and around the world I know that we can make change happen.

Next week HealthCamp takes another step. We have added a last minute HealthCamp event. On Monday September 10th the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is hosting a summit at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington DC and we had a request to help them organize un-conference sessions as part of the event. How could we refuse? So I have been able to reorganize my crazy schedule in order to help the ONC at their summit. 

So if you have a ticket to the event and are planning to be there on Monday (The event is fully subscribed) come and get involved in the discussions that will be taking place. For more information about the overall agenda check out:

https://custom.cvent.com/52D4FA8B59C44FAAAA421FE422C23033/files/aefa4b4343ed459c94d8bc9c10a7f61a.pdf

The Consumer Health IT kicks off a crazy few weeks where we have 4 HealthCa.mp events taking place. You can still grab a ticket for the other events. So go ahead. Add your voice. Join in and help us change the world.

• HealthCa.mp/Boston on Friday September 14th at Microsoft, Cambridge, MA
• HealthCa.mp/KansasCity on Sunday September 23rd in Kansas City, MO
• HealthCa.mp/SFBay on Friday October 5th in San Leandro, CA at Kaiser Permanente's fabulous Garfield Innovation Center.

We still have opportunities for sponsors to support these events. This is a great opportunity to gain exposure with passionate and connected thought leaders in and around Health Care. At the last HealthCa.mp/DC in June the event generated over 3 million tweet impressions.

So Add your Voice. Let's Change the world by empowering Health Citizen's everywhere. 

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Chrome + IE Tab smokes IE9? What have you found?

This week I am having to get to grips with an environment where Internet Explorer is a requirement. The same environment also uses Lotus Notes. For a Mac user this can be challenging but I have made quite a bit of progress setting up a configuration that works effectively.

I managed to obtain a copy of Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta. I did try to upgrade to the latest version of the Mac Client but the IBM web site steadfastly refuses to accept my address information. When you select the country it automatically submits the page - before you have had time to fill in the remaining data such as Zipcode - which is required. Consequently you end up in an infinite loop. All this in order to download a TRIAL copy of Lotus Notes 8.5.2 client. It is no wonder Lotus Notes is not that popular. You can't easily get your hands on a trial copy.

The next challenge was to use Internet Explorer on my Mountain Lion copy of Mac OS X. Now, I have had a copy of VMware Fusion v 3.1 but that will not run on Mountain Lion. Fortunately VMware have released VMware Fusion 5 with both Windows 8 and Mountain Lion support. I managed to find a discount code that let me acquire a copy of Fusion 5 for close to the upgrade price. That coupled with a copy of Windows 7 and I was ready to get going.

VMWare Fusion with the Unity interface is very nice and pretty responsive on my MacBook Air. After purchasing Windows 7 Professional and downloading the 64-bit version I was able to launch Windows 7 via VMware Fusion 5. I then upgraded from IE 8 to IE 9 and also installed a complimentary copy of McAfee Anti-virus. 

I also took the plunge and purchased a Windows copy of 1Password from Agilebits. This is my "Must Have" password manager. It works across just about every platform. It also works in conjunction with DropBox so after downloading and installing Dropbox and firing up 1Password I had my passwords readily available.

The only other components I then needed were: Flash and Adobe Reader since Windows, unlike the Mac doesn't handle PDF files without an add-in. 

With all this up and running I was able to fire up IE9 and access these IE-only sites. I was also having to access a confluence wiki via an Extranet connection. Updating the wiki turned out to be very slow, even over a fast network connection. However, when I downloaded Adobe Flash Player I had inadvertently left the "Download Google Chrome" pick active. I therefore had Google Chrome installed in my Windows Virtual Machine. 

In an effort to make editing the wiki more efficient I tried Chrome. However, I needed to be able to seamlessly switch between the Confluence Wiki pages and other web pages where IE was a requirement. I therefore downloaded and activated the IE Tab Add-in for Google Chrome. This has turned out to be a great solution. Chrome has a better User Interface than IE9 and the combination of Windows Chrome with IE Tab seems to be much faster and more responsive than IE9. 

What has your experience been with IE9? For me, switching to Chrome + IE Tab has seen the "Reloading Web Page" errors disappear and running Windows Chrome using Unity under VMware Fusion makes the browser seem almost like the native OS X Chrome browser. 

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Baltimore Tech Breakfast - Meet Baltimore's CIO @christonjes #bmoretechb

This morning is the Baltimore Tech Breakfast (#bmoretechb). This is the largest regular technology meetup in the Baltimore area. Kudos to Ron Schmelzer of Bizelo for keeping this meetup growing. This month we have a packed house of nearly 200 people.

Here is the Agenda for the morning:

Agenda for August 2012 BTB:

8:00 - 8:10 - Get yer Bagels & Coffee and chit-chat

8:10 - 8:15 - Introductions, Sponsors, Announcements - Ronald Schmelzer

8:15 - 8:25 - MindGrub's Mobile Games - Todd Marks

8:25 - 8:35 - SurveySnap - Ryan Sears

8:35 - 8:40 - 30 Second Lightning "Shout Outs"

8:40 - 8:50 - Baltimore City CIO - Chris Tonjes

8:50 - 9:00 - RenterResume - Joshua Hines

9:00 - 9:05 - 30 Second Lightning "Shout Outs"

9:05 - 9:15 - KnotFriends (Update!) - Tony Bagdon

9:15 - 9:25 - Parking Panda (Update!) - Nick Miller

9:25 - 9:30 - 30 Second Lightning "Shout Outs" & Last Words

It is great to meet so many friends from around the Baltimore Area. People like the OpenRange Video team who record the event. The Dinnertime.com team who are currently in stealth mode. Eli The Computer Guy.

Todd Marks - Mindgrub Mobile Games

Gaming is one of the divisions that has grown quickly.

Realized that first person shooters were going to go mobile. They have brought together Social, Location and Mobile.

TAG is a game of tagging your friends using your iPhone. Augmented Reality first person shooter.

Also produced Zac & Haley Scuba Adventures produced for Shark Week on Discovery Kids. 

Gaming is big in Baltimore area. Local colleges have gaming tracks in college. This brought the industry here. Mobile gaming is really expanding quickly.

Income is not coming from games. Partnering is essential for promotion. You need more marketing dollars than development dollars to get traction. 

Survey-Snap - Ryan Sears

Targeted for Architects, engineers and facility managers. 

Survey-Snap is Creating Building Surveys on mobile devices. Taking an analog data collection process to the digital tablet.

Neat ability to add pins to the drawing and add comments and notes to the tags.

Annotation, sketches, audio and video can be added and tagged to a picture or drawing.

Presenting this material is a challenge for architects and building managers. Survey-snap makes the process easy by creating a PDF with all the pictures and annotations laid out.

This is a Software as a Service offering. Currently in beta.

The software can work in other verticals: Event planners, Insurance adjusters. 

Feedback suggests over 100 vertical applications.

The system is modular and will provide a marketplace for these vertical applications.

The system will support offline use. There will also be a data export option.

Baltimore CIO - Chris Tonjes

Chris is 37 days in to his new job.  

Things to improve:

1. The city's phone system

re-focusing the stakeholders. 

2. Emergency Communications 

Old with many single points of failure.

3. 911- Computer aided dispatch

Advancing the project. Two phases. Phase 1 in 6 months.

4. 311 - CRM System

Funding to replace it but want's to do something more modern, lightweight and open.

5. Data Center updates

Two very old centers. Antiquated. Still using IBM mainframe with VM and tape. Legacy applications bring in over $1B per year. 

From strategic perspectives in an interesting position: An opportunity to rebuild an IT department. 

New financial models. Hiring opportunities with probably 50 openings.

Pushing to move very quickly. This is a CIO that uses Google Docs and Dropbox.

Promoting OpenData.

Having a pro-active CIO and a forward thinking IT department being constructed this makes Baltimore a potentially great place to grow a technology company.

What does the CIO need from the tech community?

- "A little bit of patience". Need some breathing room to mitigate some existing conditions. 

- Give input - send email. Input is welcomed.

RenterResu.me - Joshua Hines

Renting made simple. The Match.com of renting.

Provides a dashboard for Landlords.

Allows renters to setup their profiles. 

Renters pay a one-time fee of $35. Pay once instead of for each rental application. 

Background checks are performed. Eviction database check. Criminal history.

Fee is good for 30 days. Renewals at a lower fee.

Launching in Q1 of 2013.

Also have enterprise solutions for property managers.

KnotFriends (Update!) - Tony Bagdon

A tie swapping service.

$14.95 for three ties. They take a cut on each transaction. No cost to sender. Receiver/Buyer pays.

I have suggested to them that they should do a themed tie groupon style deal. This would be great at various times of year such as St Patricks Day, Christmas etc.

Parking Panda (Update!) - Nick Miller

Parking Panda is growing quickly. A great mobile app. The iphone app was built by Mindgrub.

Reserve a parking space. AirBnB model allows people to rent private parking spaces. They also work with parking sites to maximize their yield. This gives drivers a discount on parking.

Parking Panda is providing the parking for the Baltimore Grand Prix.

Expanded to Washington DC and launching in San Francisco and Philadelphia.

SEO is important. People Google Where to park.

The platform is built on the Microsoft stack.

Other Notes:

Distilled Intelligence. A venue for startups.

http://distilledintelligence.com

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Apple could throw AT&T a real curveball with Facetime if they wanted to. #NetNeutrality

AT&T have been putting themselves through some real contortions to argue that their limiting of Facetime access on their cellular network to those people that sign up for their new mobile share plans. Arstechnica's Nate Anderson has a good assessment of AT&T's position here:  http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/att-have-you-no-shame/

What is interesting is how AT&T justifies their position in relation to Net Neutrality by arguing that subscribers can download alternative apps for video calls.

So if Apple wanted to throw AT&T a curveball they only have to do one thing. They take Facetime for iOS, pull it out of the core iOS application set and make it a separate downloadable App on the App Store. By AT&T's rules Facetime would be the playing on the same level Playing field as Skype and other video calling apps in the App Store. 

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#health2stat q and a

The VA took 3 years to grow from 1 guy providing social media support to the level of activity they have today.

5 central staff and representatives in every center across the country.

Birth control

A year talking to target audiences taught them that birth control sucks.

Humor is a powerful tool to open up the conversation. Especially with men.

VA HRA

How was hRA model connected to the representation of health risk age. The health risk age is compelling. Connecting the hRA to this was an obvious step. It motivates people to change.

Sleepchamps

Moving from 20 question paper questionnaire and by putting them on a smartphone they can be completed at home in real time As events occur.

I think patents might appreciate lullaby lyrics and tunes in the Zansors sleepChamp app. That could be a useful resource for parents.

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#health2stat

I am at the Barking Dog for Health2Stat organized by Aquilent.

Health2con.com got a mention for the San Francisco conference in October. If people decide to go they should plan to arrive early to take part in healthca.mp/SFBay on Friday 5th October.

First speaker: Mary Arrnstead

Talking about NITAAC and the NIH government-wide contracts for both products and services.

CIO-SP3 IT services and solutions

Also small business 54 vendors
131 small business vendors

ECS III IT products vehicle This has 42 approved vendors

Second speaker: ranjit Das from Zansors

sleepChamp for kids.

Empower kids sleep.

Licensed from university of Michigan.

Measuring sleep quality for kids.

Sleep medicine
Data Analytics
Information architecture
Intelligent design
Lean business development
Social media engagement

Sleep champ deals with:

Sleep disorders
Sleepiness
Growth/body weight
Behavior and cognition Evidence based medicine is transformed from a paper based collection to smartphones

Parents consider the smartphone a mobile command center.

Speaker three: Konstantin Von Schmidt-Pauli

Talking about A VA healthy vet portal application that is in early stages of development. Deals with 508 compliant health risk assessment.

So the VA is building the hRA from the ground up but it looks very like a Traitwise survey.

Speaker four: Lawrence Swaider

7 out of 10 pregnancies are unplanned.

The research to the failure showed that the time of publications totally failed with the wrong tone.

Put the information in a infect that young women understood

The method explorer is a platform that can be used on multiple sites. It demystifies contraceptive methods.

"create once use everywhere"

The ad council has donated print,tv and radio ads- a $2m value.

Speaker five: Lauren Bailey VA and digital communication

22M veterans but the VA reaches less than half.

Now have 75 twitter feeds, blogs and Facebook.

Reaching vets where they are.

Facebook and twitter have been effective.

The more you talk with folks the more they tend to come back.

Lauren manages VAntage Point blog

Vets meet up on facebook. Connect with team members. They are going where the veterans are.

Twitter is used to communicate with industry partners.

Flickr has been incredibly effective. Also on YouTube. Lots of video communications are internal. YouTube is used to spread the word by publishing these videos.

The team don't seek to control communication but rather to make it easy for community managers to use the channels.

Still working to measure reach and impact.

Hard to channel questions to the right people quickly.

Governance is not about control. It is about making it easy and sharing resources.

Now for the Q & A...

Mark Scrimshire
B: http://ekive.blogspot.com
....Sent from my iPhone

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