IAM Health CEO David Croston to present at HEALTHMART 2008

Posted September 8th, 2008 by david.

Visit the IAM HEALTH Booth @ HEALTHMART to see HERMES live.

2008 HEALTHMART Agenda

Better Data for Better Health

Posted July 3rd, 2008 by jothy.

In an editorial in the Boston Globe on July 3 entitled “Better data for better health” the newspaper laments that services like Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault are filling a void created by the healthcare industry generally not embracing the Internet (yet). They question whether consumers really want all this control over their health records (evidence suggests they do). And they question whether the HIPAA law should be expanded to cover these new types of entities (some state laws already do, so Internet delivery means these entities will have to comply with the strictest state statutes they might encounter). The Globe has a point but like most people writing on this topic, they have missed the biggest one.

First, the point they have. Yes it is true that healthcare has been slow to go digital. Most large hospitals have electronic health record systems within their four walls that allow for the rapid transfer of patient information from provider to pharmacy to lab and so on. These systems have improved record keeping and sharing of patient information among all the disparate parties dealing with an individual for sure. Most small clinics still do not have EHRs such that a recent report found that only 5% of patients in the US have their information stored in an EHR. But worse is that this information is almost never portable if the patient goes to a different facility. Luckily we in the US never go on vacation, never get sick if we travel, and never move our homes. Oh and we never need a second opinion from a provider in a different medical facility either. Not. So when the Globe points out that the biggest problem with the current medical data management in the US is that data cannot move between facilities they are dead right. This has happened before in other industries from real estate to banking and it doesn’t get fixed with government pressure or regulation. And it usually doesn’t get fixed by the incumbents either. It gets fixed the good old-fashioned american way—by a new venture that sees this as an opportunity. The opportunity is to create a neutral messaging platform that can connect Hospital A with Hospital B or Hospital A with Personal Health Record system B in a secure and trusted way. In practice, Hospital A may need to communicate patient records with 100s of hospitals and 100s of PRHs so its a real burden and challenge for them. Similarly, a PHR faces the daunting task of being able to import records for any of its users no matter which of 100s or even 1000s of hospitals or clinics those consumers used. Speaking of PHRs…

Now for the point they do not have. The Globe questioned whether people really want control over their own health records. Damn right people do. Its been a “black box” where we don’t know what is in there, we don’t know if what is in there is accurate, and when we need the information because we are seeing someone new, its totally inaccessible. The advent of the PHR is very welcome to consumers. Even if all it was was a single place where people can see all the medical data on them, this is far superior to having to try to remember our own medical history. When you go to a new healthcare provider what is the second thing they do after taking your basic vital signs? They sit down and take your medical history. They ask a lot of questions about lifestyle, illnesses, medications, procedures and on and on. If you have all that information in one place its a nice jog to the memory. But it shouldn’t stop there. If you are being treated for something, if you have an on-going illness, if you are on any medications, no new provider will consider your medical history sufficient on which to base treatment. PHRs as they are designed today, and this definitely includes Google and Microsoft’s offerings, are nothing more than a jog to the patients memory, they are simply going to be viewed as advisory. The third thing that new provider is then going to do is to order some tests; tests you have already had. We understand from several studies that as much as 25% of the healthcare costs in the US are related to this sort of (avoidable) repeat tests. What would avoid these tests? And by the way, if the patient data available to this new provider is not complete and they do end up prescribing a regimen that creates an adverse reaction, the patient could die. According to the authority on the subject, the Institute of Medicine, 100,000 lives a year are lost in this way. So what would avoid the repeat tests AND avoid drug allergies and drug-drug interactions? Complete, accurate, guaranteed original patient records delivered instantly right to the new provider.

IAM HEALTH is providing both the messaging platform to connect EHR to EHR and EHR to PHR, as well as the security and control for delivering guaranteed original content in a browser. Now the records provided by the EHR to the PHR and presented by the PHR to the healthcare provider at the point-of-care are provably intact, unaltered and reliable. Suddenly, the provider can and will base treatment on the records they are seeing. This will speed up care and lower costs by avoiding repeat tests, and it will improve quality by making sure all the work done at the original hospital or clinic is available to inform the new provider so they avoid adverse medication effects.