eHealth

Posted for Kaushik P.

GE has recently unveiled its new product called eHealth. This product is in response to government’s $19 billion incentive package, which aims to help doctors and hospital to digitize their disorganized paper records system. GE invested $90 million to launch eHealth. In this article Elizabeth Moore said, “It is a daunting task, but if it works, a digital record system that streamlines connectivity between clinicians and patients would eventually cost less, work faster, and reduce medical errors, some of which can be fatal.” GE’s new eHealth business better connects patients, hospitals and doctors to critical information.

eHealth suite includes a subsystem call LifeSensor for patients. LifeSensor is a secured web-based record system where it lets patients access their health records, histories and collaborate with doctors. I think this product will take healthcare to next level and improve collaboration and interoperability in healthcare industry. Those days will be gone where you have to pay for mailing healthcare records from one office to another and keeping tracks of how many X-rays you have had since past year. You won’t have to deal with bad handwriting anymore. With current system, there is missing link between hospitals, patients and primary physicians. Starting with products like eHealth the systems can be automated to send notifications to primary physicians when patients are admitted or discharged from hospitals and they can view patients lab results instantly.

During our class, we have discussed many collaboration tools that can be used by organizations but there are not many collaboration tools like eHealth, which lets patients, access their records online and collaborate with doctors. I feel our healthcare systems are behind compare to our financial systems. Our financial infrastructure is very interoperable. You can go to any part of the world, use your credit card, access your bank account and withdraw money from your checking or savings account. You can wire transfer money from one bank to another. Yet in healthcare, it is not possible to exchange your electronic health records from one hospital to another or one doctor to another. Our healthcare IT infrastructure is poor and we needs lots systems like eHealth.

Have you heard about eHealth or do you know similar products? What do you think of eHealth? What do you think about our healthcare infrastructure? Do you think we are ready for products like eHealth?

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Comments

[Kyle Fishwick]

Now this I like for collaboration. There is probably a pay per membership that the doctors have to pay just to use the service but most important is that the data can get shared.
I would assume the doctors can post on their findings to the site that contains patience records. This should help out tremendously in the future, I am interested to see how many health care providors will adapt this technology, but its a great idea. Lets hope what we learned about in class, where sometimes even great ideas that have a profitable ROI may not be continued, does not happen in this case, I like these ideas where people push the pace of technology and speed in the medical industry.

[Ying C.]

the more i work on collaboration virtual words project the more I want to set up some sort of collaboration 3d enterprise gaming for healthcare sector. it is beneficial to both customers and hospitals.

[KimG]

The collaboration benefits will be huge when this becomes the norm, and I do believe it will become the norm. The tools for digitizing medical records and collaborating with others are outpacing their ability to implement good policies and procedures for keeping them secured and this scares me. It is hard to dispute the administrative savings to be had, but is anyone calculating what it will cost them in litigation after they suffer a security breach? Perhaps it is like all other things in business; you weigh the benefits against the risks and just know that it won't be perfect and you budget for those litigation costs. Here is an article discussing this. It is little lengthy but interesting if you want more details about the kinds of risks that are out there. http://www.co-bw.com/ethics_protecing_medical_privacy_in_DA.pdf

[Haidar AlMubarak]

I worked in healthcare twice once as a summer trainee and the other time a full time employee. The former one used pen and paper in most of transactions and it was horrible, while working there I have developed small application using MS Access to help in tracking the patient files. The second one where I worked as full time employee they have hired 30+ professional developers to build a full medical records system that integrates with PACS system, Pharmacy system ... and they have a module in the system that lets patients reserve appointments online and get notification through e-mail and SMS. it was very appreciated by both doctors and patients. With a single click a doctor can see the history of the patient and all current medicine he is taken so not to give him/her medicine that might be harmful to him/her.

People are ready for systems like eHealth but I think it needs more time for the infrastructure to be ready.

[Amanda Fick]

eHealth is great for organization and record keeping in the health industry. But what about the chance of hackers getting into the system? In Virginia, a hacker got a hold of thousands of records and threaten to use the information. http://itacidentityblog.com/hackers-holding-va-health-data-for-10-million-ransom . How do we get protected from this? There are serious threats that our health information will be unleashed with out our knowledge. I don't want people to be back to get my records and all of my medical history.

[Cornel B.]

I was formerly employed at big health care insurer and electronic health records were a big topic amongst our design teams. President bush reported before leaving office that he wanted by 2012 to for care provider to have EHR. However the issue has always been the cost to implement this technology as well as the way to protect this sensitive information for the wrong people. I think ehealth is a good step towards this goal but i think we are still a few years away for EHR to be fully implemented and accepted by the masses

[Lauren J.]

I think this would be a great tool. There are several firms that already provide EMR services, one I know of is called Efficient Health Information Solutions and they offer full scale services to medical practitioners that are looking to convert from paper to soft copies of information. I think we are certainly ready for eHealth, the majority of all people live online. We shop, socialize, bank, attend school, and read among other things on the web. A large scale platform to integrate the solutions we have would be great, we just have to keep it safe.

[Roselyn Odulate]

Wow, that is great. It's about time some tool came up for the health area. Because the amount of papers being accumulated isn't cutting it at all. we have Information being mixed up or missing.. which isn't good for clients as well as the medical physicians them selves... If this ehealth works it can change the way things are being done with the health work. Increase time and efficiency, as well as accurate client record will be recorded with worrying about any mix up of client information. I will give this a two thumb up....

[Janice Hill]

I have been hearing about electronic patient records for years. Adaption has been slow but will reach the tipping point at some time in the future. According to Wikipedia less than twenty percent of hospitals and doctor offices had implemented the technology even though it has been available for 30 years.
As someone who travels both domestically and internationally, it would be great to have my medical information available on-line whenever the need arises. My doctor does not offer this service. I am concerned about security, but the benefits outweigh that concern. I assume the collaboration aspect of eHealth is similar to exchanges during an office visit.
I hope GE’s eHealth serves as a catalyst to help electronic patient health records reach mass adaption.

[Matt Fields]

I agree the our health care records management is obsolete and needs help in a hurry. Many people this that making medical records electronic is a security risk, and that is one of the biggest challenges. Most paper based records are manually entered into a private electronic system at the hospitals, so it seem like we are half way there. We just need a centralized system that all doctors, patients, and pharmacies can access. These systems will need to be tightly regulated by the government to ensure privacy and compliance.

[Rin Chitinanda]

I haven't heard about eHealth. I think to digitize our health information is the way to go. It will reduce human error and improve productivity. But, I'm not sure it is a good idea to have our health information accessible by several organizations. It is okay for anonymously access for education or research purpose. I think like other collaboration tools consensus is the key of this tool success. I afraid there will be more than one eHealth similar products in market. Then, we stuck with a group of health insurance or dealing with how to convert data between systems when we change provider. I heard about smartcard system that store individual health information, http://www.smartcardalliance.org. Personally I prefer this approach because we have 100% control over personal health information.

[Kevin Maung]

I believe that EHealth systems will definitely enable easy communication between hospitals, doctors and patients. It can be useful in the future when the technology is on the rise. I also believe that traditional way of saving data is so much more safer than storing your medical records online, on a server where someone can access it remotely. It can cause security problems and would not be safe. I can also see some compatibility issues where one hospital may use a commercial software to store the information and when it comes time to transfer that information, it may be different format than the destination system. Overall I think it is a good idea, as long as the system is secure and we can standardize format in which the data is being transmitted.

[Tarngrud Tripitak]

I believe the Health Information and Technology field will show potential growth in our near future. I do believe that will be some bugs that will have to be worked out before it will be a big success. This is true in all new ideas and technologies that are proposed and created. I can tell you as a student of the health and information field that there is a tremendous amount of security programs in place to protect a patient’s information. The main concern for an HIT professional is to protect a patient’s information and without proper identification and the patient’s permission no one will be able to access any information. My biggest concern for a breach of information will come from an individual themselves leaking personal information. It is imperative that HIT professionals understand how severe it is to keep a patients information private and not to leak information to even the closest of friends or relatives. To help you understand this field a little more and how it will benefit us all… An HIT professional will assist a physician as each patient is seen to insure that doctors are documenting and coding information to best benefit the patient and the health care facilities best interest. The HIT professional must stay up to date on all regulations and state laws for regulating and securing patient information.

[Keith Townsend]

I think this is one of those adoption issues. My doctor's office uses a system running in Citrix in which the doctor inputs all his notes. I went to their website and there's an option for the patient to view all of their medical information.

You have to request your doctor to give you access. The last time I went they had no idea of what I was talking about. I'm hoping they've since received better training but it's difficult to change old habits or processes.

I find this to be especially true in the medical world of all placed where advances are happening all the time.

[Greg Chamopoulos]

This is probably the most interesting article posted on this blog. It is definately about time that the medical field started using the benefits of web 2.0. It seems that they have been keeping medical records almost a secret for all of these years. It can almost be seen as a suprise to people when they read their medical record because it has been so hard for people to gain access to their own information for such a long time. The only thing that can be a concern when it comes to putting them on the internet is the security threat. It almost seems that it will be inevitable that people will start to try to hack other people's medical records because it can be seen as such personal data. Though this is something that we all need to think about, it should not shy us away from the benefits of collaboration with doctors by using the internet because it will make for a much more sound healthcare system and practice. This is very exciting, and this will open up many jobs for people in the IT field (Finally).

[Sivakumar Manickavasagam]

GE’s eHealth is definitely an important health care product. Here is my thought:
Lot of companies seeing a business opportunity in government’s multi billion dollar’s Health care reform, and there going to be many products similar to GE’s eHealth. Is it possible to transfer the records from one system to another? Are they compatible?. I think the eRecords format or platform should be designed in a way that is interoperable to multiple systems.

eHealth is great start, but it’s too early to comment how successful it’s going to be in the future. I think it’s time to form group or government body to regulate all the products that are targeting health care reform program.

[Leigh Hollowell]

I really like all of the benefits that products like this one offers except I don't think that these products are secure enough for widespread use yet. The data that these applications will house is very valuable to many different groups of people, so these applications will be very attractive to attack. Personally, I'd opt out of using them for the time being.

[zahra]

It is a great idea , I just did some search about it and it seems
promising. Personally ,I completely agree with e health , it will help patient and doctor to understand each other faster and easily ,,
For me, I had difficult time when I arrive to u.s.a first wee. I had some health problem , and it was difficult for me to explain what I had ..
So, if ehealth apply it will solve many problem which face patient and doctor

[James Kempski]

I am familiar with eHealth and of other similar products which I believe to be a positive advance in the right direction for the health care industry. Google offers a similar product but it is not as in depth as this product nor can be used at an enterprise level.

With the way that technology is advancing, the health care field needs to catch up quickly to the other verticals such as financial. With the EHR mandates coming from the government where health care fields must be electronic by 2012, this is a huge push.

In my experience, the issue that health care providers are having is the funding. Not all, but a majority of hospitals here in the Chicagoland area are unable to generate any capital expenditures for IT upgrades.

Moving forward funding may be a little less likely to occur as there are incentives for health care providers sooner rather than latter. I believe that the figure is if companies have implemented the EHR software by 2011 they get a $44,000.00 reimbursement for each doctor.

Yes I believe that we are ready for this type of product.

[Veerapatr K]

I think this will be a great idea for people to have their health record that will be accessible through Internet for doctors to see. This would really help out for people who are traveling to other countries. If they have some kind of health issue or accident while they are in another country, they will not have to carry their health records with them, but instead doctors would be able to view their medical history from any location that they are being treated. This also saves a lot of time when visiting a new doctor and having to fill out long applications and it will make it more efficient and allow doctors to view full history of the patients. I think security will be a big issue and the risk of being hacked into any medical records as well.