Scott Mace on Health Care

What's in your medical record?

e-Patient Dave tells a chilling story about the misinformation that lurks in many online medical records.

Ferrari Medicine

I read a fair number of health care IT blogs. This is my favorite recent post: Ferrari Medicine: We don't need more horsepower.

Intel Health Guide: The next must-have home gadget?

The gadget guy in me is excited to see Intel announce its Health Guide today. The journalist in me is more skeptical. The device doesn't easily integrate with existing online medical records. That needs to be fixed. The announcement didn't include any pricing. Health providers are expected to pay for it and they have to get reimbursed by health plans, which will need to be convinced of the Health Guide's efficacy, which means time-consuming clinical trials. But the idea of simple ways of monitoring patients remotely, delivering info, video and even real-time videoconferencing over the Internet, all in something the size of that small white box you see on the table in this picture -- it's a compelling vision. It's great to see an industry focused for so long on business and entertainment now pivoting to focus on our own personal well-being.

Preparing for the age wave

Eric Dishman of Intel is making a difference moving the consumer electronics industry toward more useful health care appliances and services that go where people are, instead of making people come to the hospital. It's the topic of my latest Opening Move for IT Conversations.

Alabama to obese state workers: Shape up or pay up

Switzerland won't be the only place to hit the pocketbooks of workers unwilling to do something about their poor health. Alabama says to its workers: if you're obese, you'll pay more for health insurance. At the state meeting where it was decided, no one showed up to object.

Who cares for the whole patient?

ePatients.net asks: Is anyone responsible for the whole patient? I thought my "family doctor" was supposed to do that, but no, not really.

PagerBox liberates hospital texting

One of the most fun things about writing for NurseWeek is finding stories that are flying under the radar of the mainstream tech and health care press. PagerBox is one such story. My latest story for NurseWeek introduces PagerBox to a wider audience. In addition, here's a sidebar I wrote that NurseWeek couldn't print, but that tells a bit more about PagerBox.

The growth of PagerBox

The home page of PagerBox, at www.pagerbox.com, doesn't say “welcome” to strangers. It's busy serving doctors and nurses, and is otherwise a “need-to-know” place kept mysterious to increase its security. But within the hospital community, PagerBox's use is spreading by word of mouth.

Luis Diaz, MD, CEO of PagerBox, welcomes inquiries from interested hospitals or medical centers of any size who want a quick, convenient way to be able for staff to send pages or instant messages to their colleagues, using any Web browser, needing to reach any device or terminal where the recipient can read a text message or page.

PagerBox was born in 1999 when Diaz interned at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Diaz was frustrated by numeric pagers that did not allow for text messages, and by phones whose interruptive communications “destroy your day.” Diaz, now an oncologist at Hopkins, developed PagerBox as a separate business dedicated to giving doctors and nurses a channel of non-interruptive communications. “Listening to voice mail takes time, email is just not practical, so text messaging is really just the best mode of communications in the actue or subacute hospital setting,” Diaz says.

“The nice thing is, you walk through the halls, and you hear people say, PagerBox me. It's kind of nice to see that take hold.”

In addition to Hopkins and UCSF, PagerBox is also in use at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center's division of cardiology, and some other large hospitals who prefer not to be identified, according to Diaz. A Google search on the term PagerBox turns up a growing number of health care professionals with PagerBox contacts.

It's ironic that a physician invented PagerBox, instead of one of the many companies providing data services to health care. “Solutions existed out there in so many different manners,” Diaz says. “No one had really put it together. I don't know why.”

The cost of PagerBox as a service to hospitals varies based on a variety of factors: the size of hospital, amount of security required, number of users and level of customer service. To contact PagerBox, send email to info@pagerbox.com.

Finding my 2007 Today in Physical Therapy stories

I just learned that the Web site for Today in Physical Therapy cannot serve up any archived stories at this time. So the stories I wrote for this publication in 2007 cannot be found on the Web. Here is a chronological list of these stories:

• It's Electrifying - March 7, 2007
• Too Much, Too Soon - April 2, 2007
• Constraint-Induced Therapy: Promising, but difficult to access - July 23, 2007
• Defusing Despair: PTs inspire patients with brain tumors to overcome functional challenges - November 12, 2007

If you are trying to find these, check your local libraries for the printed versions.

Podcast: Intel's Distributing Health initiative

Today, Intel Research demonstrated a wide range of works in progress under the umbrella title of Distributing Health: From Mainframe to Personal Health Care through Disruptive Technologies. As part of Research@Intel Day at the Computer History Museum, Intel also arranged a briefing on the initiative by Eric Dishman. Dishman is an Intel Fellow, Digital Health Group Director of product research and innovation, and national chair of CAST, the Center for Aging Services Technologies. This podcast is a recording I made of this press briefing. I recorded it with a room microphone, and although Eric is clearly audible, some of the questions may be a bit hard to hear. I hope you enjoy it anyway. Listen. (30 minutes, 14MB)

Patient safety takes flight

Operating room teams are learning how to reduce errors by using standardized scripts inspired by routines worked out between aerospace industry cockpit crews. It's my latest story for NurseWeek.