Scott Mace on Health Care

The sad state of interoper(ating room)ability

This Investors.com story nicely sums up a press tour I attended Monday at Kaiser Permanente's Sidney Garfield Health Care Innovation Center in San Leandro, California. One of the doctors quoted, Jim Lewis, also had a telling insight into the sad state of operating room interoperability. To paraphrase, Dr. Lewis noted that it was now possible for someone to purchase a breathalyzer gadget at Radio Shack that could, properly configured, prevent me from starting my car if I were to get behind the wheel with sufficient alcohol on my breath; and yet, in the operating room, when a ventilator device needs to start supporting breathing for a patient, other critical devices in the room aren't able to signal the ventilator to begin its work. Instead, human intervention is still required.

This is the strongest call yet for interoperability between medical devices. Dr. Lewis put it in plainer language than I just did, and I'll try to follow up with him to record a podcast at some point. He's an articulate spokesman on the issue, and the Garfield Center is a true outpost of advocacy, demanding change, on behalf of all us patients.

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.

National Health IT Week is coming

"One voice. One vision" is the motto of the first National Health IT Week, scheduled for May 14-18, 2007 in Washington, D.C.:

National Health IT Week is the nation’s first fully collaborative annual forum where public and private sector organizations will unite under one banner to promote the common national goal of interoperable health IT adoption.  A coalition of health IT stakeholder organizations, with support from healthcare professional groups are working collaboratively to plan the week’s activities.

National Health IT Week brings together key healthcare constituents under one banner in a unifying call for action.  Payors, providers, clinicians, vendors, consumer organizations, quality healthcare organizations, policy experts and research foundations, as well as representatives from the government have joined National Health IT Week to strengthen alliances between private industry and the public sector in order to achieve the President’s goal of widespread interoperable electronic health records by 2014.

Partners include the American Hospital Association, the American Health Quality Association, American Medical Informatics Association, Alliance for Nursing Informatics, the California HealthCare Foundation, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, HL7, and a number of vendors. It's a pretty impressive collection of sponsors, though I'd like to see some patients' rights groups involved.