"patient engagement" entries
How to open an industry: data points from Strata Rx
O'Reilly conference brings together health care and data
O’Reilly’s first conference devoted to health care, Strata Rx, wrapped up earlier this week. Despite competing with at least three other conferences being held on the same week around the country on various aspects of health care and technology, we drew a crowd that filled the ballroom during keynotes and spent the breaks networking more hungrily than they attacked the (healthy) food provided throughout.
Springing from O’Reilly’s Strata series about the use of data to change business and society, Strata Rx explored many other directions in health care, as a peek at the schedule will show. The keynotes were filmed and will soon appear online. The unique perspectives offered by expert speakers is evident, but what’s hard is making sense of the two days as a whole.
In this article I’ll try to show the underlying threads that tied together the many sessions about data analytics, electronic records, disruption in the health care industry, 21st-century genetics research, patient empowerment, and other themes. The essential message from the leading practitioners at Strata Rx is ultimately that no one in health care (doctors, administrators, researchers, regulators, patients) can practice their discipline in isolation any more. We are all going to have to work together.
We can’t wait for insights from others, expecting researchers to hand us ideal treatment plans or doctors to make oracular judgments. The systems are all interconnected now. And if we want healthy people, not to mention sustainable health care costs, we will have to play our roles in these systems with nuance and sophistication.
But I’ll get to this insight by steps. Let’s look at some major themes of Strata Rx. Read more…
Data in use from public health to personal fitness
HHS leadership should cause other organizations to open data.
Releasing public data can't fix the health care system by itself, but it provides tools as well as a model for data sharing.
Health reform leaders focus on patient access to records as key barrier
A convocation of trend-setters and organizational leaders in U.S. health care advised two government organizations driving health reform–the Office of the National Coordinator at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, and the Dept. of Veteran Affairs–how to push forward one of their top goals, patient engagement.
The state of health IT according to the American Hospital Association
The letter conveys a rather sorrowful message about the state of health IT in the United States. One request–to put brakes on the requirement for hospitals to let patients see their own information electronically–has received particularly strong coverage and vigorous responses.
Five tough lessons I had to learn about health care
Realistic conclusions and opportunities in health care.
Despite the disappointments I've undergone in learning about health care, I expect the system to change for the better. Those who want a better system need to look at the areas where change is most likely to make a difference.