Social networking Archives

A population that is on the move will increasingly turn to mobile health applications, predicts a new market study.

The Hampshire, England-based Juniper Research Ltd. projects that mobile networks will monitor 3 million patients by 2016, according to a company news release. The growth will be fueled in part by increasingly more capable smartphones, the company says.

U.S. insurers already offer reimbursement for mobile cardiac monitoring, which makes the monitoring of cardiac outpatients the top remote monitoring field, according to Jupiter. But the analysis projects growth in the monitoring of other chronic diseases, including diabetes and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Other projections:

• Consumers will download 44 million mHealth and medical applications this year.


• That number will grow to 142 million in 2016.


• Electronic health records will eventually be an important piece of mHealth offerings.


• Smartphone-based patient monitoring will replace expensive specialized remote monitoring systems and drive down mHealth costs.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now has an app geared toward the iPad generation.

The CDC's leap into mobile health gives iPad users touchpad access to the organization's Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites, as well as articles about health topics, a health-related blog, updated CDC announcements and news releases, and the CDC's podcast library.

With the ability to quickly update public-health information, the site could become an important mHealth resource during times of a public health crisis, such as a flu pandemic.

Download the free app at the CDC's website.

A group of physicians is using the latest social-media technology to help demystify health information technology that is overwhelming many of their medical colleagues.

The heart of the project is a new website designed to "serve as a trusted resource for doctors who are contemplating or are in the midst of transforming their practices or institutions using health information technology to improve health and health care," according to the nonprofit organization's mission statement.

The Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Healthcare initiative got off the ground on Dec. 1 in Washington. A webcast featured panels of physicians who shared stories of health IT implementation. Dr. Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health IT, and Dr. Richard Baron, director of the seamless care models group at the federal government's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, weighed in, as well.

The idea is to "help physicians--operating in a diverse range of settings, from small physician practices to large integrated delivery systems-learn about the value of health IT from their peers; point them to a set of resources that will not only help them make the transition to health IT, but also optimize its use to support high quality, cost-effective care delivery; and facilitate a dialogue on best practices, key challenges, and methods to overcome those challenges," the group said on its website.

The website features articles and short videos about topics including electronic health record benefits, meaningful use and EHR implementation, and a blog by doctors sharing their experiences with EHRs. It also includes links to additional resources. Doctors will talk about why they decided to adopt health IT, the strategies they used to overcome challenges, how their practices were affected and the lessons they learned, according to a news release announcing the initiative.

"We all started as EHR novices, and through our collective four decades of experience have probably made every mistake that anyone could make (and more than once)," Dr. Peter Basch, an internist and one of the founding physicians of the group and the initial chair, wrote in the inaugural blog post. He is medical director of ambulatory EHR and health IT policy for MedStar Health in Washington.

Other founding members are Dr. William Bria, chief medical information officer at Shriners Hospitals for Children and president of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems; Dr. Michael Zaroukian, chief medical information officer at Michigan State University and medical director of clinical informatics and care transformation at Sparrow Health System; and Janet Marchibroda, chair of the Health IT Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Doctors Helping Doctors' initial executive director.

The initiative has received grants from the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, the Optum Institute for Sustainable Health and Siemens Healthcare.

Several professional medical organizations also have joined as collaborators. They are the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians, American EHR Partners, the American Osteopathic Association, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems.

OMG! With a whopping 2.2 trillion text messages zipping across the U.S. last year, the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to dial up ways to have texters get their fingers do the talking about health.

The HHS Text4Health Task Force notes that at-risk populations, including teenagers and Medicaid recipients, are among the most avid texters. Early programs are showing promise, such as the public-private partnership "text4baby," which provides information about pregnancy and child-rearing, the task force says.

In a new report, Text4Health recommends that HHS:

• Develop and host health text message libraries leveraging the department's scientifically based information.


• Further research the effectiveness of health text messaging.


• Partner with federal and private organizations to disseminate health text messaging and mobile health programs.


• Form a mobile health (mHealth) community of practice to coordinate mHealth activities.


• Integrate health text messaging and mHealth with other health IT priorities.


• Research privacy and security risks and establish guidelines to manage them.


• Have agencies, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, research texting technology trends and establish regulatory guidelines for interactive systems to prevent and treat disease.

Got a public-health emergency? Log into Facebook.

But don't stop there. Three emergency-management experts say in a commentary this week in the New England Journal of Medicine that Twitter, foursquare, Loopt, smartphone apps, RSS feeds and other social networking sites and technologies can quickly spread critical information to large groups in the chaotic aftermath of crisis or disaster.

Social networking isn't the disaster manager's only tool, but it's an increasingly important one, say the authors, Dr. Raina M. Merchant, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics; Dr. Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Stacy Elmer, a special assistant to Lurie. (Lurie and Elmer noted that they are not speaking on behalf of HSS.)

"The effectiveness of our public health emergency system relies on routine attention to preparedness, agility in responding to daily stresses and catastrophes, and the resilience that promotes rapid recovery," they write. "Social media can enhance each of these component efforts."

The commentary cites several examples of social media playing a role in crises:

• "Speak-to-Tweet," which sends brief Twitter messages through a voice connection, was used during the Egyptian uprising.


• The Ushahidi crowd-sourcing platform linked health-care providers with suppliers after the Haiti earthquake.


• Haitian earthquake victims trapped in rubble asked for help on Facebook.


• The Alexandria, Va., health department tweeted and texted information on where to go for H1N1 flu vaccines.


• Residents texted photos of oil-soaked birds to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, helping volunteers determine where to focus clean-up efforts.

The last example illustrates how social networking can help citizens become part of response efforts, the authors note. At the same time, they say, disaster victims can use social networking to access key resources.

There are downsides, the commentary points out. The technology is less likely to reach at-risk populations, and false messages can cause panic or facilitate scams. Studies are needed to evaluate the reliability and validity of public health information transmitted through social media.

But, they say, social media can bolster current communications systems, "substantially increasing our ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from events that threaten the public's health."

The American College of Physician Executives is offering some preventative medicine to keep hospital medical executives from being overwhelmed by the changing world of health IT.

The ACPE says its new health IT leadership certificate program is designed to help medical executives "more easily and effectively lead health care IT changes." The organization says its 40-hour online training courses will help executives talk knowledgeably about IT issues and fundamentals, manage IT implementers, and plan and implement health IT systems and changes.

After completing the 40-hour curriculum, participants will meet in Scottsdale, Ariz., in November, for a two-day capstone course at the ACPE Fall Leadership Institute. The total program cost is $4,800 -- $100 an hour for the courses, plus $800 for the capstone event.

Coursework is grouped into three categories: health IT fundamentals, electronic health record adoption and implementation of EHRs, and clinical functionality.

Several of the courses are available now. Courses include informatics and meaningful use of EHRs, health care and information security threats, health information exchanges, the chief medical officer-chief information officer partnership, and implementation support. Clinical functionality courses focus on specific functions including e-prescribing and clinical decision-support systems.

The courses can be used as elective credit toward an ACPE master's degree. The work also counts as continuing education for physicians.

Got a blue-ribbon health IT idea? If so, prizes courtesy of the federal government could be in your future.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT isn't saying just what those prizes might be, but it has pumped nearly $5 million into its Investing in Innovations Initiative -- or i2 Initiative, for short. Competitions enable "rapid response to emerging issues that are difficult to address with more traditional funding approaches," ONC said this week in a news release announcing the program.

"The initiative demonstrates ONC's recognition of the importance of investing in innovations and provides a platform that will attract an expanded community of innovators to the full range of the agency's programs," says Dr. Farzad Mostashari, who heads ONC. He adds that "open collaboration" is one of the goals.

Capital Consulting Corporation and Health 2.0 will manage the program and analyze emerging innovations and trends, ONC says. Competition areas established so far include:

• Secure sharing of health information within social networks.


• Access to information to support decision-making.


• Maintaining connectivity during natural disasters and other emergencies.


• Customized privacy-protected health information exchanges.

The initiative also can help clear governmental barriers to innovation: "ONC recognizes that policies that do not appropriately anticipate technological change can jeopardize success by potentially limiting competition and setting in stone inferior technologies. Accurate and timely information from this phase of the initiative will enable the federal government to engage in methodical and strategic health IT policies."

The program is the first under the administration's America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, signed in January by President Barack Obama.

Telehealth played a key role in significantly increasing hepatitis C cure rates in a New Mexico medical trial, according to an article published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Treatment of hepatitis C, a chronic infectious disease of the liver that can be fatal, requires 12 to 18 visits to a specialist in a year. According to the study, there aren't enough specialists to provide timely treatment to the 30,000 New Mexicans who are infected with the hepatitis C virus.

The Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) study teamed primary-care clinicians with specialists at academic medical centers for videoconference training on hepatitis C treatment. The clinicians were organized into "knowledge networks" that meet weekly to present and consult on patient cases using Web-based disease-management tools and shared best practices.

Armed with specialist-level knowledge, the health-care providers -- physicians, nurses, physician assistants and community health workers -- are able to effectively treat hepatitis C patients in their own communities. The cure rate for patients treated under Project ECHO was virtually identical to that of those treated at the University of New Mexico Medical Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, and significantly higher than those in previous community-based treatment programs. Additionally, the program reduced racial and ethnic disparities in treatment outcomes by providing specialty services to minority communities.

The university medical center conducted the project, which was funded in part by a three-year, $5 million grant from the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

"Project ECHO has the potential to transform health care as we know it," Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president of the foundation, said in a news release. "What began as a truly disruptive innovation in New Mexico for treatment of hepatitis C has the capacity to re-engineer health care delivery and training across the health-care system."

Since the Project ECHO hepatitis C clinic launched in 2003, it has expanded to include videoconferencing clinics in asthma, mental illness, chronic pain, diabetes and cardiovascular risk reduction, high-risk pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, pediatric obesity, rheumatology and substance abuse. More than 1,000 New Mexico clinicians have participated.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is applying the Project ECHO model nationwide, with programs already under way in Washington state and Chicago.

Health information technology is a two-way street.

Physicians who use health IT to streamline administrative functions could spend more time with patients, a new survey suggests. Yet a majority of patients would also communicate with their doctors by email and schedule appointments online if they could, according to the survey that was commissioned by the Capstrat communications agency of Raleigh, N.C.

Patients still prefer traditional lines of doctor-patient communication, according to the nationwide survey of 843 adults that was conducted in February by Public Policy Polling. Most respondents ruled out wanting to use social media and instant messaging, but 60 percent said they would email their doctors, and 56 percent expressed interest in online appointment scheduling.

"The implications include a way for doctors to free up more time for their patients by moving the right interactions online, and an opportunity to forge stronger connections through personal interaction," says Karen Albritton, president of Capstrat, in a news release.

Pamela Lewis Dolan, a reporter for the American Medical Association's amednews.com, reports that physicians almost never email patients. In an article published on Monday, she cites a study published in February by the Journal of Medical Internet Research that indicates just 2.9 percent of doctors frequently email patients -- a statistic that remained steady between 2003 and 2008. Yet new technology such as patient portals also will give patients access to health information and tools, freeing doctors from "acting as a real-time intermediary," Dolan writes.

Hindering the effective use of new tools are government incentives for health IT systems that reward capabilities focused on practice efficiencies, not patient-centered functions, Nir Menachemi, author of the Journal of Medical Internet Research study, says in the amednews article.

The Capstrat-Public Policy Polling survey also showed that half of respondents said they would consider accessing their medical records online, while 48 percent expressed interest in paying medical bills online.

Austin's funky South by Southwest festival is the place to hear the latest alt-country music, discover the next new independent filmmaker and talk about ... health IT?

Health IT was indeed on the agenda at South by Southwest Interactive, which included a health track "featuring panels that attracted government technology bigwigs, pharmaceutical reps, physicians and innovators," according to the Austin Business Journal. The five-day interactive festival, attracting techno-geeks from a spectrum of specialties, included 23 panels on health and technology, the paper reports.

Apparently the health IT world has a ways to go until its innovation matches that of the music and film artists for which the festival has traditionally been known.

Gigi Peterking, vice president of digital health for Edelman, described the mobile health application market as nascent, the paper reports. Industry needs to integrate gaming experts into the mix to come up with more useful apps, she said during a panel called "Health: Is There Really an App for That?" The app market, she said, is "still at the Friendster stage; we haven't gotten to the Facebook stage."

Other panel topics included: "Matchmaking Comes to Healthcare for Doctors and Patients," "Health Communities: Superheroes Who Need a Justice League," "Health Data Everywhere: Not a Drop to Link," and "Stop the Bleeding! Immersive Simulations for Surgeons."