eHealth Ontario Update

Diabetes Registry:

Provincial Diabetes Registry Contract announced and goes to CGI for $46.2 million.

Musings from eHealth Ontario CEO Greg Reed:

eHealth Ontario’s CEO Greg Reed’s musings on the role of eHealth Ontario

Source: eHealth Musings blog by Michael Martineau

State of Health Information Exchanges: New Report

eHealth Initiative released a new report on the state of Health Information Exchange in the US and here are my findings and view of the survey.

Key Findings:

• 234 active health information exchange initiatives (HIEs) in America
• More than half the HIEs are not dependent on federal funding
• Revenue source from transactions and subscriptions fees to data users and providers, which points towards sustainability of HIEs in  the long run rather than depending federal funding.  The model is similar to Canadian Diagnostic Imaging Repositories in some provinces, where the central organization (non-profit entity) has a sustainable revenue model continuing operations.
• Data exchange between the various providers is on the rise from medications to lab results, inpatient discharge summaries, radiology results, inpatient diagnoses and procedures looks promising for the EHR.
• Benefits and ROI of a HIE: Various measures of benefits and ROI are presented from reduced time spent to locate clinical results and records, decreased dollars on duplicate diagnostic procedures and decreased cost of care for chronic disease patients to name a few.
• More Patient Engagement: There is no questions that patients want to get engaged and the survey underscores that point once again. HIEs are the avenue to break patient health information islands.

Thanks to the folks at eHealth Initiative for the survey,  I understand that this is a high level survey, a more detailed one will be very useful to shed light on the %of data exchanged between stakeholders for each type of data and the governance and architecture model followed for ensuring sustainability and scalability of the service.

Please click on this link to access the full survey and the associated webinar.

Saravana Rajan

mobile health: iPhone goes enterprise in Canadian Hospital

Mobile health hits the road with iPhone, where Palm once a good position and Blackberry to failed to utilize the opportunity and iPhone is expected to roar with success.   That’s innovation given iPhone’s usability, which is very “vital” for Healthcare.

Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto created a mobile patient chart application in iPhone  accessing data from 66 different applications.  I guess that this was an year long project  instead of the usual norm of  multi-year projects given the amount of stakeholder engagement and legal regulations surrounding patient privacy and security, which in itself is a commendable achievement.

Also a common scenario in many hospitals today is too many devices and desktops and smartphones used by clinicians as quoted in the Canadian Healthcare article.

“He(CIO of Mount Sinai) also noticed that clinicians were accessing too many devices – cell phones and smartphones, pagers, large, clunky nurse-call devices, plus desktop computers at various workstations. Far better, he realized, to have one device that could serve as a gateway to everything. And the more portable the device, the better. That’s where the Apple iPhone came in. ” Source: Canadian Healthcare

It will be interesting to find out, whether the clinicians access it as single application with relevant sets of data(from the 66 different applications) for a patient and context sharing between them instead of 66 different iPhone applications.

The VitalHub project is getting turned into a business, to commercialize the solution and offer the iPhone accessible Patient Chart to other numerous interested hospitals.

Saravana Rajan

Mobile app development gets “WAC”ked up

Mobile industry got shaken up – for good –  with the annoucement from Wholesale Application Community -shortly WAC – a global alliance formed by telecom carriers and device manufacturers (exclude Apple, Google and RIM from this) to create a unified open industry platform for developers to build and sell applications.

Who is WAC from WAC’s FAQ?

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) is an open, global alliance formed from the world’s leading telecoms operators. WAC will unite a fragmented applications marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits the entire ecosystem, including applications developers, handset manufacturers, OS owners, network operators and end users

Mobile dev world welcomes WAC:

Open letter to WAC from mobile developer community

– Mobile dev community is open to work with WAC with concerns regarding revenue share, certification,  sales and marketing, distribution of enterprise apps

Tiny Hippos’ ( mobile dev startup in Waterloo) thoughts on WAC,

Views from the Analysts:

Gomo News: Strategic Mobile News on WAC

Moco News: A standards based app store is still mostly a work in progress

If  you are mobile developer focused only on developing for iPhone or Android or Blackberry, here is another opportunity to grab a share in the 3billion + plus market where is Nokia is the leader.

You may sit on the fence based on your business model or focus but there is some serious money to be made in providing apps to the 3 billion plus market and have the capability to reach all the devices and carriers with an app that can ran on any WAC compliant device

Also agreed its a work in progress on all the concerns raised by the mobile developer community and will have to see how it plays out.

Saravana Rajan