Stories about: health IT

Ebola in the U.S.: Can EHRs help connect the dots between public health and clinical practice?

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Dallas map Ebola electronic health records
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The Ebola situation in Dallas—with one patient death, two nurse exposures, dozens under quarantine, and talk last week of declaring a state of emergency in the city—has thrown into stark relief the gaps between public health and frontline clinical care. But those gaps also present opportunities to make public health data work harder and to change how doctors approach clinical care in times when events and information are changing at Internet speed.

That’s the gist of an editorial by Boston Children’s Hospital’s Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It comes down to making electronic health records (EHRs) work more flexibly, in ways that help promote situational awareness among clinicians during times of crisis and flag instances when a patient’s condition may require more attention than usual. …

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Big data, big pharma and you. All of you.

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Global Pediatric Innovation Summit Awards big dataWhere is the next generation of therapeutic innovations going to come from? Population-level genomic studies? The fitness trackers on everyone’s wrist? Mining electronic medical records? People’s tweets, Yelps and Facebook posts?

How about all of the above?

What all of these things have in common is data. Lots of it. Some of it represents kinds of data that didn’t exist 5 or 10 years ago, but all of it is slowly beginning to fuel the pharma sector’s efforts to create the next blockbuster drug or targeted therapeutic.

At least, it should be. …

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Does that health app on your phone have a privacy policy? Are you sure about that?

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Smartphone key lock privacy mobile health Kenneth MandlPrivacy policies are a sore point for Internet users. At least once a year the pitchforks and torches come out when a company like Facebook or Twitter changes its policies around how it uses, sells or secures users’ data—things like browsing habits, phone numbers, relationships and email addresses.

You don’t hear as much hue and cry over the privacy of mobile health apps, where people store and track what are literally their most intimate details. But perhaps you should.

Because in fact, a recent survey of mobile health apps led by Boston Children’s Hospital’s Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, finds that only about 30 percent of mobile health apps have any kind of policy covering the privacy of users’ data. …

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Health claims data: Taking a 30,000-foot view on disease associations

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Stethoscope and keyboard health insurance claims dataThe only time most of us ever look at an insurance claim is after a hospital or doctor visit, when we get a claim summary from our carrier. And then as far as we know, it gets filed away, never again to see the light of day.

But there’s a lot to be learned from these claims data.

As with electronic medical records (EMRs), behind every claim an insurer receives is a detailed record about symptoms, tests, diagnosis and treatment. Properly compiled and analyzed, claims data can be an excellent resource for taking population-level snapshots of disease, helping to identify trends and reveal or probe associations.

That’s why claims data recently caught the eye of Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, and Mei-Sing Ong, PhD, two researchers in Boston Children’s Informatics Program (CHIP). Using claims records for roughly 2.5 million Americans, they turned their attention to two conditions—epilepsy and asthma—with interesting results. …

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Disease management meets intelligent design

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At a conference in Texas a couple of years ago, I found myself – as at all good national conferences — talking to a colleague from my own institution. As we browsed the poster session, we talked about our respective work.

Eugenia Chan works in the Developmental Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital Boston, where I’m an emergency physician and health services researcher. I told Eugenia about The Online Advocate, a Web-based system I’d been developing for the past eight years. It screens patients and families for health-related social problems, provides feedback and helps them find services in their area that can assist them.

Eugenia was excited about bringing The Online Advocate to her patients.“This is really great, and I want to use it,” she said. “But I have another idea that I would like to explore with you.” …

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