medical informatics

At my Mar. 27, 2011 post "Those Who Dismiss Healthcare (and Healthcare IT) Adverse Events Reports as Mere "Anecdotes" Have Lost - Supreme Court-Style" I wrote that the SCOTUS decided in MATRIXX INITIATIVES, INC., ET AL. v.

SIRACUSANO ET AL. (link to PDF) that:

At the Jan. 11, 2011 WSJ health blog, in an article entitled "JP Morgan Healthcare: Google’s Schmidt on Open Source and Health IT", Google CEO Eric Schmidt is cited as saying:

...

One solution to the problem may be to take the electronic-medical record architecture out of the hands of the corporate world, suggested Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference last night.

P { MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px } BODY { SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR: #3f52b8; SCROLLBAR-DARKSHADOW-COLOR: #fafafa; SCROLLBAR-BASE-COLOR: #f7f7f7; SCROLLBAR-HIGHLIGHT-COLOR: #cecfce; SCROLLBAR-TRACK-COLOR: #fffbff } The message below to a listserv for Chief Medical Informatics Officers and related positions was recently forwarded to me by a colleague.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) has issued a proposed rule "RIN 0991-AB59 Proposed Establishment of Certification Programs for Health Information Technology." The proposed rule is available in PDF at this link and more information is available from ONC itself

At Healthcare Renewal and at numerous other healthcare blogs, we write about academic and industry conflicts of interest, malfeasance, and other topics in the hopes that there are leaders within organizations who might correct such wrongs.

(That is, when it is not those same leaders behind the erupting scandals.)

Our efforts are based on the assumption (perhaps, more correctly, a hope) that the problems within organizations are not organic and ideological, and that they are in some fashion amenable to correction internally and externally via exposure to sunlight.

In news that must have been leaked by anonymous spies after being kept at a level of "Top Secret" and not acted upon for decades, Healthcare IT News reports on the healthcare IT user experience:

(Note: part 1 is here, part 2 is her

I write mainly on medical informatics at this blog, but have wider interests. Earlier, I wrote a posting on a hot political issue that I believe helps explain the context of the healthcare issues discussed here, but it was not about healthcare per se.

I therefore decided to move the posting to another site here.

I've commented at "External oversight needed for hospital EMR implementation" and "Yet another clinical IT controversy: UC Davis" on the enormous amounts of money for EMR's being spent by HC organizations.

Over recent months I’ve been exploring roles back in applied HIT, having been a CMIO (Medical Director of IT, now called "Chief Medical Informatics Officer") in decidedly applied settings in the “olden days” a decade ago.

One common feature of the conversations I’ve had was that I’ve left these interviews with a sense of unease and annoyance, but was unclear why.

It is only recently that I’ve been able to identify a common theme.

Imagine a seasoned neurosurgeon, interviewing for department chair, in the following interview scenario: