We had an excellent gala conference dinner at the New Connaught Rooms on Wednesday evening. Due to trying to get things to work properly on the BCS wireless and Ethernet networks, I was not able to take notes on the session by Celia Boyer and Petra Wilson on ‘Trustworthiness in the age of Web 2.0′; however, they covered the Health on the Net code and related issues , and generated discussion of how we might ‘kitemark’ reliable websites that are Web 2.0-based and on which content might be changing rapidly.

Matic Meglic, from Slovenia, talked about ‘Care Management using BPM: Case of depression’. He began by addressing the context of future healthcare, with the development of increasing health information and tools to enable patients to take care of own health, and communicate with others. As a result, patients develop new needs, seeking more control and choice, and 24/7 access online to services. There are moves from assisting/supporting healthcare (Medicine 1.0 model)  to changing nature of healthcare (Medicine 2.0). With new emerging technologies, many of things that were done by health professionals can now be done by patients through eHealth services. He says there is a good number of open source business process modelling/management tools. He moved on to discuss an eDepression project which seeks improve processes, screening, diagnosis and care, to improve quality, patient outcomes, etc.

Anže Droljc , also from Slovenia, talked about ‘Using (open source) BRMS (business rules management system) for Guidance through Clinical Pathways in National Breast Cancer Screening Programme’.
For the project, Drools open source BRMS was used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drools http://www.jboss.org/drools/

Cristina Mazzoleni and Francesco Di Cerbo, from Italy, talked about ‘Open Source Software and Disability with Rehabilitation: Desert with Few Oases’.

In the afternoon, Jose Luis Hernandes Caceres, from CECAM in Havana, Cuba. He spoke about ‘Open source: just something more, or the only way to overcome the digital divide. Viewpoint of a researcher from a developing country’. Only 1.7% of population of Cuba have Internet access. They have the Infomed portal; 80,000 users with email with international access and a restricted ‘copy of Internet’ – www.infomed.sld.cu

My apologies to those who presentations I have not done justice to; hopefully you, or others, can add comments to fill in the gaps.

Technorati Tags: EFMI, open source, Cuba, CECAM, HoN

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Attending Janet Marchibroda session addressing information & IT to improve quality & effectiveness on national through local levels. A very dynamic speaker who engages her audience in presentation. Her presentation, as outlined in her abstract, is as follows: This presentation will provide an overview of activities occurring at the national, state, and local levels related to the use of health IT. Multi-stakeholder consensus on principles and strategies for engaging consumers, transforming care delivery, and improving population health through the use of health IT will be addressed. Aligning incentives and effectively managing privacy and security, drawing from the recently released eHealth Initiative Blueprint: From Consensus to Common Action will be discussed.

Personally I am interested in her perspective and thoughts regarding policy & such at all levels. Initial / background deals with problems attempting to solve (consumer dissatisfaction with health care to chronic disease to making care more cost effective). Some ways to address these challenges include $ incentives (aka ‘P4P), quality & efficiency transparency to consumer engagement & activation to health information technology.

Barriers include lack of standards adoption for interoperability, incentive alignment (business case for EHI use), privacy / security concerns, and, workflow issues within the practice. She moves into a description of the eHealth’s Initiative Blueprint (from consensus to common action). A 6-month process involving almost 200 organizations representing all stake holders among other ‘things’. The share vision graphic is aVenn diagram sort of picture of “engaging consumers, improving population health and transforming care delivery”, all on a base of aligning incentives, within the circle of privacy, security & confidentiality, then within the square of high quality, safe, efficient healthcare. eHI will measure this throughout the country on a yearly basis. Part of the blueprint is one data source entered once.

Based on audience participation she focusing now on policy in the US related to this topic.  Environmental overview is now about policy discussion. Congress (House & Senate) review; a lot of bills but not a lot of support. 3 bills with possible action include ‘PRO(TECH)T Act’ - this is on the House side of Congress. Among other things it codifies Office of the National Coordinator; policy committee & Standards committee (FACA HIT). Senate thinks standards should be in the private sector as well as presidential office. Senate side now has a wired bill in process. Now, Congress has passed e-Prescribing in medicare, which was supported by Congress via passing in spite of Presidential veto. It is titled “Medicare Improvfements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008″. RxHub & Surescripts merged which will also help this effort. ONC-coordinated Federal Health IT strategic Plan. 2 primary goals are patient-focuses health care and population health. 4 themes covered include a number of previous common items such as priavcy & security, interoperatiblity, adoption and collaborative governance.

Very nice presentation by Janet. She customized to the audience in a very nice fashion.  She includes, as part of her closing, is a preliminary report on HIE exchanges at state, regional & community levels. More new initiatives this year than in previous years, something noteworthy. Focus is on care delivery with major funding to hospitals. Her conclusions are a lot of progress had been made (notably in standards with a few bumps); need to change way of paying for healthcare; and other items requiring a focus at multiple levels of state, national & local arenas.

Technorati Tags: SINI, nursing, Maryland, Baltimore, nursing informatics, e-health initiative, eHI, Markle Foundation

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