Here is the description from Sivad:

A pleasure to welcome Suzanne Leveille to the program today. Suzanne is a professor of nursing at The University of Massachusetts-Boston, and the research director for OpenNotes.

OpenNotes is an initiative that invites patients to review their visit notes written by their doctors, nurses, or other clinicians.

As a patient, you have the right to read the notes your doctor or clinician writes about you during or after your appointment. Having the chance to read and discuss them with your doctor or family member can help you take better control of your health and health care.

As a healthcare professional, you may build better relationships with your patients and take better care of them when you share your visit notes. Our evidence suggests that opening up visit notes to patients may make care more efficient, improve communication, and most importantly may help patients become more actively involved with their health and health care.

Some highlights from the conversation include: the dramatic improvement between patient and doctor communications; how they overcome potential push back and resistance from physicians; patients became more engaged in their personal health care; OpenNotes has been pleasantly surprised at the patient engagement; how advanced technologies and mobile technology are going to impact the future of this idea; and how they are planning to spread the word and get more patients and doctors improving communications and care with OpenNotes!

On the quality front, which is my primary interest these days, there is some interesting discussion about  whether the new Medicare hospital readmissions policy truly will produce better care or will prod some into providing the minimum level of service to readmitted patients.

(Frankly, hospitals have been overtreating for years. If a minimal level of service gets the job done for the patient, that’s a good thing. And the policy is supposed to cause hospitals to do the right thing in the first place, knowing that they will lose out later if they don’t. I’m all for that.)

My post on consumer ignorance of telemedicine is in there, as is a good one from Vince Kuraitis and Leslie Kelly Hall about the duty providers have to share information with patients. EHRs and wearable sensors also make this edition of HWR. Not bad from an IT perspective.

My slides are here: ATA 2013 presentation.

I want to draw your attention in particular to slide 9, which is a letter to the editor of the Kearney (Neb.) Hub newspaper. Honestly, it’s one of the most ignorant, poorly argued pieces of garbage I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t believe the editor actually accepted it and published it with such a weak argument. (Really, there’s “no scientific way to diagnose a patient with a mental illness,” but it’s OK to make a diagnosis in person?) Unfortunately, I can believe that someone would be so misinformed about telehealth and healthcare in general (“doctors are being paid millions to visit with patients for five minutes …”).

Thankfully, a commenter took the author, Kearney resident Kristyn Drahota, to task. I took her to task this morning, too. I hope you will join me in helping to combat such ignorance about telehealth.

I can’t say anything more about Health eVillages now, but there is some big news coming this summer.

I recently interviewed Albert Oriol, CIO of Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, for a story that will appear elsewhere (read: a paying client) soon, but I had a lot of material I left out of that story. I get to use some of the rest here in a little experiment to see what it does to this site’s traffic.

Obviously, pediatric hospitals aren’t eligible for the Medicare side of meaningful use, which is why the threshold is lower for qualifying for Medicaid bonuses. Pediatricians and children’s hospitals only need to have 20 percent of their visits with Medicaid patients, compared to 3o percent for other providers. Rady meets that standard and already has attested to Stage 1.

Oriol, however, does not like the way the rules are written, calling some of them “well-intentioned mandates with unintended consequences.” For example, providers must offer portals for some of their patients – 10% in Stage 1, rising to 50% in Stage 2. But patients with complex conditions go to multiple providers, each of which may have unique portals. “It’s inconvenient for them to go to many different portals,” he says.

He also is frustrated with having to build reports knowing that many of the items will not apply to pediatric subspecialties. “It’s not the best use of resources,” Oriol says.

The two things at the top of mind for Oriol these days are telemedicine and advanced analytics. Rady is expanding its telemedicine program to support rural areas in Imperial County, a poor, isolated jurisdiction east of San Diego County along the Mexican border. He believes this will provide value and convenience to primary care physicians and patients alike.

On the analytics front, Rady is working on a demonstration project with California Children’s Services (CCS), a managed care program for children in the state’s MediCal system with certain diseases. “We’re going to bring in data from other providers,” Oriol says.

The hospital also is “taking a big step forward” in innovation and discovery by partnering with industry to research technology and the analytics of technology, according to Oriol.

MDconnectME makes an app intended to keep people up to date with short, secure messages when their loved ones are in surgery. I actually wrote about Philadelphia-based MDconnectME for MobiHealthNews last fall, after clinicians at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found that the app worked well for keeping frazzled family members up to date on patients transferred there when other Manhattan hospitals closed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Also included in this report are Flatiron Health, a clinical intelligence platform for cancer care that’s backed by Google Ventures and LabCorp., and Mango Health, an app supported by Rock Health to encourage medication compliance through a rewards program.

Watch the video here:

You also can see

Schnick and Davis interviewed Deborah Gordon, chief marketing officer of Network Health, a health insurer in Massachusetts, to discuss healthcare reform. I wouldn’t be posting this if it didn’t have a focus on real reform of health care, and not just insurance expansion, with a strong element of patient safety and attention to outcomes.

From Sivad:

An honor to welcome Deborah Gordon, the Chief Marketing Officer for Network Health. Debbie joins us to talk about one of the more innovative non-profit health plans one can find across the US. You can learn more about Network Health here, the number three health plan for Medicaid health plans.

Discussion topics included:

1. The challenges of serving a very diverse population and customer base, along with lower income customers as a result of income or job situation.

2. Network Health, and states like Massachusetts, have lead the nation in Medicaid health care. How can that trend, and how can the reforms found in Massachusetts, spread across the land?

3. The creation of the Health Insurance Exchange is the key to success…which brings competition and market forces to bear in health care. “It is like Expedia for health insurance…”

4. A focus on quality patient care going forward…

5. What are the challenges going forward, and how does the heated national debate impact the work they are doing.

6. The innovation that’s possible when market forces are at play… “Regulators spawning innovation…”

7. More technology is available and serving the health care markets, which is exciting. But, will access to that technology be accessible to the low income markets?

8. The e-discharge program…

9. The utilization of analytics…

10. Exposing more information to the consumer makes them better patients, healthier, and more compliant to health recommendations…

11. The patient should be the center of the health care system… not the doctor.

12. Debbie was recently named a 2013 USA Eisenhower Fellow, a prestigious fellowship which recognizes emerging leaders who are making momentous contributions to society. In 2013, she will travel to Singapore and Australia where she will explore how these countries have successfully established systems and supports that allow consumers to make good decisions about their health care. The goal is to gather insights and best practices that can be applied here in the U.S.

In a press release issued Friday, Health Affairs gave the usual, vague reason: Dentzer is “leaving to pursue a new opportunity.” Her brief Wikipedia entry says Dentzer “stepped down abruptly on April 11, 2013.”

I know no more than that, though the press release suggests it wasn’t acrimonious.”We thank Susan Dentzer for her contributions and wish her well in her new endeavor,” Project HOPE President and CEO Dr. John P. Howe III said in the release. Project HOPE publishes Health Affairs.

Iglehart returns after a nearly six-year absence. He retired in 2007 after leading the editorial side of Health Affairs since its inception in 1981. The journal says he will be working with Executive Editor Donald Metz and Executive Publisher Jane Hiebert-White to find a new editor.

On March 26, Dr. Mark Frisse, the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, lost his wife of 35 years, Catherine Loretta Walsh Frisse, who, according to an announcement posted on Dr. Frisse’s personal website, lost her battle with breast cancer after putting up a strong fight for two decades. Mrs. Frisse was a teacher, volunteer and philanthropist in the St. Louis area, as her husband and daughter both attended Washington University School of Medicine and the family still lived near St. Louis, despite Dr. Frisse’s Vanderbilt job. (I am a Wash U. alumnus myself, though that was for an undergrad degree, not at the prestigious med school.)

On March 29, Dr. Bill Hersh, chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University, lost his father-in-law, retired Chicago Tribune sports editor Cooper Rollow.

Also, Sheila Teasdale, retired editor of the journal Informatics in Primary Care and a former chair of the International Medical Informatics Association’s Primary Care Working Group, is mourning the loss of her father. J.D. Kleinke, who helped found Healthgrades and Solucient and now is a healthcare business strategist, economist, author and columnist, is doing the same for his mother.

Please join me in expressing sympathy for their recent losses.