“Today most EHRs and EMRs are invasive both to workflow and finances. While high cost is a significant barrier to physician adoption, workflow disruption remains the killer deterrent. Most proprietary softwares offer a limited palate of practice options, mostly one does things their way.”

http://www.dillingerkovach.com/accusourcecareers/?p=10501

Big name companies like General Electric, Siemens, McKesson and Cerner are rushing to profit from the push to install electronic patient records.

But the hottest company in the electronic medical records industry is a secretive Wisconsin outfit called Epic Systems. It does little marketing or advertising, shuns acquisitions, never issues press releases and tries to stay out of the headlines. The privately owned company admits it once put up a billboard that said “Marketing Sucks … Epic Systems.”

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/08/epic-systems-business-healthcare-medical-tech-09-epic.html

There’s a huge discount for students, so if you are researching mobile healthcare, this would be a great event for you to come and share your ideas and learn from others in the field.

Register now at https://www.m-healthconference.org.nz/registration.html

You can see all the blog posts up on our new Health InnoVation Exchange website at: www.hive.org.nz

I’m also doing intermittent tweets using the #hinz09 hashtag.

If you are interested in a taking up this opportunity, please drop me an email for more details. We’re looking for capable students with health or computer science backgrounds interested in a career in Health Informatics.

You can email me c.paton@auckland.ac.nz if you would like more information.

The university website has more information about the course here: http://www.fmhs.auckland.ac.nz/faculty/postgrad/programmes/pgdiphsc-healthinfo.aspx

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23MIE09

If you’re interested in discussing Meaningful Use, come and join us on the forum.

(For a definition of Meaningful Use, have a look at this PDF from the Meaningful Use Workgroup
to the Health IT Policy Committee)

The idea is to create a health grid that empowers the patient and the provider. This should be a public utility, basically what I call a U.S. public health grid. If you look at swine flu, for example–we just presented this at the Institute of Medicine. If you look at swine flu, the world came together very quickly, where we actually were able to share, very quickly, the genomic DNA and actually identify how to actually address this, in a global sense. We need to treat chronic disease as an epidemic like the swine flu. But the only way you can do that, whether it’s diabetes, whether it’s heart disease and whether it’s cancer, is to have what you call a grid, a public utility that you can actually share information on a national scale.

Source: Forbes.com via Histalk

Dr Bern Shen is the Chief Medical Officer of Theralive, a mobile health start-up. He was recently Chief Healthcare Strategist for Intel’s Digital Health group, and previously did medical software and business development for Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. In the non-profit arena, he led the health practice at the Institute for the Future, and holds faculty appointments in emergency medicine, business and pharmacy at the University of Iowa and UCSF. Dr. Shen received an A.B. (biochemistry) from Harvard and an MD, MPhil (molecular biophysics and biochemistry) from Yale.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=315885315