Junto

Our latest gathering attempted to straighten the chicane of the Healthcare industry, specifically the storage and transmission of medical data. Mark Scrimshire of CareFirst BC and HealthCamp led a discussion with PACS Manager at UPHS Brendten Eickstaedt, RN and technology enthusiast Phil Baumann, and health technology strategist Lisa Mizrahi.

They shared their respective experiences with healthcare technology and its lack-thereof. Only a small percentage of medical practices digitize records. An even smaller number share records between offices. This is the product of a multi-headed monster:

Doctors prefer to spend time with patients, not with cumbersome computer systems. Those computer systems are currently proprietary, not widely adopted, and don’t play nice with each other. Radiology, for example, has always been on the forefront of medical technology, but digital medical images often employ the proprietary formats of Seimens, Phillips, GE, Toshiba, et al. There are also problems with privacy and bad information on the internet. Doctors often find themselves talking patients down from the ledge of misinformation scraped from message boards or webMD. Authorization poses another hurdle to existing healthcare web technology. Each medical service site has a separate username and password, different security requirements to remember.

There would be greater adoption of technology if the data was standardized. Standardization is cheaper, it makes more sense capitalistically, but twenty years of digital systems haven’t yielded that standard. The data is siloed instead of clouded.

Mint.com has been successful in gathering an index of all the disparate financial services websites, aggregating login information, and painting a fairly complete picture of one’s finances.

In medicine, we currently rely heavily on the interpretation of handwriting. While a quick way of codifying information, this is the industry that birthed the phrase “chicken scratch.” Codification of medical data into universal symbols could speed up diagnosis, reduce cost, and prevent mistakes. Iconography in all parts of the world seeks to remove semiotic ambiguity, trading it for safety. Hazard symbols, subway markings, visualized instructions for assembly all aim to bridge the pitfalls of language and interpretation. Whatever the interface, it must be ergonomic and easily digestible in order to get buy-in.

API’s into anonymous pools of medical data can provide instant compilation of statistics and trends, providing a base for enormous studies not previously possible. This is already happening with sites like Patients Like Me in a social network opt-in setting. Mark mentioned economies of the crowd. Getting buy-in from patients will lower the cost of implementation and somewhat reduce resistance and skepticism from healthcare practitioners.

Healthcare has long hovered in the realm .. in this way, the digitization of medical information and medical services could operate as a Long Tail like Amazon or Netflix, rather trading in the transmission of data without burdensome inventory. We all have unique medical situations requiring niche care. Our histories are individual, our diagnoses granular, as should be our records.

In the end, we want the same thing as our doctors, more face-time, less paperwork, cheaper insurance, better care.

Related topics: MINUTES