Accelerating Electronic Information Sharing to Improve Quality and Reduce Costs in Health Care

A recent conference at the Bipartisan Policy Center:

Accelerating Electronic Information Sharing to Improve Quality and Reduce Costs in Health Care

The full agenda is here and you can watch all the proceedings online in the video:

There are some great sessions but as always Dr Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Department of Health and Human Services makes a very compelling case for the value proposition for Meaningful Use Part 2  and while he understands the pushback on patient engagement in MU2

"How can we be held accountable for what patients do"

As he says (around 190 mins)

If we are to get better health at lower cost - how can we not engage the patient

The impact of patient engagement in Patient Health - it would be a Blockbuster drug!

Providers need to stimulate this activity - since patients are the "Best Fact Checkers in the world"

Quite! He also talks about the new age of quality measures and describes how one hospital used to review quality measures retrospectively; "patients would be discharged from hospital or dead". Before the introduction of real time analysis they would do a retrospective analysis to show what did right (or not).

More often than not they found they had failed. With the new technology (such as this) they run the quality measures before the patients leave and get the opportunity to fix the missing treatments and care before the patient leaves the facility. Turning error reporting into error catching and correcting. Now that's valuable

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Asking the Wrong Questions About the Electronic Health Record

By Ashish Jha, MD

The wrong question always produces an irrelevant answer, no matter how well-crafted that answer might be.  Unfortunately the debate on health information technology seems to be increasingly focused on the wrong question.  An Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal argues that we have had a “Major Glitch” in the use of electronic health records (EHRs).  This follows on a series of recent studies that have asked the question “do EHRs save money?” Or “do EHRs improve quality?” with mixed results.  While the detractors point to the systematic review from McMaster, boosters point to the comprehensive review published in Health Affairs that found that 92% of Health IT studies showed some clinical or financial benefit. The debate, and the lack of a clear answer, have led some to argue that the federal investment of nearly $30 billion for health IT isn’t worth it.  The problem is that the WSJ piece, and the studies it points to, are asking the wrong question.  The right question is:  How do we ensure that EHRs help improve quality and reduce healthcare costs?

The fundamental issue is that our healthcare system is broken – our costs are too high and the quality is variable and often inadequate.  Paper-based records are part of the problem, creating a system where prescriptions are illegible, the system offers no guidance or feedback to clinicians, and there is little ability to avoid duplication of tests because the results from prior tests are never available.  Even more importantly, the paper-based world hampers improvement because it makes it hard to create a learning environment.  I have met lots of skeptics of today’s health information technology systems but I have not yet met many physicians who say they prefer practicing using paper-based records.

The problem is that some Health IT boosters over-hyped EHRs.  They argued that simply installing EHRs will transform healthcare, improve quality, save money, solve the national debt crisis, and bring about world peace.  We are shocked to discover it hasn’t happened – and it won’t in the current healthcare system.

Most EHR vendors today sell their products to doctors promising increased “revenue capture” (that is, improved billing resulting in greater payments to physicians and higher costs to the health care system).  In a fee-for-service world, the EHR, which is nothing but a tool, helps you get more “fee” for your “service”.  It’s not surprising that we aren’t seeing huge savings.

To understand how to best leverage the potential of EHRs to help the US improve care and save money, we will have to answer a series of other related questions:  how do we create incentives in the marketplace that reward physicians who are high quality?  How do we allow physicians to capture efficiency gains?  Today, if a physician becomes more efficient, he/she will likely lose revenue to insurance companies or to government payers.  When Kaiser Permanente installed an EHR and gave patients the ability to use the electronic system to message their physicians, they saw their ambulatory care visit rate fall by 20%.  This is a disaster in a fee-for-service world.  Sure, Kaiser was able to see real financial gains from their EHR – but how do we help the thousands of other physicians and hospitals that are not Kaiser gain efficiencies from their EHR?  That’s the question I’d like to see answered.

Now that we have made an important investment in EHRs, we need to figure out how to use this new technology to address the fact that the healthcare system is a mess.  We need to figure out how EHRs can promote coordination of care across sites, seamless flow of good clinical information, and smart analytics, to name a few things.  We simply can’t do that in a paper-based world.  I am sure that the healthcare industry single-handedly keeps the fax machine industry alive.  We need to stop. Period.  Every other part of our lives has become electronic and the benefits are clear.  Our lives are better because we bank online, communicate online, shop online.

The debate over whether we should have EHRs is over.  Can we fix our broken healthcare system without a robust electronic health information infrastructure?  We can’t.  Instead of re-litigating that, we need to spend the next five years figuring out how to use EHRs to help us solve the big problems in healthcare.

Ashish Jha, MD, MPH is the C. Boyden Gray Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He blogs at An Ounce of Evidence.This post first appeared at the Health Affairs Blog.

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Filed Under: Tech, THCB

Tagged: Ashish Jha, EHR, HITECH, Quality Sep 19, 2012

via thehealthcareblog.com

Interesting rebuttal to the WSJ article "Major Glitch" as Dr Jha says

The fundamental issue is that our healthcare system is broken – our costs are too high and the quality is variable and often inadequate

Installing an EMR won't change this since there is no silver bullet for our problems. EHRs like many of the technologies and initiatives are one part of the equation but they are definitely part o the soltuion
What they look like and how we interact with them will probably be very different to the current interactions and will involve current technologies and probably some that have not even been imagined yet or applied in that way to healthcare. Can you imagine wearing Google Glasses in your practice - probably not but I am willing to bet some variant of this will become mainstream at some point in our healthcare delivery system
Same is true of patient centered content and management. To that end I will be looking forward to talking to Clint McCellan (@clintmc1) this afternoon on this area and how we can push this aspect forward

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The Sad State of Smoking by country broken down by Men and Women

Women "catching up" in many countries

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VoiceoftheDoctor for the Month of September

This month we will be 
Sep 7

Brad Tritle (@BTritle)who is currenlty the chair of the HIMSS Social Media Task Force.  He is currently co-editing a forthcoming HIMSS book on consumer engagement and consulting under the Office of the National  Coordinator on consumer engagement for State HIEs and immunization registries. Amongst the areas of focus:

• Health Information Exchange
• Consumer e-health
• Personal Health Records
• privacy/security

You can read his interview ith HIMSS here
We will be discussing the dleivery of patinet care - where the patient and the change in system dleivery and technology innovation to achieve this including telehealth services for consumers, apps and how this relates to PHRs.  

Sep 14
ID Experts - Is the EHR a target for Cybercrime.....


Sep 21

Clint McClellan (Twitter @clintmc1) who is Sr. Dir. of Strategic Marketing at Qualcomm Life and the President and Chairman of the Continua Health Alliance. HE and I will be talking about the Continua Health Alliance which is a non-profit, open industry organization of healthcare and technology companieswho are collaborating to improve personal healthcare.They are establishing a system of interoperable personal connected health solutions that will help empower everyone to enageg in their own personal health wellness amangement. Take a look at their vision video here


He and I will be discussing some of the examples and soltuions in the personal health space and how these have eveolved from personal smartphones to dedicated gateways and what opportunities will open up for application developers?

Sep 28

Healthstory - Liora Alschuler, CEO of the Lantana Group and co-founder of Healthstory initiative. She is Co-chair, HL7 Structured Documents Work Group responsible for HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), the first standard for healthcare based on XML. 

We will be discussing the Healthstory Intitaive and the recently finalized Meaningful Use Part 2 guidelines


Join me this Friday at 2:30 ET on VoiceoftheDoctor

There are three ways to tune in:

• Stream the show live – click the Listen Live Now to launch our Internet radio player.

• You can also call in. A few minutes before our show starts, call in the following number:  Call: 1-559-546-1880; Enter participant code: 840521#

• HealthcareNOWradio.com is now on iTunes Radio!  Stream the show live – you’ll find this station listed under News/Talk.

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Nuance Healthcare Asks Developers to Make #HealthIT Smarter

via nuancehealthcareblog.com

Nuance wants your help - we want to make #HealthIT smarter and have issued a challenge (similar to the successful challenge from HIMS2012)

Can you take the Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) software development toolkit and apply this in your application. The opportunity to convert free form narrative content into meaningful clinically actionable data without asking the user to fill in a form, check a box or select from a drop down list.

$5,000 prize plus additional prizes for the first 20 submissions.

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Khosla says technology will replace 80 percent of doctors - I think not

via venturebeat.com

Technology replacing doctors.....
Still missing The Human Element and besides in the

Mayo Clinic Proceedings March 2006 vol. 81 no. 3 338-344 they identified the most most important characteristics patients feel a good doctor must possess

confident,

empathetic,

humane,

personal,

forthright,

respectful, and

thorough

These facets are entirely human and will be hard for technology to replace

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The Trouble with EHRs - 26% report decrease in productivity #EHR #Speechrecognition #HealthIT

Recent review by Medscape (Membership required)

http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/EHR2012

THe advice from EHR users included the suggestions:

"Learn to Type VERY Well"

Intelligent integration of speech recognition is a genuine solution to that challenge

Rankings were interesting - Amazing Charts still hitting the top spot

In Medscape's 2012 survey, the 5 top-ranked EHRs were Amazing Charts, Practice Fusion, VA-CPRS, and Medent. In Medscape's 2009 survey, the top-ranked EHRs were Amazing Charts, MediNotes, VA-CPRS, Misys (now Allscripts), and Practice Partner and eClinicalWorks tied for fifth place.

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Five Technologies that will Change the Practice of Medicine

Speech Technology

Speech recognition offers efficiencies today but recent innovations and new technologies will expand the horizon of opportunity with speech technologies that will change the human computer interface, simplifying the interaction and offering new and innovative tools that increase efficiency and safety of healthcare delivery and reduce the administrative burden and decrease costs.

Medical Intelligence in the Cloud

We’re facing a tsunami of patient data. The ability to process and leverage this data at the point of care is gone. Cloud based intelligence, analyzing data content and delivering contextually relevant information in real-time will become essential.


Continuous Mobile Monitoring

Our current perspective of a patient’s healthcare record is comprised of snippets of our total healthcare record (imagine a piece of string as the record – all we get is a very short piece when we visit a doctor/facility). Continuous monitoring (wireless, cloud based and automatically monitored and tracked) changes this and offers more complete view of our health record and more important data that is not just single data points but trends and changes.

Personal Health Management

This is becoming essential as we move from a system that disconnects the purchaser from the payer. It’s as if we were buying a car but someone else was paying with no personal financial consequence – we would all buy Ferrari’s, Porsche etc. As we move away from this model, personal responsibility, personal health management tools and PHR's will become essential, not just for capturing and holding the data, but for helping people interpret and manage their own care. We will all become our own care coordinators for ourselves and our extended family, but will need the tools and solutions to help – these will come in form of PHP and health management tools.

Social Media in Healthcare

If World of Warcraft can engage a generation of young adults and teens to stay online, engaged and spending enormous sums of money, the gaming industry is doing something "right". Applying this to health and getting folks engaged is the next frontier. We have already seen that just giving a patient access to their medical record and putting a definitive Diagnosis of obesity has a positive impact on their behavior and general health. Imagine what else you could do with social media and gaming engagement.


But as always - don't forget the patient. As I have noted before Doctor Please Look at Me not Your EMR

This was amplified in a recent article in JAMA: A Piece Of My Mind (JAMA. 2012;307(23):2497-2498. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.4946) that included this drawing from a 7year old girl:

Medical students still burdened by high debt loads

via ama-assn.org

This problem needs to be fixed - if the debt load for a student emerging from medical school training is that high their income needs will be very high just to make loan payments.

Average debt of $162,000 - $205,000: Imagine starting out your early life with that kind of debt load!

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Nice Summary fo Major Changes from #MU1 to #MU2 #hcr #hcsm

Nice Summary from Healthcare Informatics in graphic form of the major changes of MU1 -> MU2

http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/meaningful-use-stage-2-what-s-changed-proposed-rule

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Mobility and the Olympic Games #mHealth #hcsm #HITsm

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Voice of the Doctor - August 10

This week I will be joined by Clint McClellan (Twitter @clintmc1) who is Sr. Dir. of Strategic Marketing at Qualcomm Life and the President and Chairman of the Continua Health Alliance. HE and I will be talking about the Continua Health Alliance which is a non-profit, open industry organization of healthcare and technology companieswho are collaborating to improve personal healthcare.They are establishing a system of interoperable personal connected health solutions that will help empower everyone to enageg in their own personal health wellness amangement. Take a look at their vision video here

He and I will be discussing some fo the examples and soltuions in the personal health space and how these have eveolved from personal smartphones to dedicated gateways and what opportunities will open up for application developers?

 

There are three ways to tune in:

• Stream the show live – click the Listen Live Now to launch our Internet radio player.

• You can also call in. A few minutes before our show starts, call in the following number:  Call: 1-559-546-1880; Enter participant code: 840521#

• HealthcareNOWradio.com is now on iTunes Radio!  Stream the show live – you’ll find this station listed under News/Talk.

Voice of the Doctor - August 10

This week I will be joined by Clint McClellan (Twitter @clintmc1) who is Sr. Dir. of Strategic Marketing at Qualcomm Life and the President and Chairman of the Continua Health Alliance. HE and I will be talking about the Continua Health Alliance which is a non-profit, open industry organization of healthcare and technology companieswho are collaborating to improve personal healthcare.They are establishing a system of interoperable personal connected health solutions that will help empower everyone to enageg in their own personal health wellness amangement. Take a look at their vision video here

He and I will be discussing some fo the examples and soltuions in the personal health space and how these have eveolved from personal smartphones to dedicated gateways and what opportunities will open up for application developers?

 

There are three ways to tune in:

• Stream the show live – click the Listen Live Now to launch our Internet radio player.

• You can also call in. A few minutes before our show starts, call in the following number:  Call: 1-559-546-1880; Enter participant code: 840521#

• HealthcareNOWradio.com is now on iTunes Radio!  Stream the show live – you’ll find this station listed under News/Talk.

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Larry Weed's Grand Rounds at Emory University in 1971

Amazing Larry Weed, MD's (Father of the Problem Orientated Medical record and key innovator in Problem-Oriented Medical Information System (PROMIS) )video is still available but here it is on youtube

Interesting to see how he effectively highlights the need for a well-organized problem lists for clear and sound clinical thinking. His thoughts are still relevant today and he is still engaged in the medical records arena (Lawrence Weed, father of the Problem Oriented Medical Record, looks ahead) 

His original article "Medical Records that Guide and Teach" (N Engl J Med. 1968;[11]278:593-600) from 1968 is still sadly behind a paywall but this more recent interview Interview with Lawrence Weed, MD—The Father of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record Looks Ahead from the Permanente Journal  and the pdf.

Worth taking the time to listen to - 50 years on....!

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Larry Weed's Grand Rounds at Emory University in 1971

Amazing Larry Weed, MD's (Father of the Problem Orientated Medical record and key innovator in Problem-Oriented Medical Information System (PROMIS) )video is still available but here it is on youtube

Interesting to see how he effectively highlights the need for a well-organized problem lists for clear and sound clinical thinking. His thoughts are still relevant today and he is still engaged in the medical records arena (Lawrence Weed, father of the Problem Oriented Medical Record, looks ahead) 

His original article "Medical Records that Guide and Teach" (N Engl J Med. 1968;[11]278:593-600) from 1968 is still sadly behind a paywall but this more recent interview Interview with Lawrence Weed, MD—The Father of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record Looks Ahead from the Permanente Journal  and the pdf.

Worth taking the time to listen to - 50 years on....!

Healthcare's Often Missing Element - The Human Element

About 6 years ago Dow Chemical sponsored what became a series of iconic TV commercials – simply called The Human Element. They still crop up occasionally - and I still think they are CLIO worthy – but no wins to date. A summary of the soothing, violin accompanied voice-over went like this:

For each of us there is a moment of discovery. In the flash of a synapse we learn that life is elemental. This knowledge changes everything. We see all things connected. The element not listed on the chart – is the missing element – the human element. And when we add it to the equation – the chemistry changes. Every reaction is different. The human element is the element of change. Nothing is more fundamental. Nothing more elemental.

In the course of those same 6 years we’ve raced breathlessly – sometimes frantically – to bring the promise of new technology to healthcare. E-Health, M-Health, D-Health – all with varying degrees of success but all with the same triple aim – improved care, health and cost.

Xerox has new evidence to suggest that there are still some sizable gaps in at least one critical element of our healthcare transformation – and it’s that human element. A recent survey of 2,147 U.S. adults, conducted for Xerox by Harris Interactive found that only 26% want electronic health records (EHR’s). Even beyond that surprise, only 40% of respondents believe that EHR’s will deliver better, more efficient care – and that’s down 2% from last year’s survey. About 85% also said they have privacy concerns about EHR systems generally. Those concerns aren’t unfounded. Today’s headline over at ModernHealthcare reports that over the last 3 years there were over 470 healthcare data breaches that involved the medical records of over 20 million people.

Much of that human element relates to a variety of customer experiences around all the different dialog’s in healthcare (physician to hospital, hospital to payer, patient to doctor etc…). In this context, consumers are really all of us – regardless of any healthcare  affiliation. Fundamentally changing these experiences isn’t as simple as slathering on a glitzy web design – or racing full throttle to the cloud and mobile. Recent headlines certainly aren’t conclusive – but they do suggest ample room for innovation and improvement – especially around that human element:

• A Physician Has Difficulty Selecting A Primary Care Doctor
• Badly Designed Electronic Medical Records Can Kill You
• Why EMR Is A Dirty Word To Many Doctors

Even with the big Enterprise IT decisions – headlines here often reflect areas of both significant risk and doubt:

• Cloud’s Thorniest Question – Does It Pay Off?
• Healthcare: Most Breached Industry In 2011
• Hospitals Struggle With BYOD, Want Clarity From Federal Regulators

In an effort to help providers to maximize the value of an EHR, Xerox turned to researchers at the venerable Palo Alto Research Center (PARC – a company that Xerox spun-off about 10 years ago) as a way to explore the landscape of innovation around EHR’s.

A big part of PARC’s healthcare work for Xerox is using ethnography and other social science methods to observe and analyze actual work practices – not just what people say they do – said Steve Hoover, CEO, PARC. If there’s one thing that this survey tells us, coupled with our own experiences, it’s that you should never develop or deploy technology outside of the human context.

PARC’s rich history in engineering innovation is legendary – spanning more than 40 years – and includes such key developments as laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.

Relative to healthcare, Xerox acquired ACS almost 3 years ago – which in turn acquired The Breakaway Group last fall (in part for their PromisePoint® technology – a kind of flight-simulator for large-scale EHR deployments). Last year, ACS signed a $500 million, 10-year agreement with Allscripts for hosted IT Services using Allscripts’ Sunrise Enterprise Suite to support EHR’s. These large scale connections (Xerox, ACS, Allscripts) combined with the innovation engines of companies like PARC and The Breakaway Group represent an exciting development. It’s where innovation – including the human element – meets scale – in healthcare. PARC’s influence is still relatively early – and most clearly represents the opportunity around that human element. Steve Hoover summarized it best:

PARC helped to usher in the era of ubiquitous computing – but in the evolution to truly personalized computing we recognized the critical importance of contextual computing. Bringing that deep understanding to large industries like healthcare is both a rich heritage – and an exciting opportunity. It’s also one we’re extremely passionate about.

via forbes.com

Love this piece by @DanMunro on the missing "element" (love the graphic with an Atomic number of 8 - same as Oxygen and an Atomic weight of 7E-09)

As Dan points out this si the key ingredient that is missing in so much of the dicussion and includes everything from the dialog with the physician/hospital/payer) to the interaction with the EMR and the engagement with the Xerox Spin off PARC that has been exploring the EHR interaction for ten years.

Interesting concept to have a flight simulator version of EMR's which was exactly the process we went through about 20 years ago when we designed our paperless hospital in Glasgow. We built mock up rooms and tested them in earnest with real physicians, nurses and other ancillary staff to work out the workflow kinks in the room's ergonomics.

We need more of this and perhaps even an independent testing environment that takes the CCHIT testing and certification methodology a stage further.

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Voice of the Doctor DIscussion Aug 3 with Chuck Webster, MD (@EHRWorkflow)

I had the pleasure of talking with Chuck Webster, MD (@EHRWorkflow) over the last few days and weeks and he just posted this interview at his website
We found much in common (not justin healthcare but in books, space and science fiction) and he has kindly agreed to join me tomorrow for the #VoiceoftheDr radio show at 2:30 ET
We will be continuing the theme from this interview and discussing EMR usability, how interface design is so important and how it can be improved with the addition of intelligent speech interfaces and the importance of enabling clinicians to use narrative documentation as the source of truth in our march towards digitization of medicine and the medical record

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>>>>>>>>

Natural language processing (NLP) applied to medical speech and text, also know as Clinical Language Understanding (CLU), is a hot topic. It promises to improve EHR user experience and extract valuable clinical knowledge from free text about patients. In keeping with this blog’s theme, NLP/CLU can improve EHR workflow and sometimes uses sophisticated workflow technology to span between users and systems.

10. Most of my previous questions are pretty “geeky.” So, to compensate, from the point of view of a current or potential EHR user, what’s the most important advice you can give them?

To me, the core issue is usability and interface design. The interface and technology has struggled to take off in part because the technology has been complex, hard to master and in many instances has required extensive and repeated training to use. The combination of SR [speech recognition] and CLU technology offers the opportunity to bridge the complexity chasm, removing the major barriers to adoption by making the technology intuitive and “friendly”. We can achieve this with intelligent design that capitalizes on the power of speech as a tool to remove the need to remember gateway commands and menu trees and doesn’t just convert what you say to text but actually understands the intent and applies the context of the EMR to the interaction. We have seen the early stages of this with the Siri tool that offers a new way of interacting with our mobile phone, using the context of your calendar, the day and date, location and other information to create a more human-like technology interface that is intuitive and less intimidating.

You can see the full interview at Video Interview and 10 Questions for Nuance’s Dr. Nick on Clinical Language Understanding via chuckwebster.com

Moon Landing Anniversary: Pictures From Historic Apollo 11 Misson (PHOTOS)

via huffingtonpost.com

Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Landing on the moon set in motion with these words

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Sadly I do not think we have the same vision necessary to take the next giant leap

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Apollo 11 Video Montage

Apollo 11 Video Introduction

http://mfile.akamai.com/20356/mov/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/qt.na...

Video Montage of Apollo 11 Moon Landing from 43 years ago today

http://mfile.akamai.com/20356/mov/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/qt.na...

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News Round Up - July 20

Some interesting news pieces to review this week including

The Value of the EHR

"The Relationship Between Electronic Health Records and Malpractice Claims,” from the Archives of Internal Medicine on Jun 25 and featured in the AMED News: "EHR use linked to fewer medical liability claims" on July 16

A research letter published online June 25 in Archives of Internal Medicine found that the rate of liability claims when EHRs were used was one-sixth the rate when EHRs were not used. Researchers say their findings suggest there was a reduction in errors associated with EHR use.

That showed the following results before and after an EHR implementation:



A word about correlation and the fact this does not imply causality: …correlation between two variables does not automatically imply that one causes the other

But as the authors put it:

It’s entirely possible that there’s something still distinct and unusual about practices that adopted electronic health records earlier, and they just happen to practice in a way that reduces their risk of malpractice claims….But I think it’s equally plausible that there’s something about electronic health records that does reduce their risk.

Uncertain but an interesting positive development

High Price Variability in US Hospital Surgical Procedures

Calprig published a report "Your Price May Vary" that offered a view into the wide differences in pricing for the same procedure in California. For example for a knee replacement from $59,800 (Alameda County Medical Center) to $164,400 (Washington Hospital). But the variation doe snot necessarily track quality adn they pointed to an earlier study in the Archives of Internal Medicine that showed county hospitals usually charge the least and for-profit hospitals charge the most and did an an interesting analysis of the hierarchical model for percentage increase in median charge for various patient and hospital factors:


And the charges for Appendicitis:

The median hospital charge among all patients was $33,611, with a lowest observed charge of $1529 and highest of $182,955

Personal Health Records

This review of Kaiser's myHealthManager: Lab tests and knowing our numbers can inspire patient engagement:

Engaging patents and sharing laboratory data helping them understand their results can inspire patent engagement. As they put it it is not enough to share the data you have to engage with the patient:

That means patients need to knowing their numbers: what they mean, and how changing them can impact their future quality and length of life… where personal behavior change has the potential to do this

This is the start of patient engagement and one that I think we will see increase in the coming months and years

This and more on #VoiceoftheDr



Join me on Friday at 2:30 ET on VoiceoftheDoctor
There are three ways to tune in:

• Stream the show live – click the Listen Live Now to launch our Internet radio player.

• You can also call in. A few minutes before our show starts, call in the following number:  Call: 1-559-546-1880; Enter participant code: 840521#

•  HealthcareNOWradio.com is now on iTunes Radio!  Stream the show live – you’ll find this station listed under News/Talk