e-Health 2011
Summary Review of e-Health 2011
I really wanted to attend the annual e-Health conference last year, but the company I was with wouldn't send me. So I signed up as a volunteer only to find out a few days before the conference that it was held in Vancouver. I sent an email to the volunteer coordinator because I was too embarrassed to explaining over the phone that I wouldn’t be able to come since I live in Toronto. As you can imagine, I was really excited that OTN would send me to the conference this year and I really appreciate the opportunity. I want to write a summary review on everything that left an impression on me. I have the tendency of filtering information according to my areas of interests and at the same time cover as much material as I can, so this review will sound a bit scatter-brain-ish.
Sessions I have attended, orderly chronologically.
Opening by COACH president
A good reminder of the purpose of our work: enable healthy outcome in patients. Sometimes I forget why we are working on certain project, especially when working through mundane and tedious tasks.
Opening Key note Address – e-Health: A Media MD’s Take on Winning Hearst and Minds on Medicine’s Front Lines
Interesting comment on security: most doctors are willing to sacrifice some security for more access.
www.cancerview.ca: Accelerating Cancer Control and Facilitating Virtual Collaboration in Canada
This is a credible source on cancer control information. White label framework is used to decrease redundancy of information from different partners. The framework of the portal is lent to partners who want to publish information on the site.
Remote Screening for Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) using Telemedicine: experience of the SickKids Ophthalmology and Telemedicine Program over two years
The technology behind is really similar to our own Tele-Ophthalmology project, except that the screening is done in real time here. What I learnt from this presentation is that the timing of the ROP screening is crucial: it has to be done before the tissue damage is irreversible.
Cloud Power – We’re All In
I went to this session because prior to joining OTN, I was with IBM working on a Cloud Computing project, so I was interested to find out progress made in this area. Basically, I didn’t hear anything that I didn’t know, which is good; that means my knowledge is still up to date! Most of the questions from the audience are about SLA (Service Level Agreement), and rightfully so, since the idea is about renting someone else’s resources, the SLA needs to be tight enough to meet the business needs.
Baycrest
Baycrest is working on a portal as a form of sharing privacy policies and procedures in the e-Health industry. I thought this would be very useful for us, especially OTN privacy specialists once it is in production.
Plenary Session: Quality Improvement in Healthcare: An Executive’s Perspective
Unlike the U.S., since the Canadian government funds healthcare, the government basically has the power to make EMR mandatory in primary care. Hmmm, if we take the extreme measure, we can be ahead of all the nations in terms of e-Health adoption.
Currently there is no way of measuring the performance in primary care; the data from EMR would help enable this measurement. Of course, there are a number of physicians that don’t want to expose the data to be measured due to fear of competition among peers.
We are partially relying on the physician’s work ethics for our health; e.g. the physician’s office schedule yearly checkup with us. In my case, I just call the doctor’s office whenever I need an appointment. This is how our healthcare system works: the physicians are trained to administer their own business. By interfering and introducing EMR, we are really changing the administration of the entire healthcare system, and we are bound to meet resistance because the doctors don’t have the proper training to use the new system.
Public Launch of a Province-wide Personal Health Portal Solution: MyHealth.Alberta.ca
This is a patient centric portal. The presenter talked about identity access management implementation of the portal which is the reason I attended this session. Unfortunately, there weren’t any details. There is also a physician centric portal in Alberta (albertanetcare.ca). I plan to make inquires about their IAM implementation.
I wish we can exchange information more frequently with western provinces since B.C. and Alberta are both ahead of Ontario in terms of patient/physician portal, as well as HER/EMR implementation.
Transforming the Chronic Disease Management Model through technology enabled Patient / Physician Connectivity
The presenter of this session has got to be one of the best speaker I have ever encountered. He has a very deep understand and interest in the subject area, all the way from government legislation down to implementation details. His pace of speaking is slow, but powerful and clear. He answers questions right on the money and he even answers questions that people don’t know how to articulate properly.
A chronic disease management portal was implemented in various clinics in Cleveland area to enable access of patient information. I was happy the speaker talked about how they dealt with security and privacy concerns. Security needs to be separated from privacy even though they are always brought up together . People are catching on quickly on security related technology, and are getting comfortable with it, so security is usually not a big concern. In terms of privacy, the process of obtaining consent is built into the portal, e.g. patient is given control on whether to push the personal health information to the vault where it can then be shared among the clinics in the network. If patient does not consent, then the PHI only stays with the user’s home clinic. One of the success factors is that they made it clear that only people within the network can have access to the information. By doing so they have set the scope and expectation clearly from the start; and that helped to decrease patients’ anxiety level towards exposure of information.
Design and Pilot Evaluation of an mHealth Self-Management System for Adolescents with Type I Diabetes
This is a demo of a mobile application designed for adolescents with Type I diabetes. It is easy to use and gained general acceptance in the pilot group. I liked the fact that the blood glucose reading can be automatically feed (through Bluetooth?) into the cell phone app. What a hassle free way to update the application. The application also has intelligence to analyze trends and recommend changes in behavior accordingly. My sister in-law is always carrying a notebook to record her son’s blood glucose reading, she would love to get hold of this product. I think it can be useful in training diabetics to be more independent.
How to Implement a Clinical Portal?
It’s always good to start small and try to accomplish little by little in a portal implementations. Begin by a “proof of concept” stage: release the service to a small pilot group is well worth the time and effort to make the service more successful in the end.
e-Health in the Developing and Emerging World – How Should We Help?
I find this session particularly interesting because it talks about e-Health development in my home country: China. China’s healthcare system does not have family physicians. People go directly to the hospital to be triaged and then arranged to see specialists directly. In rural areas, the rich travel to the city to see doctors; the poor have virtually no access to qualified medical staff. Telemedicine can really play a role in bridging the gap in these areas. I wonder if OTN can expand to overseas. Among developing counties, China especially, is very receptive in piloting e-Health projects because the government wants to see proof that the program works before deploy it to the entire population.
Closing and Keynote Address by Stephen Lewis
A passionate humanitarian speech on how the technology we already have here can help save lives in developing countries. I wonder if OTN can get involved with WHO to help those in need.
Miscellaneous:
There are other things worth noting in the conference material distributed to attendees. I flipped through the information and found some good to know information
1. COACH has certification programs worth pursuing
2. COACH has volunteer programs for people that want to gain experience in the industry
I really wanted to attend the annual e-Health conference last year, but the company I was with wouldn't send me. So I signed up as a volunteer only to find out a few days before the conference that it was held in Vancouver. I sent an email to the volunteer coordinator because I was too embarrassed to explaining over the phone that I wouldn’t be able to come since I live in Toronto. As you can imagine, I was really excited that OTN would send me to the conference this year and I really appreciate the opportunity. I want to write a summary review on everything that left an impression on me. I have the tendency of filtering information according to my areas of interests and at the same time cover as much material as I can, so this review will sound a bit scatter-brain-ish.
Sessions I have attended, orderly chronologically.
Opening by COACH president
A good reminder of the purpose of our work: enable healthy outcome in patients. Sometimes I forget why we are working on certain project, especially when working through mundane and tedious tasks.
Opening Key note Address – e-Health: A Media MD’s Take on Winning Hearst and Minds on Medicine’s Front Lines
Interesting comment on security: most doctors are willing to sacrifice some security for more access.
www.cancerview.ca: Accelerating Cancer Control and Facilitating Virtual Collaboration in Canada
This is a credible source on cancer control information. White label framework is used to decrease redundancy of information from different partners. The framework of the portal is lent to partners who want to publish information on the site.
Remote Screening for Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) using Telemedicine: experience of the SickKids Ophthalmology and Telemedicine Program over two years
The technology behind is really similar to our own Tele-Ophthalmology project, except that the screening is done in real time here. What I learnt from this presentation is that the timing of the ROP screening is crucial: it has to be done before the tissue damage is irreversible.
Cloud Power – We’re All In
I went to this session because prior to joining OTN, I was with IBM working on a Cloud Computing project, so I was interested to find out progress made in this area. Basically, I didn’t hear anything that I didn’t know, which is good; that means my knowledge is still up to date! Most of the questions from the audience are about SLA (Service Level Agreement), and rightfully so, since the idea is about renting someone else’s resources, the SLA needs to be tight enough to meet the business needs.
Baycrest
Baycrest is working on a portal as a form of sharing privacy policies and procedures in the e-Health industry. I thought this would be very useful for us, especially OTN privacy specialists once it is in production.
Plenary Session: Quality Improvement in Healthcare: An Executive’s Perspective
Unlike the U.S., since the Canadian government funds healthcare, the government basically has the power to make EMR mandatory in primary care. Hmmm, if we take the extreme measure, we can be ahead of all the nations in terms of e-Health adoption.
Currently there is no way of measuring the performance in primary care; the data from EMR would help enable this measurement. Of course, there are a number of physicians that don’t want to expose the data to be measured due to fear of competition among peers.
We are partially relying on the physician’s work ethics for our health; e.g. the physician’s office schedule yearly checkup with us. In my case, I just call the doctor’s office whenever I need an appointment. This is how our healthcare system works: the physicians are trained to administer their own business. By interfering and introducing EMR, we are really changing the administration of the entire healthcare system, and we are bound to meet resistance because the doctors don’t have the proper training to use the new system.
Public Launch of a Province-wide Personal Health Portal Solution: MyHealth.Alberta.ca
This is a patient centric portal. The presenter talked about identity access management implementation of the portal which is the reason I attended this session. Unfortunately, there weren’t any details. There is also a physician centric portal in Alberta (albertanetcare.ca). I plan to make inquires about their IAM implementation.
I wish we can exchange information more frequently with western provinces since B.C. and Alberta are both ahead of Ontario in terms of patient/physician portal, as well as HER/EMR implementation.
Transforming the Chronic Disease Management Model through technology enabled Patient / Physician Connectivity
The presenter of this session has got to be one of the best speaker I have ever encountered. He has a very deep understand and interest in the subject area, all the way from government legislation down to implementation details. His pace of speaking is slow, but powerful and clear. He answers questions right on the money and he even answers questions that people don’t know how to articulate properly.
A chronic disease management portal was implemented in various clinics in Cleveland area to enable access of patient information. I was happy the speaker talked about how they dealt with security and privacy concerns. Security needs to be separated from privacy even though they are always brought up together . People are catching on quickly on security related technology, and are getting comfortable with it, so security is usually not a big concern. In terms of privacy, the process of obtaining consent is built into the portal, e.g. patient is given control on whether to push the personal health information to the vault where it can then be shared among the clinics in the network. If patient does not consent, then the PHI only stays with the user’s home clinic. One of the success factors is that they made it clear that only people within the network can have access to the information. By doing so they have set the scope and expectation clearly from the start; and that helped to decrease patients’ anxiety level towards exposure of information.
Design and Pilot Evaluation of an mHealth Self-Management System for Adolescents with Type I Diabetes
This is a demo of a mobile application designed for adolescents with Type I diabetes. It is easy to use and gained general acceptance in the pilot group. I liked the fact that the blood glucose reading can be automatically feed (through Bluetooth?) into the cell phone app. What a hassle free way to update the application. The application also has intelligence to analyze trends and recommend changes in behavior accordingly. My sister in-law is always carrying a notebook to record her son’s blood glucose reading, she would love to get hold of this product. I think it can be useful in training diabetics to be more independent.
How to Implement a Clinical Portal?
It’s always good to start small and try to accomplish little by little in a portal implementations. Begin by a “proof of concept” stage: release the service to a small pilot group is well worth the time and effort to make the service more successful in the end.
e-Health in the Developing and Emerging World – How Should We Help?
I find this session particularly interesting because it talks about e-Health development in my home country: China. China’s healthcare system does not have family physicians. People go directly to the hospital to be triaged and then arranged to see specialists directly. In rural areas, the rich travel to the city to see doctors; the poor have virtually no access to qualified medical staff. Telemedicine can really play a role in bridging the gap in these areas. I wonder if OTN can expand to overseas. Among developing counties, China especially, is very receptive in piloting e-Health projects because the government wants to see proof that the program works before deploy it to the entire population.
Closing and Keynote Address by Stephen Lewis
A passionate humanitarian speech on how the technology we already have here can help save lives in developing countries. I wonder if OTN can get involved with WHO to help those in need.
Miscellaneous:
There are other things worth noting in the conference material distributed to attendees. I flipped through the information and found some good to know information
1. COACH has certification programs worth pursuing
2. COACH has volunteer programs for people that want to gain experience in the industry
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