HealthIT Developers and Users: The Common Platform is Now Available!

By Patricia Flatley Brennan.

I am pleased to invite HealthIT developers and users to try Project HealthDesign’s Common Platform Development Environment (PHD-CDE). This is an instance of the Common Platform, created and hosted by Sujansky & Associates, that allows you to develop against the Common Platform Components and test new applications. Additionally, to assist with development of your own applications, developers can access a sample web hosted application for which source code is available.

The Common Platform was designed to be a set of software components that provides common, shared functions to a variety of personal health applications (PHAs). By reducing personal health application implementation time and increasing interoperability among PHAs, the platform’s centralized functions aids in storing observations and medications as well as providing authentication, registry, and access-control functions.

By making the PHD-CDE available without cost, we hope to engage consumers and developers alike in the creation of innovative PHAs that include interoperability and ODLs.

To gain access to the Common Platform Development Environment, please visit our site and request a user account. After using the Development Environment and sample application, leave a comment to give us your feedback about how they work. We also encourage you to let us know of any applications you create and how they are used. We would be pleased to feature these uses on our website, if there is sufficient interest.

Note: We have received 11 account requests since November 19th. Send us a blog comment about your experiences with the PHD-CDE.

Brennan Receives Leadership Award at AMIA

Posted November 19, 2009 by Steve Downs 

In case you haven’t heard … there’s news out of San Francisco and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium. In addition to all the tutorials, panels, workshops, posters and presentations, AMIA uses the meeting as an opportunity to recognize distinguished leaders in the field at their Leadership Dinner, held last Saturday night. This year, none other than Project HealthDesign’s National Program Office Director Patti Brennan was recognized for her volunteer leadership and service to the organization.

 

All of us who know Patti know that professionally and personally she is passionate in her desire to expand her knowledge – and exceedingly generous in sharing her own considerable understanding of the nexus of technology, health care and consumer choice. She has been involved with AMIA for more than a decade and has worn a variety of hats – from chairing numerous working groups, to sitting on the board of directors, to planning multiple symposiums and congresses. Taking on an even larger role in 2000, Patti was named AMIA’s president where she oversaw the development of the association’s strategic plan.

 

Congratulations, Patti, on being recognized for your ever-growing rap sheet of achievements. We’re really fortunate to have your leadership, expertise and boundless energy to guide the work that we do at Project HealthDesign.

 

I also want to congratulate Paul Tang, who serves as the chair of Project HealthDesign’s National Advisory Committee. Paul was given AMIA’s Detmer Award for policy contributions in recognition of his many contributions to informing health policy. Well done, Paul, and well deserved.

Posted November 9, 2009 by Uba Backonja

From October 27^th through the 30^th, TEDMED wowed San Diego.  The conference, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, focused on medical innovations ranging from Dr. Craig Venter and his discussion of synthetic genomics, to Dr. Anthony Atala and the seemingly fictional yet full-on reality of tissue and organ regeneration done at the Wake Forrest Institute of Regenerative Medicine.

One of the unofficial themes of the conference, as noted by several speakers, was the importance of patients telling their stories, how narrative is central of understanding a patient’s health.  This theme and several showcased projects resonated with Project HealthDesign.

Eric Dishman, Chief Strategist and Global Director of Product Research, Innovation, and Policy for Intel’s Digital Health Group, focused on “bringing health care home and to the home.” The project, stemming from Intel’s study of seniors, focuses on measuring and monitoring health behavior in meaningful ways and on shifting from a “mainframe model” to a “personal computing" model in health care.  He demonstrated how one can pick up changes in health in the nuances of how one answers the phone.  Voice more quiet than normal?  May signal Parkinson’s.  Taking a longer time for the person to recognize the person on the other line?  May be a sign of dementia.  Taking them longer to get to the phone?  May have mobility problems.  Dishman also discussed the mechanism of bringing health care to the home via home monitoring—cameras, sensors embedded in the rug, and on-person devices that can capture gait, stride, length, and body position.  By tracking changes in patterns in the household, one can be alerted to potential problems.

Dr. Vic Strecher, at the University of Michigan Center for Health Communication Research, highlighted one of the projects that perhaps resonated with Project HealthDesign the most.  Looking at what inspires behavior change (motivation, confidence, and events, which are often chaotic) and aligning behavior and core values to initiate behavior change, Strecher has created a website for tailored digital health coaching.  The uniqueness in the tailoring is in that multiple facets of a patient’s life are taken into consideration and used as mechanisms to initiate behavior change.

Bill Davenhall, from Health and Human Services Solutions at ESRI, had patient narrative at the center of his talk about how one’s “place history” (where you have lived or been) impacts your health and should be required in PHRs.  He showed not only mapping place history from recall but also capturing this data via GPS and Geographic Information Systems.  This data can then be integrated with, for example, pollution information from the Environmental Protection Agency, allowing for risk assessment based on pollution exposure.

Other interesting speakers included Alexander Tsiaris, founder and CEO of Anatomical Travelogue.  Emphasizing the importance of telling stories, he unveiled TheVisualMD.com, a visual health information guide for patients in video and visual (including 3D) format.  The library is open source and includes a personalized section where personal health information notes can be inserted into educational tutorials.

Also, the audience had the honor to hear Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the President’s special advisor on health policy, speak about health care and what matters in reform.  One of the points that he highlighted was that a move to home care is key to health reform.

The only disappointing part of the conference was the lack of nurses in the lineup and in the audience.  Hopefully in the future the innovations of nurse scientists and researchers can be showcased along with other health scientists.

Talks from the conference will be available at TED.com and TEDMED.com in the near future.  TEDMED 2010 has opened registration for next year’s meeting.

NCVHS PHR Recommendations and PHD

Posted November 2, 2009 by Uba Backonja

On September 28^th, 2009, the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS, http://www.ncvhs.hhs.gov/wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius regarding the “protection of the privacy and security of individual health information in personal health records.”

In the letter, the committee discussed the synthesis of their recommendations on privacy and security of information in PHRs. This included hearings in May of 2009, held by the Confidentiality and Security Subcommittee of the NCVHS and included testimony from PHR vendors, consumer advocates, experts representatives of PHRs offered by health care providers and payers, and representatives from Medicare and Medicaid PHR projects.

From these hearings, four themes emerged:

1. the need for a standard set of fair information practices to govern consumer rights across all PHRs,
2. the need to maintain regulatory flexibility to foster development and innovation in the field of PHRs,
3. the importance of protecting consumers from unanticipated or inappropriate uses or disclosures of health information in their PHRs, and
4. the need to develop a consumer education strategy that will ensure appropriate understanding of the purposes, uses, and privacy and confidentiality limitations of PHRs.

These themes touch on major functions and goals of Project HealthDesign.

1. Project HealthDesign is inherently patient-centered—they are the focus of the project design and it is their perspective that this design is centered on. Patients have easy access to their PHR and decide what data to share, when, and with whom. Also, Round 2 grantees will receive technical core support and consultation on legal and regulatory aspects of capturing Observations of Daily Living (ODLs).
2. The major tenant of Project HealthDesign is to “stimulate innovation in personal health information technology.” Also, one of the project’s objectives is to expand “regulatory and policy considerations to facilitate the sharing of and protection of personal health information generated outside of care settings and its integration into clinical practice.” In Round 2, a major component is to provide guidance to teams within the context of national, state, and local regulations in terms of capturing ODLs and integrating them in to care processes.
3. Protecting consumer information is a major component of Project HealthDesign and one of the elements that composes the foundation of the common platform.
4. A core development stage in PHR development at Project HealthDesign is early engagement of patients in the design process. This promotes the possiblity of innovations that are developed to “fit” patient mental models and usefulness needs while minimizing training. In person educational efforts can then focus on complex, conceptual questions, such as understanding risk or making tradeoffs.

These points by NCVHS are an important turning point in the implementation of PHRs with the focus on the patient perspective. Project HealthDesign is glad to be in step with these points and looks forward to participating in the evolution of PHRs.