Nikolai Kirienko, Chronology.MD Co-Project Director, UC, Berkeley
Tablet computing at the point of care is poised to touch virtually every corner of care delivery in medicine. Yet, the currently proposed criteria for Meaningful Use Stage 2 have yet to embrace the post-PC world of medicine that’s just over the horizon. Someday sooner than we think, those large, immobile boxes chained to a desk will seem as quaint a notion as the endless stacks of paper charts they replaced.
Thankfully, Project HealthDesign offers a practical glimpse of our rapidly emerging future in action today.
By equipping patients and providers with an array of cutting-edge consumer technologies-- from iPads to WiFi biometric devices-- and putting them through their paces in clinical practice, we are able to learn a vast amount about the promise and pitfalls we're likely to encounter at scale in just a few short years.
With respect to Meaningful Use, and through Project HealthDesign, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is characteristically ahead of the game, pioneering a scenario that, at first glance, may look ridiculous to folks steeped in the world as it is today. iPads? SMS messaging? WiFi? I can't even get my patients to show up! (Note the Estrellita team's most popular app feature: appointment tracking.)
As a member of ONC’s newly minted Consumer/Patient Engagement Power Team, it's been a privilege to work with ONC's senior adviser for Consumer E-Health, Lygeia Riccardi and MaryJo Deering, acting director of the Office of Communications, to examine the long view in the context of Meaningful Use.
They recently asked fellow patient advocates Hugo Campos, Heidi Sitcov and me to work alongside industry leaders as co-chairs of a remarkable group assembled to combine a rare blend of on-the-ground experience implementing health IT. Our task: to bring the patient voice, via direct item by item comments, before the Policy and Standards Committees overseeing the development of the Meaningful Use Stage 2 criteria.
Thanks to Project HealthDesign, I have no shortage of vivid patient experiences involving the challenges of working with electronic health data, which I hope to more explicitly detail along with our specific comments in an upcoming post.
In short, Project HealthDesign makes abundantly clear that patients today-- and in rapidly growing numbers into the future-- will expect to easily engage with their personal health data in apps and on mobile devices of their choosing. Native apps on smartphones and tablets may provide the most engaging experiences available, but importing data, such as lab test results, remains a significant barrier to adoption-- for patients and developers alike.
The SMART Platform within ONC’s Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) is working hard to reduce many of these barriers.In conjunction with existing standards, it will facilitate the role outlined early on by the Project HealthDesign Common Platform and through complementary third party services like Microsoft HealthVault.
My highest hope is that data liberation for apps, as advanced in these and similar projects, will become a policy and standards reality in Meaningful Use Stage 3 and beyond.
It will be a beautiful day when sharing components of my longitudinal health record, such as medication adherence or lab test results, with an iPad app is as simple and easy as installing an app on Facebook.
Chronology.MD, in conjunction with other interactive health history timelines such as SMART app challenge winner MyNote, or @KatieMcCurdy's inspiring medical life history will require this data for greater accuracy and to spare patients from hand transcription.
The details of my experience directing and using our app have made me a vocal advocate for the robust inclusion of patient engagement as more than just a theme in a spreadsheet. To make a transformational difference, truly liberated data will need to be hard coded into the policies and standards driving value in our rapidly evolving electronic health care economy.
Granting static electronic views of data will be a welcome improvement, as written in the current Meaningful Use criteria. But if patients can't engage with their data in order to create meaningful change in their daily lives-- via apps they might actually enjoy-- then it’s but one more health information silo that used to be on paper. When it’s all said and done, Meaningful Use must be meaningful for patients for it to be truly meaningful at all. Thankfully, this is only the beginning.
How would you enhance Meaningful Use to aid dynamic patient engagement? Sound off in the comments so I can share your input with the Power Team.
