Ix, Medicaid and HIT

The Center for Children and Families at the Georgetown Health Policy Institute has just released a series of issue briefs on “Strengthening Medicaid.” I authored one of these papers, “Health Information Technology: Innovative Applications for Medicaid,” which discusses strategies that states can use to improve the quality and efficiency of Medicaid programs. The paper addresses [...]

Patient-Centered Health Information Technology Initiative

I will be doing a considerable amount of my blogging about information therapy (Ix) at the now-live Patient Centered Health Information Technology (PCHIT) blog. The Center for Information Therapy’s (IxCenter’s) new PCHIT Initiative will have an active learning community of clinicians hosted by me and Ted Eytan, MD, the IxCenter’s Senior Visiting Fellow, who is currently on [...]

Who Can Be an Information Therapist?

A colleague out in Seattle posted a great story, Information Therapy on the Go, about his experience in despensing information therapy (Ix) in taxis. The end of his post raised some questions: What is an information therapist? Who can be an information therapist? How can we train people to be information therapists in order to [...]

What Will Be the Biggest Disruption in Health Care?

Will the biggest disruption in health care be an Internet-based health care industry?  We already know that more consumers get answers to their health care questions on a daily basis from the Internet than from their doctors.  But do we think that online tools will evolve enough to allow consumers to organize and make sense [...]

Can Ix and PHRs Address the IOM’s “Crossing the Quality Chasm” Challenge?

The IxCenter published a white paper a few years ago entitled, “The Ix Evidence Base: Using Information Therapy to Cross the Quality Chasm” (available at http://www.ixcenter.org/publications/whitepapers.cfm). In it, we detailed the emprical evidence that supports the Ix role in addressing each of the 10 rules that Institute of Medicine (IOM) laid out for health care delivery [...]

Ix Across America: Integrating Information Therapy Into Practice Community by Community

We are eager to identify new strategies for helping practicing clinicians to make it easier to integrate information therapy (Ix) into their clinical workflow. One model that we have conceptualized is collaborating with leading local and regional quality leaders to stimulate Ix advancement in their own communities.
We are aware that this “Ix Across America” concept [...]

Who Will Be the Next Generation of PHR Users?

Looking at how young people use the Web for virtually everything from commerce to social networking, it’s not hard to imagine an increasingly virtual future health care world. If Don Berwick is right that at least half of current in-person clinical encounters don’t require a visit, this generation likely will change the character of US health [...]

Ix is in the House: Congressman Kennedy Re-Introduces PHR Legislation

Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) re-introduced the “Personalized Health Information Act” at a Capitol Hill briefing today to incentivize adoption of personal health records (for details of the precursor PHR legislation from the last Congress, see my January 3 post: Patient-Centered Health Information Technology in the New Congress). Some of the observations about the issues that most struck [...]

MyHealth, Circa 2007…More Questions & Responses…

Following up on Tuesday’s posting, another question that came up a few times in our webcast, “MyHealth, Circa 2007: Consumer Needs and Market Responses in eHealth,” related to consumer privacy concerns.
I believe three things about privacy and security related to online personal health information (PHI).

Every provider, system, Web site or other entity that collects consumers’ [...]

MyHealth, Circa 2007: Consumer Needs and Market Responses in eHealth

We held a public webcast on this topic today. Susannah Fox, Associate Director of the Pew Internet Project, not only shared valuable insights but also some of Pew’s as-yet-unpublished data. The presentations and the audio recording from both of our presentations will be available on our Web site in the near future.
We had nearly 100 unique [...]