Power to the Patient!
This is a quick post without a lot of explanation, targeted to perhaps a small number of people but perhaps also intriguing to a lot more. This image is a quick summary of the post below:
[What’s FHIR? I’ve been blogging about it for more than a year; here are all the posts, newest first, though if you’re new to the concept please start here. This post doesn’t require understanding FHIR’s significance, but it sure helps.]
Deadline Friday, May 22: See timeline below, learn more on the track page, then submit your application. Prizes, fame, community!
This post is an unusual project for me, and not everyone will want to do it, but I know some will want to pitch in, and maybe someone out there will have a magic wand to undo the harm that’s apparently been done by years of stonewalling.
[Read more…]Today in an email thread I realized it’s a decade since the OpenNotes work started, via Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker, and now promoted so brilliantly by Liz Salmi. How great that back then my PCP Danny Sands and I were among the first crew of OpenNotes study participants!
I decided to mark the occasion by creating an /OpenNotes page on my site, listing all the blog posts and articles that have emerged as part of the work.
(Interesting to observe: before cancer rearranged my life, I don’t think I ever stuck with any cause for ten years straight. Funny how that happens.)
[Readers who are familiar with HIPAA can skip to the tweets below.]
Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about how the 1996 HIPAA law, whose regulations govern health data privacy (and access), is not sufficient for today’s world of apps and digital everything. For instance, the regs say docs & hospitals generally have to be careful with your medical records – but apps and wearables like Fitbits didn’t exist at the time, so HIPAA says nothing about what apps learn about you, nor what such companies do with it. Same for sites like Facebook and Amazon’s ever-listening Alexa. So everyone in the field agrees HIPAA needs to be replaced.
[Read more…]
The photo above shows what “visit notes” from a doctor appointment might look like in the era before computers. Just two days before my first speech where I said “Gimme my damn data,” I had an ENT visit, and on the way out I asked for a copy of the doctor’s notes. The clerk snickered out loud and showed it to me, saying, “If you really want it….”
No joke; this is what the doctor had recorded.
[Read more…]