e-Patient Dave

Democratizing Healthcare

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“From #73cents to FHIR”: keynote at the Redox Connect customer conference

Patient voices have been working for decades to achieve access to their medical records, which have always been locked up in the hospital. No more: new rules went into effect on October 6 that mean all your health data must be available for download by apps, online, by end of year.

This so-called “Cures Rule” is part of the continuing work of the 21st Century Cures Act enacted by Congress in 2015. The Act includes many other things to improve development of cures, but for patients a vital new requirement is that health data must now move easily between computers. It’s common sense for everyone in healthcare, and for patients it’s an immense win for justice (fairness): at last we can see about ourselves what the people treating us can see.

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New podcasts & webinars #1: “Interoperability & Equity” for HIMSS

There’s been an interesting surge in evangelist activity recently: I’ve been involved in several podcasts and webinars, all giving new life to the “gimme my data” movement. Here’s one that went live today on the HIMSS Learning Network. (It’s free but you may need to register.)

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#LongCOVID patient researcher Hannah Wei kicks off FHIR DevDays

For two years I’ve blogged about DevDays, the twice-annual software developer conference for the FHIR software standard for health data. November 17-20 was this fall’s edition, and in the opening session, Hannah Wei gave a keynote unlike any other.

Fifteen minute video:

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“My doc’s practice closed. Need my chart. What do I do?”

That’s a paraphrase of the starting tweet in a valuable thread today from a colleague in OpenNotes, Cait DesRoches. Here are the tweets. (I hope this all comes through on the blog; email subscribers, if necessary, click the headline to read this online.)

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Morgan Gleason, 21, wins the second FHIR DevDays Patient Track

Last week at the virtual DevDays conference (for the FHIR software standard that I’ve blogged about so much) we held the second Patient Innovator Track. Watch the winning pitch, 10 minutes long, from Morgan Gleason, fresh out of college. She describes her complex situation and how she’s learned to deal with it manually, and tells the FHIR developer community what she needs – what she wants them to help create, so she can walk into each doctor visit fully prepared without going through all the work she has to do now:

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FHIR on the horizon: ten part blog series

I want to let you know about a couple of important developments. First, I’ve started blogging on another site, Tincture, as well as here; second, there’s important news in the world of health I.T. (or personal health data or whatever you want to call it).

First, the health IT news: there seems to be good stuff happening! An international data transfer standard called FHIR (pronounced “fire”) has been in development for years, and is finally nearing the time when it will (we hope) change the world for those of us who want unfettered access to all our health data.

It’s not very visible to the general public yet, but a Google Image search shows tons of different graphics illustrating different perspectives. Google shows different people different things but here’s what I get:

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