This time of the year I tend to rethink all that I have accomplished through out the year.
2007:
Personal Life:
- Got married!!
- Expanded my field of study from Technology to Health Care with IT.
- My rock collection/study (Petrology) is progressing.
- Extended my lifestyle as a Jain follower.
- Organized all our important documents online for real time access.
Work:
- Successfully coordinated the $28,000 valued CCHIT certification effort for the company product.
- Improvised the company intranet website — HELPDESK — allowing internal communication improvement.
- Formulated appropriate communication policies within the company for directing the employee efforts in the right direction.
- Transformed from being a Knowledge Research Specialist to being a Knowledge Manager.
We (myself and Avni) wish you a Merry Christmas and hope your holidays are filled with joy and happiness.
My Contact Information:
Email: nainil@eliteral.com
Orkut: nainil@gmail.com
IM: nainil@hotmail.com
My first encounter with materialistic world came into actual realization when I first had to shift apartments from Philadelphia to Boston. I realized that I had almost 30% of house inventory which I had never used or was not going to use in the future. Since then I decided to balance my needs and wants which my factual needs and wants.
This Christmas myself and my wife we both decided to give each other a gift. We decided to:
- Organize our Documents with online access control.
- Remove all unused items for charitable donation or recycling.
- Scan all our Health Records and upload it on Microsoft HealthVault
Online Documents: We have scanned all of our most important documents and have uploaded them on a dedicated VPS server with dual backup facility for real time accessibility of data. We are now able to organize our documents online without the fear of loosing them for the rest of our lives.
Charitable Event: We donate our unwanted clothes at the local Walmart’s Cloths Donation boxes. Any other unused item goes to “Salvation Army” or any such projects available locally.
HealthVault: Microsoft HealthVault is personal health technology platform that lets you gather, store and share health information online. With HealthVault, users control their own health records, so they can privately share their health information with family, friends and healthcare professionals, and have access to trustworthy online health management tools.
We spent a total of 2 weekends to take care of the above mentioned tasks. By doing this exercise:
- Time is saved (as we lead a more organized life).
- We have a clear understanding of our needs and wants.
- We are now looking at the bigger picture of being a united family with a sense of responsibility towards the world we live in.
- We are able to find anything we need without searching for it.
- We have secure Health Records; accessible from any where around the world.
- We embrace technology to make our lives simpler.
There’s nothing wrong with having standards, is there?
No, as long as you don’t force them on others.
We work in an (healthcare) industry where we can harm our clients (patients) through medical errors and still charge them for our own mistakes.
Questions that need answers:
Who will take the ownership of Standards Deployment?
Is the EMR Adoption going to be a reality?
Is there a HIPAA Version 2.0?
If a doctor is participating in a quality measurement initiative and is only submitting “Aggregate Patient Information” to the quality measure unit, does the doctor need to take CONSENT from the patient that the patients information will be used in “Aggregate Data Collection”?
PatientPrivacyRights.Org (Deborah Peel, MD) says:
There should be no “secondary uses” or any uses of our personal health information without contemporaneous, informed consent.
Technically, HIPAA does not require consent for aggregate information sharing. Also, quality measurement is part of treatment/payment/operations, so it is exempt anyway. However, beyond HIPAA is the perception of the patient and community that their data is being shared.
Here are some interesting facts from an interesting article I read in the Science Daily on the US Health Care System:
* U.S. spends more than double what other countries spend for medical care–$6,697 per capita in 2005
* U.S. patients are more likely to report experiencing medical errors
* The study, published recently in the journal Health Affairs, finds that U.S. adults also have the highest out-of-pocket costs and greatest problems paying medical bills.
* U.S. adults are most likely to have gone without care because of high out-of-pocket costs.
Source: Commonwealth Fund (2007, November 4). One-third Of US Adults Call For Completely Rebuilding Health Care System. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/11/071101084956.htm
Considering all the efforts put by various health care organizations including (HITSP,ASTM,CCHIT) I believe that these numbers will change and there will be a positive upward moving trend in the health care industry.
The Wall Street Journal: MIT Scientists Pave the Way For Wireless Battery Charging (Friday, June 8, 2007)
A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported in the online publication of the journal Science, that they had demonstrated wireless transmission of electric power by magnetically coupled resonators. They dubbed their technology “WiTricity” for wireless electricity.
Resonator is an electrical circuit that combines capacitance and inductance in such a way that a periodic electric oscillation will reach maximum amplitude.
Consider the magnitude at which the WiTricity would affect the normal day to day life:
* Normal Person: Wireless Cell Phone / Laptop Battery Charging
* Doctors: Availability of devices which would not need an adaptor to charge but just the WiTricity Technology. Thus making the Doctors more portable.
* Patients: Heart Devices, Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices etc. will not need to be Charged on a constant basis using an adaptor.
This is progress. This is realization of patient safety. This is Technology for the next generation.
I believe in explaining to the fullest as to the details of my Work Profile.
There have been quite a few instances when the other person tries to derive, what I do before I start explaining them just because they heard me talk a few items on “HIPAA”, “Privacy” and “Compliance”.
I guess it is the “Human Nature” to:
* Constantly prove that “To Err.. is Human” and;
* Draw conclusions from a few “Jargons” one hears
Most of the times by nature of my work, the people with whom I interact are proficient in their work domain. However when it comes to explaining them “Interoperability” and “Standardization” in respect to “HIPAA” or other such “Health Care” related arenas they pretend to know everything about it.
Realistically, how many of you actually understand “HIPAA”? How many of you actually understand everything that lies behind being completely interoperable? How many of you understand the importance of “Patient Data Consent”?
Once I start explaining them the real meaning of these terms, they then look at you in astonishment. Thus, making you realize that what one understands in “General Terms” on any topic, is not quite as likely to be the real meaning. There is a deep underlying meaning for almost everything that goes on in any particular aspect of life and to understand it completely, one needs to be ready to listen, comprehend and learn from his surroundings.
One needs to throw a deeper insight on the terms which on the first look quite “Generic”.
It is very surprising to know what a care provider or a health care software vendor would consider their ultimate goal.
Care Provider: Quick and Easy Delivery of Care. (Less Clicks, Quicker Results)
Health Care Software Vendor: Provide a software to the care provider that would make the provider’s life easy.
Any health care project will fail if the Patient does not get Care. However the majority of the Care Providers/Vendors forget the real cause which should be “Providing Proper Care to the Patients”.
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