We are not at a point where we can effectively: total, safely protect, easily transport and access our health data. I read a great article by Margalit Gur-Arie entitled, “Trust your life records to an unnamed chain of software vendors” she uses an analogy of our current banking system to emphasize how far away we are from gaining the trust around our health records data. Great article and highly recommended. This got me thinking about how we manage our data today?
The current focus on the use of smartphones and tablets are mainly for the physicians and nurses. We have yet to discuss the needs of the patients? My personal experience in daily work routines, writing my blogs and using smartphones indicates we are still evolving. There are some models of storing data that could promote greater adoption of data management that would help accelerate the use of technology for managing healthcare data.
Unintended consequences
A few weeks ago I had accidentally dropped my laptop. You know those moments when you’re traveling for business and just happened to let your device slip from your hands. This damaged the LCD display rendering my laptop useless as I was not able to use my data. For the next week I struggled to work effectively, and yes I do keep up a back-up of my data. So I had to cart around my portable drive with my files to a desktop with Internet access, and rely more heavily on my smartphone.
Bottom line from this experience is that smartphones are still not the answer to managing my data. I still rely on apps to do my daily work routines. There needs to be alternatives to managing apps and data across several devices.
Managing your health records
My brother is a kidney transplant recipient. In my earlier blog “Fresh start in 2011” I mentioned how thankful I am for his life. Those of you that have a relative who has undergone these kinds of operations you know that there is a daily regimen of medications to keep the body from rejecting the foreign organ. Have you seen the amount of ‘paper’ data from all the specialists and physicians it takes to keep this all in balance? Even with a dedicated intern whose job it is to check and analyze this data still takes a few hours just to make a ‘minor’ medication adjustment!
There are some apps on the market that address specific medical data: heart monitoring, diabetes tracking, etc. I would be very interested in a personal health record (PHR) that can sum the data from multiple sources?
Smartphones and Tablets – we’re still developing
iPhone versus Android. The iPad versus the latest set of tablets. Earlier this week I posed several questions at the 2011 mHealth Trends (HIMSS Preview) webinar with Brian Dolan (@mobilehealth) and John Moore (@john_chilmark). These devices are still evolving in the market and while it is getting easier to check health data via individual apps we are not addressing the issue of managing the complete portfolio (or checkbook) of your health data?
Later this year the iPhone 5 will be out on the market. As well as an update to the popular iPad tablet. The market is evolving with devices that are easier to use and much more powerful. We have come a long way since the bag phone and netbooks.
How can we digest all of these changes – what is still missing?
There are ways to manage your data on multiple devices. Mobileme (www.apple.com/mobileme/) from Apple is a good example of how their devices can have data synched via the Internet for email, contacts and files. There are apps like SimpleNote (www.simplenoteapp.com) that allows you to support ideas using any smartphone and allow you to reach these ideas, in my case, via the laptop. The idea is that with a little effort I can avoid the unintended consequences of the loss on one device leveraging cloud computing as the repository for my data.
We are still not there when it comes to health records. Since the sources of the data come from a variety of sources. Physicians will soon be using electronic health records. Now the challenge will be how do patients aggregate this data? Can’t say I have a good answer for this based on some of the personal health records I’ve tested.
I would be interested if someone has found a ‘true’ personal health record that can be maintained on multiple devices and allow me to summarize my results data. Once this is in place we can then address the issues of security and portability. In the meantime my daily work is in helping Life Sciences companies’ leverage how an individual can use, analyze and get this data via a variety of devices. I am optimistic that we will see a day when software vendors in the healthcare space act like banks and financial institutes. Though I can’t see how the ATMs fit in all this…..who knows?
Thanks,
Jim