• Hello Health-Concierge Care for All | Nexthealth - Hello Health is coming. This is a tweet by tweet review of Jay Parkinson, MD's demo.

• Lululemon’s Next Workout - Profile of a company who's CEO wants to be close to her customer. A great true north - "elevate the world through health and fitness." My own experience finding their expansion strategy - the showroom concept - could be useful to health care organizations

• Aetna’s CEO Again Attacks 3rd Party PHRs « Chilmark Research - The "d" word is back. Reacting by innovating is a great thing.

I learned about this at the CCR workshop. The CCR accomodates elements of this, but CMS has not endorsed it yet as a standard.

AMCP.org - Comments on Standard SIG - The NCPDP was working on the standard for Med Sigs - a little background

I walked past this sign, welcoming people to Pomona College, in Claremont, California. As our profession thinks about broadening consumer health informatics to help more people (from diverse backgrounds and parts of our society), we should remember to share the added riches of our learning, experience, and ideas for improving health care in trust for mankind. More innovation happens when more is shared, not less. This includes what we did well with, and what mistakes we made.

April 1st through April 2nd:

• Pattern Recognition » Blog Archive » I really hate Zotero - Like the concept, wants to improve the implementation
• Medical Home | Solution to Chronic Care Management? | Health Care | Disruptive Innovation for a New Primary Care Model | Center for Health Solutions - Deloitte LLP - Very nice overview of Medical Home, particularly with the rundown of stakeholders in the back, plus the medical home cost model.
• WordPress ? Support » Tags Import As Numbers, Not Words - Importing issues Wordpress
• Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 ? Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences, April 22 - 25, 2008, San Francisco, CA -
• Compare Accounts | YouSendIt - Store and forward service for the times when e-mail isn’t so efficient. I use XDrive.
• Convert Your Paper to iPaper | Scribd - An ambitious project to convert paper , no extra charge
• John Furrier Says Google?s CIO is Leaving for EMI - Interesting change of employer, could the same thing happen if a Google employee was recruited to run a health care organization?
• Twitter - A Teaching and Learning Tool | ICT in my Classroom - Nice discussion of the uses of Twitter in education
• VoiceThread - Group conversations around images, docs and videos - An interesting image, video, voice annotating service. What are the applicaitons in medical group training and patient involvement

March 28th through March 29th:

• WordPress ? Search and Replace « WordPress Plugins - Wordpress 2.5 is out. I have a feeling this plugin will be useful to have handy
• JAMA — Preserving Confidentiality in the Peer Review Process, March 24, 2008, DeAngelis and Thornton 0 (2008): 299.16.jed80000 - With tremendous respect for Catherine DeAngelis’ leadership during a tough situation. I am left wondering if the best place to hide is out in the open - if peer review became more Web2.0 like. What would happen in a situation like this?
• Findings From the 2007 EBRI/Commonwealth Fund Consumerism in Health Survey - EBRI - About 2 percent of the population is enrolled in a consumer directed health plans. Significant points for me: (1) almost half of the population with a chronic condition reports not filling medications or skipping doses or delaying care due to cost. Sobering reminder that patients can and do choose to do what we doctors prescribe. (2) “There have been no significant gains int he provision of information on provider cost and quality by any health plan type over the three years of the survey. There has been no increase in the share of CDHP or HDHP enrollees who say their health plans provide them with quality and cost information about their providers, and they remain no more likely to receive such information than enrollees in more comprehensive plans.” Okay, one more point - they did not ask about the impact of involvement in care in choosing a health plan - no mention of medical records access or involvement in information sharing at the level of the encounter.
• My Starbucks Idea - How about doing this for a health care org?
• Bronson Beta - Mail.appetizer - Nice Mail notification tool, Leopard

While in New York City this week, I happened to attend the (first?) iPhone Developer Summit, thanks to a free pass and a little wiggle room in my schedule.

I didn’t go because I am planning to learn Objective C and develop for the iPhone. I went because I wanted to see what the developer community is thinking, and I have to say I was impressed with what I saw. I sat in on a session about the new iPhone SDK and the audience looked almost to me like a group of doctors that are sitting in a room to learn about electronic health records and realizing that their lives are going to change.

There was discussion of the iPhone platform, which has far more computing power and graphics capability than any other handheld that has preceded it, coupled with the fact that Apple, Inc., has made it easier than ever for developers to distribute their applications quickly and efficiently through iTunes. Nothing like this has ever existed on other mobile platforms.

I sensed a tone of quiet resignation coupled with excitement that this will be the next revolution in computing. At the same time, the teaching was about the very basics of developing for the iPhone so it’s very early in the journey. I learned a few things, like the fact that the iPhone you use to develop on will need to be disconnected from the AT&T cellular network, so basically you will need to purchase a phone specifically for development. The SDK requires that you have a Mac running Leopard - you cannot develop on a Windows box. And an interesting revelation that was not well covered previously - the iPod Touch is also a platform for this SDK. This means that an enterprise developer could create internal applications that run off of Wi-Fi, decoupled from phone service. That’s a big deal.

After taking in this scene, I wandered with a colleague over to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, which provided more evidence of a transformation coming. The store was packed beyond all recognition. There was a long feeder line of customers waiting to buy things. And yet the store made all of the products available to customers and potential customers to enjoy at their leisure.

There’s something going on here. Click on any of the pictures to see them full size, and the video below to get a sense yourself.

March 14th through March 17th:

• To build a better hospital, Virginia Mason takes lessons from Toyota plants - Nice profile of a hospital that employs LEAN. The comments are not as charitable. The challenge is both to communicate what LEAN is and make sure that the core philosophy of LEAN, respect, is a part of every transformation.
• Peachpit: How to Add WordPress Category Feed Links to Posts > Subscribing to Categories - The title says it all. A little blog geekery.
• Agile Development Whitepaper - VersionOne - Agile Software Development Management - A bit of a “state of Agile” survey among its practitioners. Data is useful in figuring out where the drive to go Agile (and by proxy, LEAN) might come from an org, and also what practices are being deployed (55% daily standup - why not in cilnical medicin
• PowerCard Project Management Software - Without embracing a computerized tool for project management, I wonder if this software’s approach most closely resembles Agile. Does it? Looks like it creates burn down charts (?)
• Unconference - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Unconference, I want to experiment hosting these! How would they work for continuing medical education?
• BBC NEWS | Health | Sinus bug antibiotics ‘no good’ - How long will it take actual practice to change?

March 12th through March 13th:

• DCist: Columbia Heights Target Crime Update - There’s an interesting debate going on about the value of big box retailers in urban areas. I believe a similar debate has been in play in Seattle for some time. DC is growing up. Oh, and this Target is walking distance from me.
• Business Technology : Why Businesses Banish Cool Technologies - These businesses, unlike the ones in the next link, are the ones that may find themselves challenged when it comes to recruiting GenX and GenY staff and leaders. Maybe there’s a way out, see the next link.
• Why a worker says ‘it feels like I just got out of IT prison’ | Technology | The Guardian - Employee asset ownership may be a good way for IT to support innovation in large organizations. Ask BP and Unisys. And the GenX and GenY staff that will expect to use technology to its fullest.
• AHLTA 2008 - National Forum on the Future of the Defense Health Information System; supporting care for a vulnerable population (the enlisted and returning veterans).
• Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard - Nice guide to R on R on Leopard