Precision medicine – moving away from one-size-fits-all

More and more tools and technologies from genomics to big data can be used to help deliver the right health intervention, at the right time, to the right person or population. Step by step, better targeted care for individuals as well as populations may therefore be attainable in many areas of health.

Stefan Kohler discusses how precision health principles apply to various areas of healthcare, ranging from personalised drug treatment to precision population health interventions.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Implementing Blockchains for Efficient Healthcare: A Systematic Review

The scattered nature of sensitive health information can bring about situations where timely information is unavailable, worsening health outcomes. Furthermore, as patient involvement in healthcare increases, there is a growing need for patients to access and control their data. Blockchain is a secure decentralised online ledger that could be used to manage electronic health records efficiently, and so improve health outcomes by enabling interoperability.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

From second to hundredth opinion in medicine: A global consultation platform for physicians

Serious medical diagnostic errors lead to adverse patient outcomes and increased healthcare costs. The use of virtual online consultation platforms may lead to better-informed physicians and reduce the incidence of diagnostic errors. Our aim was to assess the usage characteristics of an online, physician-to-physician, no-cost, medical consultation platform, Medscape Consult, from November 2015 through October 2017. Physicians creating original content were noted as “presenters” and those following up as “responders”. During the study period, 37,706 physician users generated a combined 117,346 presentations and responses. The physicians had an average age of 56 years and were from 171 countries on every continent. Over 90% of all presentations received responses with the median time to first response of 1.5 h. Overall, computer- and device-based medical consultation has the capacity to rapidly reach a global medical community and may play a role in the reduction of diagnostic errors.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Pharmacists Want to Play a Bigger Part in Patient Care Yet Are Hamstrung by Poor Access to Patient Data

Pharmacists don’t just fill prescriptions. They’re a vital part of a patient’s care team. Even so, less than a third of pharmacists say they are satisfied with their ability to access the information they need to manage a patient’s pharmacotherapy.

In partnership with ORC International, Surescripts surveyed pharmacists about access to critical patient data. The results show that pharmacists want and need more clinical and medical history about their patients, but often find it hard or frustrating to obtain.

The full Surescripts article can be viewed at this link.  In addition, the Surescripts data brief can be downloaded below.  

How Penn Medicine is redesigning its EHR for a new era of care

Penn Medicine is pursuing a new initiative it says will innovate electronic health records for 21st Century medicine. The goal, officials say, is to make the technology more interactive and responsive to clinicians – nudging the EHR into a new era where it's not just a documentation system but a crucial tool for care delivery.

The full article can be viewed at this link.  

NIH programs shed light on gene variants and their connections to health and disease

Programs supported by the National Institutes of Health are establishing which genes and genomic variants play a role in human disease, enabling their use in genomic medicine and research. NIH’s Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen(link is external)) and ClinVar programs address a major barrier to incorporating genomic medicine into healthcare, which is a lack of evidence about the relationship between gene variants and diseases. A special issue of Human Mutation(link is external), published on Oct. 12, highlights the broad array of advances made through these programs, which work in concert to advance knowledge connecting human genomic variation to human health.

The full news release can be viewed at this link.  

eHealth Initiative (eHI) is pleased to submit this proposal for services to support you in achieving your goals for marketing, brand awareness, business development, thought leadership, and research. Over the last 17 years, eHI has partnered with hundreds of organizations working in healthcare whose ultimate business goal is to improve the quality of patient care and transform the healthcare delivery system. This proposal lists the most popular services contracted through the Foundation for eHealth Initiative. These can be customized, specifically around topic areas and target audiences. Our main goal is to ensure that you find value from your work with us. We welcome your feedback on other services that might better support and fit your needs.

This podcast Meditech discusses the unique challenges and opportunities that rural healthcare organizations are facing as we shift to value-based care models. Tune into this podcast to hear a discussion about the evolving role of the healthcare CIO and how he sees it continuing to change in the future. 

U.S. National Health IT Week (NHIT Week) is a nationwide awareness week focused on catalyzing actionable change within the U.S. health system through the application of information and technology. Founded by HIMSS and the Institute for e-Policy in 2006, the week-long celebration is comprised of partner-driven activities and events led by the efforts of national health stakeholders. Participants range from the Administration, congressional, federal and state agencies, providers, non-profit organizations and more. Virtually, in Washington DC and beyond, National Health IT Week stakeholders collaborate towards actionable outcomes which demonstrate the power information and technology has to transform health in the U.S., and its wide-reaching global impact.

A Quantitative Observational Study of Physician Influence on Hospital Costs

Physicians serve as the nexus of treatment decision-making in hospitalized patients; however, little empirical evidence describes the influence of individual physicians on hospital costs. In this study, we examine the extent to which hospital costs vary across physicians and physician characteristics. We used all-payer data from 2 states representing 15 237 physicians and 2.5 million hospital visits. Regression analysis and propensity score matching were used to understand the role of observable provider characteristics on hospital costs controlling for patient demographics, socioeconomic characteristics, clinical risk, and hospital characteristics. We used hierarchical models to estimate the amount of variation attributable to physicians. We found that the average cost of hospital inpatient stays registered to female physicians was consistently lower across all empirical specifications when compared with male physicians. We also found a negative association between physicians’ years of experience and the average costs. The average cost of hospital inpatient stays registered to foreign-trained physicians was lower than US-trained physicians. We observed sizable variation in average costs of hospital inpatient stays across medical specialties. In addition, we used hierarchical methods and estimated the amount of remaining variation attributable to physicians and found that it was nonnegligible (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC]: 0.33 in the full sample). Historically, most physicians have been reimbursed separately from hospitals, and our study shows that physicians play a role in influencing hospital costs. Future policies and practices should acknowledge these important dependencies. This study lends further support for alignment of physician and hospital incentives to control costs and improve outcomes.

The full article can be downloaded below.