The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, which has been the group providing a seal of approval for electronic medical record products since 2006, will continue to be the certification body for health IT systems at least until December when the U.S. government finalizes its definition of "meaningful use" of e-health products.

After the meaningful use definition is finalized, multiple organizations will be allowed to perform testing and certification of products for meeting the evolving criteria and standards of U.S. and Health and Human Services health IT certification rules. Vendors would need certification from only one certification body.

From: "HIT Certification Committee Still In Play -- Health IT -- InformationWeek"

Patients decide whether to seek care and whether to comply with a physician’s prescriptions.

From: "The Missing Focus in the Health Care Debate: Both sides are asking the wrong questions."

From @twilson650. I love how the instructor actually starts 'real-laughing' at about 40 seconds in...

FDA Public Health Notification: Potentially Fatal Errors with GDH-PQQ* Glucose Monitoring Technology

* glucose dehydrogenase pyrroloquinoline quinone

Date: August 13, 2009

Dear Healthcare Practitioner:

This is to alert you to the possibility of falsely elevated blood glucose results when using GDH-PQQ glucose test strips on patients who are receiving therapeutic products containing certain non-glucose sugars. These sugars can falsely elevate glucose results, which may mask significant hypoglycemia or prompt excessive insulin administration, leading to serious injury or death. The following provides background information on this problem, a summary of fatality reports FDA has received, and recommendations to reduce the risk. This problem can occur wherever these products are used including in-patient and out-patient healthcare facilities, and at home.

An EHR program that cut cardiac deaths by 73 percent has also kept patients healthy two years later, according to a new study.

The Kaiser Permanente program in Denver linked coronary artery disease patients and teams of pharmacists, nurses, primary care doctors and cardiologists with an electronic health record to help keep the patients healthy two years after they left the program by keeping them in touch with their caregivers electronically, according to a randomized study.

The study, which was funded by the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, is published in The American Journal of Managed Care this month. It is the first randomized study to evaluate a follow-up system for patients discharged from a cardiovascular risk reduction service, researchers said.

The Clinical Pharmacy Cardiac Risk Service at Kaiser Permanente Colorado combines Kaiser Permanente's HealthConnect EHR with patient outreach, education, lifestyle adjustments and medication management.

The two-year randomized trial of 421 patients found that patients discharged from the program kept their lipid and blood pressure levels at controlled, healthy levels by receiving electronic reminders.

From: "Study places EHRs at core of saving cardiac patients' lives | Healthcare IT News."

Stanford Experiments with Drive-Through Emergency Room - Health Blog - WSJ

A conference for open-source enthusiasts is kicking off today in Houston.

Organizers are billing FOSSHealth, which stands for Free and Open Source Software in Healthcare, as an “unconference” for people who want to see the latest open-source projects available. Open-source initiatives by Medsphere Systems Corp., Misys, Sun Microsystems and WorldVistA are expected to be presented, according to the agenda.

Fred Trotter, a programmer and co-founder of the Liberty Medical Software Foundation, will introduce the conference. The not-for-profit foundation promotes the use of open-source health information technology. Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal—a Sun Microsystems subsidiary that manages federal government business—and chief technology officer for global accounts and industries at Sun Microsystems, will deliver a keynote about the company's efforts in the project aimed at tying health systems into the national health information networking using free software called Connect.

Maybe not. Look at sponsoring companies, then compare to roster of firms with reps on working groups at CCHIT.

However, if you're interested in data portability/standards in healthcare, keep an eye on FOSSHealth.

Inuktitut can help communicate important unifying concepts in healthcare that may elude us in English. I was reminded of the bonding power of Inuktitut by our new kisaut ("anchor" or "oneness") fellow, Jen McCabe Gorman. Inuktitut is a language of inclusiveness. English can be divisive. Inuktitut is an aggregating language - pronouns, verb tense, and emotional cadence get mixed together to form one block or phrase. And the language of health ought to be inclusionary.

From Neil Seeman's essay: "How Do You Say "Health" in Inuktitut?" Longwoods Publishing

If you're working on NLP for healthcare, semantic web technologies, or creating new ontologies for PHRs, please consider 'meaningful use' of inclusionary language a vital design element.