Actor George Clooney was admitted last month to the the Palisades Medical Center after a motorcycle accident. The temptation to look at Mr. Clooney’s medical file was just too much a couple dozen unauthorized employees to withstand. 27 people looked. 27 people are now suspended for a month without pay according to CNN.com. Sadly, the impetus for the investigation was not that they viewed Clooney’s records without cause, but that they leaked information to the press… HIPAA, it’s got (some) teeth now.

Microsoft, the megalithic, oft-hated vendor of  only marginally-useful software, announced today in the Wall Street Journal that it would be offering free personal health records on the Web via its HealthVault system. Why *anyone* would trust the likes of Microsoft with their health information is beyond my comprehension. Still, proving once again that CEOs continue to make technology decisions instead of CIOs, Microsoft managed to signup an impressive roster of partners, including: American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health, a network of seven hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington region.

On the upside, they did get the permissions model right, “Its privacy controls, the company said, are set entirely by the individual, including what information goes in and who gets to see it.” That said, the WSJ article goes on to mention that the data, stripped of some identifiers, will be data mined by third parties.

The news of this launch prompted a Slashdot reader to quip, “[this brings a] whole new meaning [to the blue screen of death.]

Would you trust Microsoft with your personal medical information?!?

It’s no secret that many doctors are, if not technophobic, at least VERY SLOW to implement new technologies. To wit, according to the report called “Health Information Technology in the United States: The Information Base for Progress,” only one in four doctors (24.9 percent) use EHRs to improve how they deliver care to patients.1 Fortunately, our Luddite physician friends are being joined by Gen X’ers, who, having grown up with computers, are not afraid to break out of the restraints of paper forms and charts.

One of these early adopters is Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH (from Penn State and Johns Hopkins.) Jay is an EMR-enabled, private physician practicing in Brooklyn. Jay prefers to “e-visit [his patients] by video chat, IM and Email for problems that don’t require an actual face-to-face visit. It’s the future of cost-effective medicine.” All of that, plus two home/work visits a year for $500.00. Jay also gives out his cellphone to his patients.

Can you video conference with your doctor?

1. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=785923

Recently a number of websites have been offering “real age” calculators which, upon asking a number of health/lifestyle questions, attempt to predict how long you will live. The difference between how long you are going to live and how long people live on average determines your “real age.” If, for example, you are a heavy smoker with a family history of heart disease, you might have been born 28 years ago, but your real age could be closer to 35. As a measure of its popularity, even Oprah and her ilk have been jumping on the real age bandwagon.

These real age calculators are not without their faults however.

1. No (or little) research is offered to substantiate their healthcare calculations
2. The numbers are frequently a little *too* clean (what are the chances that all bad things raise your real age by EXACTLY 1 year?)
3. No distinction is made between elements you can and cannot control
4. At the end of the survey, no action items are provided to allow the user to alter their Real Age. After all, unless you can glean some ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE from the results, these calculators are ultimately of little utility.

After seeing the calculator at http://www.poodwaddle.com/realage.htm, I spent a few hours reverse engineering it. healthtech’s real age calculator is an attempt to rectify the aforementioned deficits.

1. Based on XML: see the real age XML now: download and modify the XML as new scientific studies are released. add your own questions, etc.
2. Open Source: download the Real Age code and run it yourself
3. Better health summary at the end (action checklist)
4. Items are distinguished as controllable or not

RemedyMD’s tagline is “Better Data, Better Decisions, Better Outcomes,” and you might be tempted to think that better data leads automatically to better decisions, but that is not always the case. More often, it is the application of intelligent analytic algorithms (predictive informatics, if you will) which transforms the raw data into actionable information. A lot of EHR systems collect medical history, for example, but how many of them process that information to produce actionable knowledge?

What is your Real Age?!?