Will we get the healthcare ecosystem to collaborate on improving mankind?

We have very high development cycles of devices and techniques (18 months or less) AND an industry moving at a ludicrous speed.

We have an enormous amount of incompatible data, coming from: 

• different devices, 
• via different systems, 
• via different (mobile) OSs

Despite great efforts of organisations like Continua Health Alliance, it's an illusion to think that -someday- we will be using the same (open) techniques/standards worldwide to collect and combine health-data.

Striving towards compatibility and interoperability is essential, but I believe this should be complemented by focussing on efficient ways to aggregate all that incompatible data (the equivalent of Friendfeed) and display it as a coherent stream in a personal health record. 

Fusion with data from energy-sources, city- & home-services and social media will further leverage the potential of the collected data.

Extra advantage is that the collected data can be searched upon anonymously. Possibilities to improve mankind by developing cures & remedies faster, improving diagnoses, improving adherence, ... and at the same time lowering the (healthcare)costs and giving more opportunity for 'face time'.

Good examples are:

http://www.data.gov/health

http://www.numerahealth.com/

http://www.gravityeight.com/

http://www.scanadu.com/

http://www.runkeeper.com

Will we find good plumbers to connect the different data-pipes? 

Will the diameter of the data-pipes be wide enough to cope with an enormous data-flow?

Will our buckets be big enough to store collect/store the data? 

Will we find enough good craftsmen to visualize and interpret that flow? 

Will we get the ecosystem to collaborate on improving mankind? 

Slide from 'mhealth is huge' preso at MoMoAMS.

Cloud storage for the exchange of health information

ZH_dossier_voorbeeld.pdf Download this file

For several years I'm complaining that paper health records are getting lost when one of the elderly residents of our carehome is hospitalised.

We did all kinds of efforts to prevent loss of the papers, but no success till now.

In case of loss we had to fax (alas, no email) the papers to the central reception of the hospital (alas, no fax at the specific department).

I was approached by a hospital and a software vendor to find a solution.

A logical suggestion was to use cloud storage (like Amazon, Dropbox, Nomadesk, ...) and to use encrypted folders (per user or per organisation) for such papers. Such cloud solutions are easy to use, very flexible, easy to implement and safe enough for this purpose. When hospital staff reacts outraged 'how unsafe this is', I point them to the current 'solution' where we fax the papers to the central reception.

I'm very curious which cloud solution they are going to produce, how cheap it will be and how user friendly it will be.

EPD20 and EPD20wiki: happy collab!

Inspired by #TEDxMaastricht, a group of Dutch healthcare professionals are co-operating to describe a Electronic Healthcare Record 2.0 wiki.

Keep an eye on http://www.epd20.nl the following days.

The LinkedIn group is here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/EPD20wiki-3858209

Humbled that the info from the open wikimap will be used (with input from @michlr & @icmcc: http://www.mindmeister.com/nl/87194521/wwepd)

Already certain the end result will be of very high and compassionate quality.

The momentum is here!