sxsw: 3.10.08 Transforming Hospital Systems: The Digital Future of Healthcare

sxsw: 3.10.08 Transforming Hospital Systems: The Digital Future of Healthcare

I was interested to see what I could learn from this session on the digital future of healthcare - but it went over some fairly traditional concepts and I pretty much knew about it!

The moderator Grace Lanni is the director of Healthcare Partner Solutions at Motion Computing where she focuses on strategic software co-development partnerships. The intro says: Why can we move money anywhere quickly and easily, look up bank balances online and spit out cash at an ATM, but we can't access our own medical records? Worse, doctors can't access our records when it's critical to be sure that meds or procedures they prescribe won't kill us. That's changing -- learn how advanced digital technologies are transforming healthcare.

From the panel I was most interested in Michael Kennedy from Microsoft on HealthVault and would have liked for him to go into more detail about the concept and its development. He talked about products for health information – and discusses HealthVault by Microsoft. The search in HealthVault is very targeted and from authoritative sources he says. A platform for innovation and for connectivity says the tagline. HealthVault will take records from your hospital and your doctor. Your personal information is not datamined and privacy is key he says. Some organizations he works with includes CapMed – a PHR [personal health record] and you can have this portable and mobile or desktop.

A physician from Austin Dr. Lucksinger covered his experiences with beta-testing a new tablet for EMR. Psychcentral.com Dr. Grohol presented on health information. He said there are so many tools available for online assessments, for ratings and reviewing doctors, carepages, social networking sites, and phr/emr and the connections between the two.