September 18, 2012
Last week, Clay Patterson shared his thoughts on the recent Consumer Health IT Summit sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology ("the ONC"). While he was there, I tweeted Cerner's pledge to support the View, Download, and Transmit challenge (#VDTNow) issued by Farzad Mostashari, head of the ONC.
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April 12, 2012
In part one of this series on the Direct Project, I discussed the backbone transport and message gateway the program uses. In part two, I explored Direct’s security and trust modules and the importance of establishing meaningful trust relationships between HISPs. In this brief, final post, I will define edge protocols and clients and briefly touch on a few policy elements that govern the day-to-day operations of Direct.
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April 10, 2012
In part one of this series, I dissected the Direct Project into discrete modules and provided a relatively in-depth view of the backbone transport and message gateway. In this post, I'll dive into the lifeblood of Direct: security and trust.
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April 06, 2012
Over the past month, I've taken on the daunting task of compiling my knowledge of the technical ins and outs of the Direct Project into an online developer's handbook to assist both my Cerner brethren and third party developers who have chosen Cerner Direct as their full-service health information service provider (HISP). As I looked back over the content, I realized there is a lot of material that is useful to a broader audience in the Direct community. So in the spirit of knowledge sharing, I'm sharing my insight (wisdom?) in a series of blog posts.
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January 10, 2012
I practice family medicine at Norman Regional Health System in Norman, Okla. We’re connected to SMRTNET, a health information exchange (HIE) in Oklahoma developed by Cerner in 2005. With more than 27 million health records in the system covering 2.6 million lives, the saturation of clinic, hospital and laboratory data within SMRTNET is second to none anywhere in the nation. It’s the access to this data via the HIE that is revolutionizing my practice.
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December 15, 2011
On December 8th, I again had the privilege to organize and host a Direct Project virtual connect-a-thon. This was the fifth virtual connect-a-thon held by the Direct Project reference implementation workgroup, and the second time we’ve hosted it at Cerner. As an indication of Direct’s increasing momentum, this was the largest connect-a-thon to date, consisting of more than 20 companies, with 13 actively participating HISPs.
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September 27, 2011
Google just turned 13 years old (9/27/1998), and I feel old. I remember toiling away as an undergrad in the engineering computer lab, using NCSA’s Mosaic as my browser and AltaVista as my main search engine. I also remember my first encounter with a laboratory information system (LIS) as a medical student, using a light pen to call up a floor census and printing out pages of labs to stuff into my pockets for rounds. EMRs were barely there, paper was everywhere. The big movement in all parts of health care IT at the time was “get the data into the computer,” and all of those printouts, paper charts, and the like slowly migrated into an electronic format.
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September 20, 2011
Imagine an environment that is aware of your presence. Automated events occur based on your location, preferences and patterns. Daily tasks take less time or are simply no longer necessary, based upon the ability to utilize smart technology – seamlessly integrated into your everyday routine. Now, apply this smart concept to an environment focused upon providing health care and optimizing the patient experience.
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July 13, 2011
While certainly a valuable application workflow to layer on top of the Direct Project, equating the output of the Direct Project to an email application does it a disservice and underestimates its potential.
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July 08, 2011
SMRTNET is the largest Health Information Exchange (HIE) in the state of Oklahoma, containing nearly 2 million patient records from 45 unique contributing facilities. It is the product of a four year effort to provide a capability for medical providers to securely exchange electronic health information under federal and state law with onnections that include hospitals, physician offices, laboratory, university, Native American tribe, public health, mental health, and community health centers.
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June 10, 2011
As the Cerner Direct team has been working with our pilots, continuing to tweak our Web Inbox and HISP (Health Information Service Provider) services, and responding to RFPs, our whiteboard has been filling up with thoughts about what we’d look for when choosing a Direct HISP. It’s time to put those thoughts in a blog post.To be clear, our notes aren’t about choosing HISP software/services from a third party in order to become a HISP. Rather, they’re for organizations that intend to sign up with a service provider and begin securely exchanging health information, leaving the infrastructure build-out and maintenance to an organization that’s making a business of offering the services. In that sense, we’ve been thinking along the lines of choosing a cable provider or telecommunications carrier.
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April 28, 2011
Standards… boring, right? You typically encounter those odd letters and acronyms when talks start about moving data between disparate healthcare IT systems or medical devices. HL7, DICOM, ASTM, IHE, LOINC, and the like serve a very important role in the HIT ecosystem by providing a common language that all parties can utilize to allow information to flow easily across systems. At Cerner, we use these standards to send, receive, and store data for our own systems, so these are not foreign concepts… but our approach is.
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