Conmergence

Smart Phone Electronic Medical Record / Mobile Contactless Payment / Remote Monitoring, Developments Toward...

<ed.note>Since vendors are looking at remote monitoring for disease management I should list those as well. I'll also be on the look out for sensors which are car-based now that wi-fi is available in automobiles. There are some parallel developments which I guess I should mention: Major League Baseball and other event vendors as well as transportation providers and social networks are putting the cell phone closer to the center of their business models. ( Robert Neelbauer on social graphs here -- cells will eventually be tracked by them. ) Of course, on the other end of the spectrum is home automation.</ed.note>

Phillips (still using POTS lines)
Qualcomm
Nokia's Intellisync Call Connect for Cisco

Shout out to http://www.wirelesshealthcare.co.uk who usually gets these stories before anyone else.

The Tech Scene: Banking by Cell Phone - This Time It's for Real?,
Use of Mobile and Wireless Technology Jumps in Hospitals,

iPhone ? ? ? ( Remember Osirix ), icefirst, liferecord, Access, aKos, ARANZ Medical, Asia eHealth presentations, Banco do Brasil, Blackberry [2], Diebold, Docobo, ebay VOIP (Skype), Gemalto, Google [2][3][4], INSIDE Contactless, J/Speedy, mBlox, mFoundry, Microsoft, m-Wallet, Obopay, payWave, Mayo Clinic InTouch, NTT DoCoMo, PayPal Credit Card, Privium, Samsung, telSpace, Telzuit's Bio-Patch PDA,
Telemedicine & eHealth Directory 2005, Verisign, ViVOtech, FeliCa, [2], Mifare [2], NFC Forum, Blackberry, Ubuntu mobile, Globe Telecom and Smart Communications

Can Medical Banking Connect the Healthcare IT Dots for Politicians?

<ed.note>John Casillas testified today before the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) American Health Information Community concerning the medical banking vision of a unified view and unified platform to connect EHR|PHR, real-time adjudication, Healthcare Savings Accounts, High Deductible Health Plans, Consumer Driven Healthcare. AHIC decided at its November 29, 2005 meeting to form workgroups in the following areas: biosurveillance, consumer empowerment, chronic care, and electronic health records. Subsequently, at the May 16, 2006 Community meeting, two additional groups were formed: the Biosurveillance Data Steering Group as a sub-workgroup within the Biosurveillance Workgroup (renamed Population Health and Clinical Care Connections Workgroup), and the Confidentiality, Privacy & Security Workgroup, which was created as a cross-cutting workgroup responsible for an issue relevant to all the workgroups. More recent, at the August 1, 2006, meeting, the Community formed the Quality Workgroup to address the need for the development of quality measures; and at the October 31, 2006, meeting, the Personalized Healthcare Workgroup was formed to develop and make recommendations on standards for interoperable integration of genomic test information into personal e-health records.</ed.note>

Disintermediate Me! [ was Banking 2.0 ]

<ed.note>Updated Updated Update: MarketPlace on Prosper.com<ed.note>

BofA joins in. Update: why stop with banking when you can trade stocks free at Zecco. I'm waiting for the Mortgage and Healthcare Savings Account combo product offering to hit the holistic wealth market...

According to their web site, Zopa is coming to the U.S.

Three Massachusetts Communities Chosen To Be Test Cases For Digital Health Records

March 29, 2005 By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek

Backed by $50 million from a health insurer, the multiyear project will test whether digital health records can cut errors and costs in the real world.

Three Massachusetts communities have been chosen as pilot sites for an electronic-health-record project that could serve as the model for statewide adoption of digitized medical-record systems.

... Within each community, health-care providers--including acute-care hospitals or group hospitals, physician practices, long-term care facilities, nursing and home health-care agencies, and community health centers--will implement interoperable E-health records systems.

Call the Ontologist -- Stat!

The future of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee

Federal Reserve Board Eyes New Role in Medical Banking

The Medical Banking Report, July|August Vol. 3, No. 4

As ONCHIT seeks to harmonize standards, technology and architecture to create an electronic health records system, another effort suddenly finds itself in the landscape of the possible for implementing our “medical internet”.

While related to the work of the Medical Banking Project, the new “Independent Health Record Bank” (IHRB) is far different. Yet the profile of IHRBs in medical banking was signficantly raised when a new House bill seeking to establish IHRBs appointed the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) as the governance agency.

Because IHRBs can emerge external to existing banking infrastructure, MBProject doesn’t classify it as a pure medical banking play. Core to medical banking is leveraging existing banking systems for healthcare. Yet if IHRBs gain traction banks will likely get much more involved, especially if the FRB is involved.

“Yes, the IHRB can be implemented outside of banks but it can also work within the banking community,” insists Amnon Shabo, PhD., in an email to MBR. Shabo, who did early work in creating the IHRB model, works at IBM’s Almaden Institute in Haifa, Israel. Yet offering the new service could present challenges to banks. The proposed “Independent Health Record Bank Act of 2006” suggests that IHRBs are non-profit entities only, and that they are right off the bat, a HIPAA clearinghouse.

Bills stoke debate about health records

June 16, 2006 by Rob Roberts, Staff Writer, Kansas City Business Journal

Banks say they have systems, know-how

Legislation introduced by two members of Kansas' congressional delegation is sparking debate about who should become the bankers of Americans' electronic health records -- financial institutions or independent health record banks.

U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican, introduced the Independent Health Record Bank Act on June 6. U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore, a Democrat, filed a nearly identical House version two days later.

The bills call for independent health record banks to be formed by nonprofit cooperatives that, for a fee, would maintain members' lifetime electronic health records and make them accessible through swipe cards.

Some sources, however, say it makes more sense to build a nationwide health information network on top of the banking industry's existing financial infrastructure.

"We're advancing a model that is much more bank-centric than the independent health record bank model," said John Casillas, executive director of a Franklin, Tenn., think tank called the Medical Banking Project.

Casillas said the financial industry is positioned to roll out health record banking quicker and less expensively due to its nationwide electronic networks, 55 million online customers and existing accounts with health care providers and insurers.

Banks that provide services such as cash disbursement for health plans or lockbox check-processing for health care providers already must be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

"So the next step is: What services can banks add onto these HIPAA-compliant platforms we're building?" Casillas said.

The Medical Banking Project, which plans to launch a demonstration pilot next year, envisions a day when bank-issued swipe cards will allow health care providers to verify insurance coverage, receive payment from patients' bank accounts and access their electronic health records.

The Independent Health Record Bank Act

"Brownback bill would centralize medical records", Kansas City Business Journal

<ed.note>Hmmm, doesn't this sound vaguely familiar?</ed.note>

U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., introduced the Independent Health Record Bank Act on Tuesday, and a companion bill is expected to be introduced later this week in the U.S. House.

The Senate bill, which doesn't yet have a number, was previewed during Brownback's April 14 visit to Cerner Corp. in North Kansas City. Health care information companies like Cerner could profit from the bill by providing necessary technology for the independent record banks.

The Independent Record Bank Act provides legal and regulatory guidelines for establishing the banks by nonprofit cooperative institutions similar to member-owned credit unions.

H.A.T.’s Off to PNC Bank

May/June 2006  Vol. 3, No.3, The MEDICAL BANKING REPORT

Over the past two months, PNC Bank has placed a stake in the ground in the evolving medical banking industry. Besides conducting a survey that helps to lay important groundwork for establishing the value of emerging medical banking services, (Mar/Apr Issue), the bank also organized a new annual seminar featuring prominent healthcare plans and provider systems.

PNC Bank, however, was saving the best for last.

On April 19 the newswires heralded a breakthrough in the medical banking space. PNC acquired a health data clearinghouse – Healthcare Administration Technologies, Inc., (H.A.T.) of Tulsa, OK – and announced that it will now offer services that streamline the entire claims process between
the healthcare provider and the insurance company.

The new integrated platform marks a first in the industry. Other acquisitions of health data management firms by banks have folded (First American/SSI; BoNY/CSI; Nation’s/Covation).
These acquisitions didn’t, however, position the asset within the bank’s treasury management services area.

In fact, MBProject contends that it is precisely this type of alignment – linking cash management and health data management assets – that creates new value for healthcare. Getting behind this new commercial idea has taken the banking and healthcare industries some time, but today, it is now the topic of growing focus.

More here

Bird Flu XML [was: ebXML at the CDC has been a success story]

Integration languages make B2B communication more effective

April 7, 2005 By Johanna Ambrosio, SearchCIO.com

... Granted, it's early going, according to experts, and adopting these kinds of communications protocols is anything but a quick-and-dirty kind of project. It can take years for systems to be built and for customers and partners to be brought fully into the loop.

But that's not stopping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. The federal watchdog organization over flu, hepatitis and other health threats has based the messaging portion of its new Public Health Information Network (PHIN) on ebXML. The protocol will act as the standard means for exchanging messages among all 50 states and the CDC. Other users -- including clinical facilities and medical laboratories around the country -- will be brought in as well, said Barry Rhodes, associate director for public health systems development.

At this point, PHIN has been implemented in about 15 state health departments, with the rest to be rolled out over the next three years, Rhodes said. PHIN, based on a bevy of computing and other standards, is about the secure and reliable exchange of information. It's envisioned to be a unifying framework built on top of existing standards whenever possible; for instance, Secure Sockets Layer and some Java technologies are included in the system as well.

For its part, ebXML is "the envelope into which we put messages," Rhodes explained. "Some are XML messages and some are not."

The CDC chose ebXML as the underlying message transport because it liked its approach. "The developers of ebXML looked at the business need of interactions between business partners, of how that could happen." Rhodes said. "We needed that business process modeling perspective that ebXML provides. [In comparison,] Web services tools take a bottoms-up approach -- that approach is more of a solution to a technical issue, of how to distribute functionality across servers and the Internet."

So far, ebXML at the CDC has been a "success story," because it has allowed much greater interoperability than what previously occurred among the states, Rhodes said. "Our ROI is about communication and getting more information to and from the CDC."

Rhodes was not able to share specific data, but he talked about one application -- in operation for years -- that gathers information about notifiable public health threats, including E. coli bacteria and the chickenpox.

"We look at the data and analyze it for things like latency and the amount of data received -- and we have compared those to what was happening pre-PHIN," Rhodes explained. "We've seen a demonstrable increase in the amount of data and a decrease in information latency."

The biggest threat to ebXML adoption, he said, is that it's early enough in the technology's lifecycle that it's not yet a sure bet that all the major computing vendors will support it. "It's one thing to put forth a standard," he said, "but if Microsoft and IBM choose not to implement it, that makes it very difficult. Predicting the future is a hard thing." ...