One of the issues with inplementing a health record which is more accessibable and managed by the patient is enabling health professionals to make entries with out creating huge amounts of extra work for them.

Information entry needs to be seamless incorporated into the health professionals workflow. Not always easy when they are rarely at a desk.

Have you heard much discussion this from this angle?

Sorry you couldn’t be present. You forgot to check the Twittersphere in your review of views. There’s more content out there than just blogs that we have to follow…:) The other issue that day was a pretty severe bandwidth shortage – unless you were a Verizon customer in that room, you didn’t have much.

You’re correct that my content was slim. I ended up focusing on the essence of what’s being discussed – what I can learn and take away, rather than in summarizng the event (despite Jen’s encouragement to livetweet as much as possible….) Unfortunately essence is hard to get unless you’re in the room, so maybe for your audience a few thoughts:

- The teams involved patients heavily in the work. This is a big difference from other efforts I have seen, and it came across in so many ways in the demos. A piece of information for a patient was formatted in a way that made it more “theirs” than “the doctor’s” – a common pitfall in some systems today. This is an innovation. There are many many little things throughout that the industry can and should take to really make these systems about records that people can do things with.

- The project has produced very useful content in the translation of its work to currently available platforms, which point out some future requirements in current standards, such as the iCal standard, that needs additional fields to be usable in patient self-management. These are available on the Project Health Design website.

- And then there’s essence. It’s still surprising to me the number of health professionals who feel that patients aren’t interested in understanding and managing their health. I tweeted this quote during the event: “”People are thinking about their condition all the time.” Yes and thank you.” This is important paradigm change that these teams are reinforcing in their work. People like me need this content, because beyond the $5 million, there’s something around $2 trillion being spent with the assumption that the physician is the one who does all the thinking.

- The brush of “academics” that’s being painted is a pretty broad one. We complain that health care doesn’t spend enough time listening to industries outside of itself, and yet I found myself watching the work of a user-centered interface design expert from Colorado who decided to leverage her talents for health care. That’s pleasing to me.

Disclosure for me is that I do work part time for the California Healthcare Foundation as a consultant. One of the teams’ leaders, James Ralston, MD (a practicing internest), is a former colleague of mine at Group Health Cooperative. I am not a grantee of Project HealthDesign and not funded by RWJF in any capacity. I am not in a position to value whether the $5 million is worth it or not, but I thought I’d take the time to beef up the information I took away from my time at the expo.

You continue to create a great space for discussion and we should all look to see how this work influences the growth and development of patient-centered health information technology. Hopefully see you at Health2.0!

Best,

Ted