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Have You Checked Out the Prices for Your Local Hospitals?
If you haven’t then it is worth clicking on the linked map from the New York Times to see what local hospitals charge for the 5 most common procedures. Who knows if the healthcare reform will ultimately succeed but it is forcing this industry to be transparent for the patients sake which is a good thing.
ESPN has allegedly had discussions with at least one major U.S. carrier about the plan, according to The Wall Street Journal. The two largest carriers in America, Verizon and AT&T, both carry the iPhone and both restrict new customers with capped data plans.
While this great for customers who currently pay for cable via Comcast, ATT, and others) it leaves others in rural areas without the option to utilize WatchESPN. ESPN should use its position as an industry leader to not only provide subsidies for streaming but develop a model that allow all its fans (customers) stream WatchESPN no matter the cable carrier.
Great Infographic from CDW on Current Healthcare Trends
The problem with this info-graphic and the results of Ponemon Institute study.
This week results from a Ponemon Institute study on healthcare use of communication flooded various online tech news streams. While this study has the correct focus for healthcare it has some questionable results being reported. For example, the attache graphic references this finding in the aforementioned study:
The majority of both IT and clinicians (65 percent) believe the answer is to use secure text messaging to communicate with care teams during the discharge process. In fact, they believe the total discharge time could be reduced on average about 50 minutes by using secure texting.
via Ponemon Institute
Where’s the hard data behind these numbers and which solution could achieve these costs. Sorry, but stating that someone “believes” it will cut cost is not a finding worth reporting. There needs to be actual data to support these numbers. After reading the study a couple of times, there is still no evidence behind these “costs savings” from secure sms messages.
picture courtesy of http://www.hitconsultant.net/
Amen!!! The Focus of Big Data in Healthcare Should be on Understanding the Data.
For starters, that means investing in people with a keen ability to create knowledge out of data (in case you didn’t hear, the data scientist is apparently the sexiest job of the 21st century). From a wider view, maybe what this industry needs for now is actually less trying to add layer upon layer on top of new technologies and more innovation in the way of training and engaging providers, and making that technology easy for them to use.
via medcitynews.com
Technology can only go so far in assisting clinicians to provide better care. If healthcare systems don’t invest in understanding the data then it will just stay data and not be transformed into information for patient care.
picture courtesy of brandmagazine.com
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Great use of the Microsoft Xbox in health care by Gamers Outreach.
Gamers Outreach works with medical supply companies to create portable video game kiosks we like to call GO Karts (Gamers Outreach Karts). Thanks to GO Karts, hospital staff members are able to easily transport video games and other sources of entertainment to patients who have a limited amount of access to activities outside of their rooms.
Long-term hospitalization can often times be a lonely, stressful, and frightening experience. GO Karts help to ease the burdens associated with hospital stays by providing sources of relief to patients.
Microsoft Research Diagnosing Health via Social Media Streams -
“What’s exciting is that we could identify individuals potentially at risk for having an emotional downturn just by looking at streams of publicly shared data,” in this case Twitter feeds, says Eric Horvitz, managing co-director of the Microsoft Research lab. Horvitz and his colleagues presented the results of their efforts to predict postpartum emotional and behavioral changes via social media this week at an Association for Computing Machinery conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris. via Scientific America
Thoughts on Microsoft providing healthcare insights via social media?