HealthBlog

Very interesting news from Google indeed. Cleavland Clinic is big customer and user of Epic (Epic Systems Corporation in Verona, Wisconsin) products. It looks like Google managed talk Epic into opening their silos for public use. Epic is the largest healthcare software provider in the USA and has large customer base and fact that it can work hand in hand with Google raises challenge for Microsoft HSG to the new level. It will be interesting to see if HSG can respond to this.  The most challenging in all this is that as a fact of matter that most clinics and hospitals require Epic certification nowadays in the USA  (likewise Microsoft certifications for IT professionals) and it may well be that Microsoft is too late for this game.

HealthVault's partners are mostly vendors for cool gadgets which measure vital signs (temperature, blood pressure etc) and that is it. I doubt there can be more then 10 of them and you are speaking 100+ - sounds like a lie. HSG was not able to pull what Google did with Cleavland clinic. I doubt it can do it at all since now it competes with its old good friends like Epic, GE Healthcare, Cerner etc.  

No, thank you. I prefer to stay incognito. Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins so what? Epic runs Harvard and Cleavland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Allina etc and makes real money while HSG signs only strategic agreements :) Let's play by old good saying "Show me the money!".

In a post by Bill Crounse of Microsoft, he takes an open attitude about the Google Health announcement this week by presenting a "more the merrier" outlook. "Transforming healthcare is an incredibly complex challenge – one which no single organization

I think a positive difference for Microsoft (with Azyxxi/Amalga specifically) compared to Google’s announcement is that MS is actually playing at the healthcare provider level and forming partnerships with the likes of Johns Hopkins, NY/Presby, St. Joseph Health, Moffitt, Mayo, MedStar, Novant, etc.

More is usually better as long as it doesn't lead to fragmentation, since we all know what that has done to our current system.

And let's not forget one of the most important and necessary ingredients in transforming healthcare: physicians. The consumer experience should appeal not only to patients but also physicians. Unfortunately doctors, as a whole, have been silent for too long but now it seems like they are uniting on different fronts in order to regain their autonomy, without which all the innovation in the world would only lead to incremental rather than transformative change.

Physician-entrepreneurs/innovators challenging the status quo are on the right track. The following is a link to an important physician-led campaign that speaks to this emerging reality: http://blog.seankhozin.com/category/open-letter-campaign/

I'm glad to hear Physician's getting motivated - you docs are typically the brightest of the bright and the most motivated amongst us, otherwise you wouldn't be docs. And you're practical, not ivory tower theorists.

However, I do hope that this (r)evolution also recognizes that it's not just docs, it's docs and "mom's"(typically the first line of triage)/patients that need to work *together* to ensure clinical data is safe, transportable, useful and usable and that HIT vendors are held to a higher accountability standards than they have been to date.

I was not hired by Epic Systems, but they have a wonderful campus like structure that they work in.