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Earlier this month, I led a workshop at ProductCamp called Web Portal Triage. The main points we covered in the workshop are summarized below:

What constitutes GREATNESS in website design?

Your answer to this question will say more about what you do,  what you value, and what you believe than the reality of how well the website in question will perform.  For example, the Webby awards focus on innovative websites with jaw-dropping graphics and effects...a graphic designer's view of greatness. 

Other websites are the equivalent of a Swiss army knife - less beautiful perhaps, but built on a solid CMS framework with lots of function, boat-loads of content, potential for expansion, and the security of Fort Knox...this is a web developer's view of greatness.

What follows are my unofficial notes from the THSA Board review of the Strategic and Operational Plans for the Texas Health Information Exchange (HIE). The Texas Health Services Authority (THSA) is a non-profit organization that was created to oversee the creation and coordinate the many components of the Texas HIE. Today, I listened in on the live broadcast of the THSA Board meeting. Below are highlights from this meeting.  

Tony Gilman, CEO of the THSA, provided a high level view of the substantive changes made to the draft. 238 comments were received from 28 individuals on the original draft released on August 2, 2010. Unfortunately the live stream did not show any slides of the comments being discussed, so these discussions were difficult to follow. Hopefully, THSA will post the comments on their website.

What information I was able to capture on discussions during review of the commentary are below:

Tony Gilman, CEO of the Texas Health Services Authority (THSA), recently updated the Austin HIMSS Chapter on status of the Texas Health Information Exchange (HIE). The THSA is a non-profit corporation created through House Bill 1066 in 2007 to support the improvement of the Texas health care system by promoting and coordinating HIE and health information technology (HIT) throughout the State. Update for 8/26/2010: The updated review draft of the Strategic and Operational Plans for Health Information Exchange is available for download from their website. I recommend it as a primer for understanding the current state, challenges and roadmap for the health services IT infrastructure in Texas. The public review period for the document has now ended and last briefings and vote will take place at the Board of Directors meeting at 10am on August 26, 2010. The agenda includes:

Health 2.0 is partnering with the US Department of Health and Human Services to put on a series of virtual and physical events though the summer in which developers and challengers can work together to develop (and enhance) applications. Developers, patients, providers, health care organizations, foundations–and anyone else interested in health care–are invited to take part in the challenge.  Check the FAQs on Health 2.0 for details on the challenge and how to participate.

Information on the next Texas Health IT Summit has just been posted at www.texashealthitsummit.org.  See my earlier blog posts for notes on the Summits held earlier this year in Austin and Dallas.  I'm checking with the good folks at the Texas Health Institute to find out where (if) the Dallas presentations have been posted.  The Texas Health Institute in partnership with the TMF Health Quality Institute have done an awesome job in bringing the experts into these events to answer questions and offer practical advice to providers, clinicians and hospitals interested in the latest information on meaningful use reimbursements and addressing data, reporting and security requirements over the coming years.

Last month, I attended a security briefing held for executives in finance, health and other industries targeted by cybercriminals. The event was hosted by the University of Texas at Austin and featured very knowledgeable speakers from the FBI, CIA, security consultancies and other government agencies. A few major points in what they described is now happening on the security front:

Between presentations and researching EHR capabilities, I've been pretty "heads down" over the last six weeks. Will thus share a montage of news and research I've encountered recently.

Last month's HIMSS Southwest Regional conference was heavily attended by vendors and consultants. There was good representation from a small number of hospitals, but very few participants (physicians or staff) from the ambulatory world. A poll of my "Lean and Meaningful Workflow Redesign" audience indicated that it was mostly composed of vendors, consultants and internal QA professionals. As a result, I shifted the flow of my introductory presentation to take a deeper dive into managing the workflow redesign process, integrating the work into an EHR and IT deployments, measuring results, and sustaining a culture of continuous improvement. The complimentary letters I received from the HIMSS organizers and participants are greatly appreciated. Next week, I'll be presenting the same topic from a totally different perspective for AHIMA's Texas State conference in San Marcos. 

Posting the link to an interesting article about a new startup called PatientsLikeMe which is a social media support group for patients with chronic disease that provides data and analysis after removing personal identifiable elements of the shared information. The article describes an instance where the consensus of the site-derived data pre-dated the published conclusion of a formal study by over a year.  The article and company are interesting in that they show one approach for supporting patients and handling privacy concerns while making data available for analysis. A glimpse of future benefits of  the HIE? I hope so!        

The second Texas Health IT Summit of the year was held from April 22-24, 2010 in Dallas. I attended the Nursing Infomatics and Health IT Policy pre-sessions and the EHR track.  The organizers for the summit, the Texas Health Institute, are planning to post presentations from this summit online.  As of this date, presentations have not yet been posted, but I am monitoring the site and will update this post when I see the new presentations have been posted. The next Texas Health IT Summit is being planned for Houston later this year. You can register on the Texas Health Insitute's site for notification when the date is set and more information is available. 

Below are highlights from the notes I took during the sessions:    

Nursing Informatics Pre-session

Am reposting an interesting demo from MIT showing the power of web-enabled telemedicine combined with artificial intelligence.   Beyond that, it has been an eventful couple of weeks with passage of the health care legislation last night.