Physician Portal

Provider organizations have the opportunity and responsibility to act today to improve care, according to James G. Lee, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Adventist Healthcare, Rockville, Md. In 2009, the health system started a primary care medical home pilot system for its employees.

Premier Healthcare Alliance, a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,600 U.S. hospitals and 84,000-plus other healthcare sites, is launching a virtual healthcare community. The community, PremierConnect, will connect to more than 100,000 clinicians, supply chain leaders, hospital executives, and other healthcare providers nationwide, allowing them to interact as one in communities of common interest.

Steven D. Freedman, M.D. and others at Beth Israel Deaconess are trying to succeed in patient engagement where others have failed with the Digital Passport to Trust, an online medical dashboard, currently in development, aimed at creating a constant two-way communication platform for physicians and providers. The Digital Passport to Trust dashboard will aim to create a care plan that is easily accessed by patients and providers, with an easy-to-understand, mapped out step-by-step, week-to-week guidance plan.

One of the biggest signs of how important social media is to the nation’s social (and business) fabric can be found in today’s headlines: Facebook Inc.’s filing of an initial public offering that could raise as much as $10 billon when it begins selling shares this spring, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal article says the IPO could raise the value of the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion. Also noteworthy is the social network’s membership, with 845 million users globally, up 39 percent from the year before. “In just eight years, Facebook has the world’s social bazaar, where friends gossip, play games and swap 250 million photos per day,” the Journal article says. It might also have added that that Facebook, and social networks in general, is changing the way many patients are becoming engaged with their own healthcare.

ONC has began implementation of a promise made in their five-year strategic plan, released earlier this spring, to enable a “learning health system” to understand population measures of health, performance, disease and quality while respecting patient privacy. In an announcement and webinar (.pdf) this week, ONC National Coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari, HHS CIO Todd Park, and director of the ONC’s Office of Standards and Interoperability Dr. Doug Fridsma launched Query Health – an initiative to establish standards and protocols.