Shahid Shah is an enterprise software analyst with 15 years of experience in healthcare IT. He writes regularly at The Healthcare IT Guy.
Let’s imagine a Digital Health Store where we can have computers, wearables, tablets, phones, medical devices, remote monitoring, care quality, and other cool devices sitting in one place.
I’ll be at #HIMSS15 in Chicago this week and am preparing for the onslaught of the term “patient engagement”. It’s both overused and ill-defined which means it’s almost meaningless as a category of technology or approaches. It’s also multi-faceted which means a definition is not going to be forthcoming soon; so, I’m not going […]
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
In some industries, major innovations can come from outside, but in a complex regulated industry like healthcare, where patient safety and clinical workflows are ingrained, mission-driven organizations must partner with innovators.
Entrepreneurs shouldn’t be left to integrate various investors on their own; instead, investors should form strategic partnerships with other investors where they formally form a vertically integrated supply chain.
I’ve been involved in building many life-critical and mission-critical products over the last 25 years and have found that, finally, cybersecurity is getting the kind of attention it deserves. We’re slowly and steadily moving from “HIPAA Compliance” silliness into a more mature and disciplined professional focus on risk management, continuous risk monitoring, and actual security […]
I’ve been looking at hospital supply chain automation and the IT surrounding it for a number of years now. Starting with Cardinal Health but then moving on to help a number of other vendors in the space, I’ve felt that there’s not been enough next-generation tech being applied to the low margin, high volume business of hospital […]
My friend John Lynn was kind enough to cover the new HealthIMPACT Conference that I’m chairing in Houston on April 3 in his recent piece entitled “Getting Beyond the Health IT Cheerleaders, BS, and Hype Machine“. While the article was great, Beth Friedman’s comment was priceless: What are the criteria to be considered part of […]
Last week I presented the closing keynote at the Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West Conference & Exhibition in Los Angeles. MD&M has always been about what’s next in medical device designs and this year’s event didn’t disappoint. While still being primarily focused on hardware, many smart device manufacturers came out to MD&M looking for […]
I was watching the Super Bowl Sunday night and lost interest after Bruno Mars’ very nice halftime concert so I started picking up some “Read it Later” articles I saved late last year; one specifically caught my eye. In December the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Avon is pulling the plug on a $125 million […]
This past Friday I was invited by the Patient Privacy Rights (PPR) Foundation to lead a discussion about privacy and EHRs. The discussion, entitled “Fact vs. Fiction: Best Privacy Practices for EHRs in the Cloud,” addressed patient privacy concerns and potential solutions for doctors working with EHRs. While we are all somewhat disturbed by the […]
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Events such as the annual HIMSS Conference take months to plan and properly execute which means that some topics and subject areas that are being covered at the conference might not be as timely as they could be. Also, event planners and selection committees choosing topics for keynotes and presentations do a pretty good job […]
“Digital Health” is often centered on EHRs and Meaningful Use to the detriment of many other technologies that can help improve patient satisfaction. To help make sure that we don’t forget how useful modern technologies are to actually getting paid for medical services, I invited Jay Fulkerson, president and CEO of Health Payment Systems (HPS), […]
As I travel and speak with physician practices and hospital execs about health IT, I often hear questions about how practices can become paperless as they transition from manual to electronic processes. For those of you that have installed EHRs, you know that going digital does not mean that you’ll be paperless and you’ve probably had […]
Earlier this week I spoke at Atlanta Healthcare IT Leadership Summit on Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and what I call “accountable tech“. I was pleasantly surprised to learn most of the audience agreed that ACOs can’t succeed without the right technology but am continuously disappointed as to how little we as an industry are doing […]
A friend of mine, a User Interaction (UI)/User Experience (UX) designer and a usability expert that is doing some work at a technology-based medical device client, wrote to me wondering why many medical device companies don’t have much of a UX/UI and usability focused discipline in their marketing and product design teams. The simple reason […]
