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Reality of Healthcare Digitization: the Practical versus the Possible
Submited by searley on
November 15, 2011 - 10:13 GMT

Healthcare information technology is undergoing enormous changes with broad consumer impact. One major area of innovation is mobile healthcare or mHealth. mHealth has the potential to provide patients and physician’s with a broad range of interactive tools - the success of which depends on greater effectiveness in standardizing and structuring vocabularies across healthcare. Hence, why this is of great interest to me and our community of practitioners.

 

MHealth is resulting in new technologies and approaches for healthcare. Classes of application include patient monitoring, remote diagnostics, Rx compliance-monitoring, self-monitoring for wellness, patient tracking, home healthcare, and payment and reimbursement management systems, among others.

 

The challenges of data management and integration are magnified significantly by mHealth programs and initiatives. This nascent and developing field requires greater numbers of systems and tools to communicate and manage information - as it is, the healthcare IT industry is already a tower of babel of conflicting and confusing standards from MeSH, SNOMED, ICD-9, ICD-10, LOINC and others. This means that further fragmentation from new applications and new entrants into the field will cause problems and challenges to be even more magnified before things settle down into accepted methods for organizing and transmitting data.

 

Transaction Processing versus Quality of Patient Care

Five Reasons Why Records Managers Need to Care about Content Management
Submited by searley on
October 18, 2011 - 12:04 GMT

How can you tell the difference between an introverted records manager and an extroverted records manager?  The extrovert stares at your shoes when they talk to you.

That’s actually an old accounting joke and the subtext here is that records managers are boring because records management is boring.  The last thing that people doing cool knowledge management, dynamic content, or search projects want to consider is records processes.  Boring!

The topic brings to mind the old days of file rooms and file clerks.  But these are not the old days and there are reasons now for all information management professionals to care about RM.    Records are created by everyone, everywhere, on all kinds of devices.  A record can be anything that is used in the course of executing a transaction, performing day to day work tasks or that is created in support of a transaction.  That means that we are all creating records.  Records processes are distributed and ad hoc and in most organizations not well managed due to the fact that evolution of technology has happened more quickly than processes can keep up with. 

Here are five reasons why you need to adopt a records management perspective:

Taxonomy and Records Management, Part 2
Submited by ahrenlehnert on
January 19, 2009 - 11:31 GMT

Continuing the exploration of taxonomy in the context of records management, I’m going to focus on the second challenge listed in my earlier post on the subject:  taxonomies and record retention schedules exist but are not being used effectively. I worked on a records management project in which we were to create the retention schedule for one business unit as a baseline for building out the schedule as the records management initiative was rolled out to subsequent divisions.

In this case, it was not that they didn’t already have a retention schedule. In fact, they had an extremely robust, thorough, and complicated schedule created by another consulting firm specializing in records management. It was so robust, thorough, and complicated that no one could figure out how to apply it, and, so, didn’t.

Taxonomy and Records Management
Submited by ahrenlehnert on
December 15, 2008 - 5:49 GMT

Taxonomies, as hierarchical vocabulary structures, clearly define relationships between words and concepts. If a taxonomy is implemented and governed properly, there is a high degree of control over how terms are added, modified, and deleted. Terms used for content tagging can also be controlled in how they are selected and applied. Similarly, records management is a discipline requiring high control over documents meeting legal compliance. An ARMA fact sheet defines records management as “the systematic control of records throughout their life cycle.”

Strangely enough, taxonomies and records management remind me of the Panopticon, a prison imagined by the English social theorist, Jeremy Bentham. Let me explain. The Panopticon is a circular architectural structure with an observer in the middle able to keep surveillance over many prisoners at one time without the prisoners knowing who was being watched at any given moment. This allowed for great control at great economy.

As a liberal with world views shaped by films of the 1980s riddled with paranoia about governmental control and espousing an anti-Orwellian future as imagined in 1984, the concept of control of any kind stirs my blood. The Panopticon could very well be the source of Tolkien’s Eye of Sauron, presented in film as aloft in a tower—a kind of all-seeing eye with a 360 degree view. However, and here’s the connection, the control of records in an organization supported by a taxonomy structure can mean the difference between being fined millions of dollars and providing information during a legal discovery process. This by simply managing which information should be retained, retrieved, and/or disposed of properly and in a timely fashion. There is the bridge between the Panopticon and taxonomy and records management; now to build the bridge between taxonomy and records management.