Health Informatics Forum

Engineers monitor heart health using paper-thin 'electronic skin'

“A professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has developed a heart monitor thinner than a dollar bill and no wider than a postage stamp”.   Interesting stuff - well worth a read: http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=30532.php

Hunt announces £260 million technology investment for Digital NHS

“Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has today unveiled a new £260 million technology fund for hospitals”.   Read more to find out how the funds will be spent:   http://www.publictechnology.net/news/hunt-announces-260-million-technology-investment-digital-nhs/37793

An Interview with the Most Powerful Woman in Health Care

“Judy Faulkner might not be a household name yet, but in the health care industry, she’s simply known as Judy”.    Read more about the woman who set up the $1.5 billion company and finds herself on the Forbes billionaires list. http://www.forbes.com/sites/zinamoukheiber/2013/05/15/a-chat-with-epic-systems-ceo-judy-faulkner/

Patient Blogging Could Offer Host of Benefits

“We share many aspects of our lives online, and illness is no exception”.  An interesting read exploring why blogging could be beneficial to patients:  http://www.ihealthbeat.org/features/2013/patient-blogging-could-offer-host-of-benefits.aspx#ixzz2Tp9n0qKs

3 reasons you'll need voice recognition for better patient engagement

“The preponderance of mobile voice technologies is going to give a big…

As part of the discussions at eHealth week, Dr Farzad Montashari, National Coordinator for Health IT, US Department of Health and Human Services shared some thoughts about workforce training in eHealth. The stimulus package in the US provided $117m for workforce programmes and an evaluation of the impact will be available soon. However Dr Montashari has some interesting points to make.

The funding was spent in a number of areas:

Curricula development for 5 eHealth roles with different competencies and profiles. Nearly 100,000 units of these curricula have been downloaded so far. However the curricula do need to be customized before use.

Competency exams administered by HIMA. These are offered free to graduates and are run in over 81 colleges and have graduated 17,000 students so far.

Higher awards such as M.Sc are offered through universities and over 1000 have been graduated so far.

Some of the lessons learned from this work (there will be a formal evaluation soon):

The M.Sc students found jobs even before they graduated, there is a huge demand for such graduates

The lower level training, carried out in community colleges etc, didn't have as much success. Students who are converting from other disciplines didn't fair as well as students with a health background. A major reason for this is that it is difficult to give non-Health students access real world access to health data, health services etc. as part of their training. More work needs to be done here to create a type of appreticeship model. A better model is to retrain and up-skill people who are already working in the health services. A lot of the smaller health centres in rural america are run by one or two people who need a range of skills. We need to train these people (the transportation chief may also be the IT person!)

Certification and even free examinations weren't taken up that much. Employers are not saying "I really value…