Is it a Bird? A Plane? No, it's Electronic Clinical Data!

Faster than a speeding bullet, the clinical data portal we launched in June has scored it's first physician! It's pretty exciting to have built it, even more so to actually see a physician using it.

The portal allows a physician - or a group of physicians - to upload clinical data relevant to a given condition, in this case Diabetes. We ask for a set of specific, discrete data, not the entire record, such as blood sugar levels, blood pressure, eye exams and the like, and then using the data from the record we score the physician(s) against an evidence-based measure set that scores the doctor on his or her performance for that condition.

So, in this case, the doctor voluntarily submits to being scored for his performance treating and managing his diabetic patients. Any eligible physician who scores well on the measure will start receiving incentive payments from participating payors and purchasers, as well as be recognised in HealthGrades.com

Pretty cool, huh?

In addition, using the same engine we also scored two batches of physicians who are using the NextGen EHR package, thereby scoring their performance directly from the data.

As EHR adoption in the United States grows I anticipate more and more data being available to more and more performance assessors like ourselves, and I look forward to the next five years. Next step? Live report cards that tell you not how a hospital did last year, but how they did YESTERDAY.

Can't wait.‎ Full story...

Netflix Winner Announced

Health transparency wise we have three great new projects each due to go live in the next 60 days or so, hence the lack of posts, just too much going on. However, I do like to talk about technology that isn't health care-related once in a while. Netflix started an open contest three years ago offering a million dollars to anyone who could improve their movie recommendation engine. The contest is finally over, whittled down from over 50,000 contestants to two teams who came in at the last minute just a few minutes apart. The full story is at Wired, go to http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/bellkors-pragmatic-chaos-wins-1-million-netflix-prize/ and enjoy the read.

I think it's a great example of both using the collective consciousness and open software principles.‎ Full story...