Health Datapalooza 2014 Recap

The Health Datapalooza conference is ripe with opportunities to inspire and be inspired.  At any given session or lunch, the developer of an emerging app is seated at your left, and the winner of some other developer challenge a few years ago is on your right.  The vibe is a bit frenetic, in a good way.

At this conference, data geeks get right down to the business of discussing controversial and innovative healthcare data issues.  Nothing is watered down.  Even the Director of NIH Francis Collins, whom everyone wanted to hear play his guitar and sing, charged right in with data-rich graphs and statistics.  Jeremy Hunt of the UK offered sobering yet transparent error figures, encouraging the use of data to learn from and improve upon our safety practices at the point of care.  Keynotes from Jonathan Bush and Todd Park alleviated any need for caffeine, even though there was plenty on hand.  Countless application developers told truly compelling stories of their solutions.  Kathleen Sebelius challenged us to reconsider “the way we’ve always done it”.

What’s not to love?

I had hoped we would dive deeper into interoperability issues such as consistent data transport and payload standards.  Or, how a sensitive dependence on initial conditions such as protocol specifications, as in chaos theory, can lead to unexpected behaviors in pairwise HISP (Direct Exchange service provider) interoperability, seemingly at random.  Our data needs to be free to move about the care continuum, in order to be the most useful to us.  Gamification was suggested as a way to help patients adhere to medications.  Perhaps it could also encourage Healthcare IT companies to better adhere to specifications?

Silo was another buzzword that was used a lot last week.  That is to say, it’s a buzzword you don’t want to be associated with.  It was reassuring that we’ve set expectations properly around interoperability.  Fortunately, silos are going the way of the beeper and the booth babe.

There were some well-received promises of intense BlueButton promotion in the fall by Dr. Oz and several others.  I was also really encouraged to see the BlueButton Toolkit site preview on Sunday.  Look for more information about this when it goes live, and be sure to send Adam Dole your suggestions.  Great work, Adam!

Maybe next year at Health Datapalooza, we’ll talk about structuring the data collected by wearable devices, since we certainly heard this year about how integral to wellness quantified self is expected to be.  Quantified self and interoperability might even be considered as separate award categories in the Code-A-Palooza contest next year.  This could lead to more diversity and creativity in developers’ solutions, while helping to spur patient engagement and data transfer.

Countless examples of knowledge gleaned from large datasets, that could be used to make better medical decisions, were cited.  But this information hasn’t yet been integrated into day to day clinical workflow in a way that’s helpful to individual patients.  There’s no single source of individualized, analytics-enabled tools for patients to guide medical decision-making today.  But there will be!

About the author

Julie Maas

Julie Maas is Founder and CEO of EMR Direct, a HISP (Health Information Service Provider) whose mission is to simplify interoperability in healthcare through the use of Direct messaging EHR integration and other applications. EMR Direct works with a large developer community to enable Direct for MU2 and other workflows using a custom, rapid-integration API that's part of the phiMail Direct Messaging platform. Julie is passionate about improving quality of care and software user experience, and manages ongoing interoperability testing within DirectTrust. Find Julie on Twitter @JulieWMaas.

   

Categories