Radiation Passport helps physicians and patients determine cancer risk and cumulative radiation exposure in diagnostic imaging
This review is cross posted from iMedicalApps.com
Radiation Passport aims to fulfill an important need: to quantify the cancer risk for the various diagnostic imaging studies and to add up the cumulative exposure and cancer risk for one patient. The app makers explicitly invite lay persons to track their own cumulative dose (thus the monicker “passport”) but the design and vocabulary appear to be targeted more toward physicians.
While the diagnostic benefits of modern imaging techniques are easily appreciated, the risk of exposure to ionizing radiation is less well understood. This question has become more acute as recently published studies attempting to quantify cancer risk from diagnostic radiation were widely picked up by media outlets. I can attest that, in recent months, many of my patients have brought up this coverage when I ordered scans. At the same time, I have also decreased orders for CT scans and even x-rays in my pediatric patients.
Radiation Passport (iTunes link) was designed and built by a team of two brothers, one of whom is a radiologist – and is priced at $3.99. The application includes a well written “background” section which deals early-on with the vexing dilemma of calculating cancer risk – that much of of the data on cancer risk is extrapolated from atomic bomb data – by simply stating it is the best information available. Much of the background section of the app is drawn from an accompanying article in the Journal of American College of Radiology, in which the brothers describe the application’s methodology.
Add comment June 10, 2010
Open source software and the future of health IT: O’Reilly jumps in at its annual OSCon event
Kudos to Andy Oram of O’Reilly for organizing what promises to be a great introduction between the world of health IT and the open source software community. In his recent post , he summarizes his experience in building this first ever line-up of health IT software developers, vendors and regulators at the annual O’Reilly OsCon event.
As everybody knows, O’Reilly is highly respected technology publisher with deep roots in open source software. Its annual OsCon meeting is always well attended and, with the excitement this year around publication of meaningful use standards and HITECH stimulus money, this was an opportune time to get the open source community and software developers in general more directly engaged in building great products for health IT.
Add comment May 24, 2010
Is an electronic health record (EHR) a good business decision for a physician practice ?
(This is cross-posted from iMedicalApps.com .)
As many readers are aware, the 2008 HITECH act included a $44,000 incentive for any qualifying physician who implements an approved EHR and puts it to “meaningful use”. The tenets of meaningful use are mostly known* but the final list is not due to be published until this Summer. Our senior editor, Iltifat Hussein is working on more detailed analysis as part of his MPH program but two published analyses shed a little light, or at least numbers, on this question.
What many people, myself included, wondered is where did this $44,000 number come from ? It turns out that it came out of a single published paper which surveyed the implementation costs of an EHR, averaged across fourteen family practice groups [Miller, et al, Health Affairs, 2005] and arrived at an average cost of $44k.
Aside from the marvel of setting far-reaching national legislation on such a small sample size, the next question is what is the financial benefit of implementing an EHR and is there a business argument in favor of it ?
Add comment May 22, 2010
Apple’s iPhone & iPad and the end of the hacker
I was talking to a friend the other day who shares a common love for gadgets, especially the electronic kind. He told me that he had “jumped ship” from the iPhone to Android and bought a Nexus One. That seemed a little odd but not terribly striking. What really caught my attention is what he said next, which is that he spent most of one night “rooting” (i.e. jailbreaking) his Android phone to allow him to tether its cellular data to his computer.
Now, I know this guy has a demanding job and probably does not have a lot of spare time. What I realized from my reaction though, is that this type of computer hobbyist is now almost a dinosaur.
Continue Reading Add comment May 14, 2010
Why not just use the internet to transmit health information ? The transformative potential of NHIN Direct
David Kibbe, MD recently penned a detailed post on the basics of the NHIN Direct project titled “Getting to the Health Internet” . It is great reading and I highly recommend it. Below are a few of the points I found the most interesting.
Continue Reading Add comment May 12, 2010
EHR stimulus is not about technology adoption, it is about changing health care delivery: Dr. Blumenthal, ONC Director
The NY Times recently reported on a Health IT conference attended by many technology leaders.
The story emphasized the tug of war between older, large EHR vendors with major investments in “client-server” technology and newer, web-based vendors who provide EHRs as “software-as-a-service” (SaaS).
Continue Reading Add comment May 10, 2010
New host (WordPress)
Dear reader,
As of May 9, I have switched blog hosting provider from Tumblr to WordPress. The reasons are several, but the decision is not without drawbacks. One of them is breaking links to old posts. Therefore, my apologies iif you arrive at an error message following a link. Please use the search feature to find the post of interest.
Add comment May 10, 2010
MGMA Confirms Productivity Loss with Government’s EMR Program
From Evan Steele’s SRSoft blog (worth checking out):
“What struck me at last week’s annual meeting of HIMSS (Health Information and Management Systems Society) was the conspicuous absence of conversation about the effect of the ARRA legislation on physician productivity—there was hardly a mention of the subject throughout the conference. Jeffrey Belden, M.D., of the HIMSS Usability Taskforce, did point out that documenting patient exams in an EMR takes 10 times as long as documenting by dictation, but offered no solution to that problem. Admittedly, the audience contained few, if any, physicians. However, once again, it struck me that physician productivity was the elephant in the room—the topic that no one was discussing, even though physicians are the very people upon whom the success of the program is so dependent.”
…. Continued
April 29, 2010
The Blio Reader Could Launch a New Digital Era of Medical Textbook Publishing
The medical textbook has long been a ripe target for digital enhancement. In the 1990s the paragon of digital publishing was the CD ROM. At that time, publishers produced premium versions of their leading texts which included a CD ROM with additional images, search capability and even videos.
As the internet became a viable distribution model, publishers moved the supplementary content to the web and started offering paid subscriptions. Of course, the internet also encourages free distribution, and thus arose comprehensive medical ad-supported websites aimed at consumers and physicians, e.g. WebMD and Medscape, respectively. One national society, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, launched a large, curated site of surgical and non-surgical treatment techniques for its members (“orthopedic knowledge online”) which includes videos of surgical procedures and offers continuing medical education (CME) credits.
Continue Reading April 29, 2010
Good-enough and plenty: the future of Android
While I did not follow the events of the recent Google developer conference (“Google I/O”), apparently, a good part of the fireworks consisted of loud, public taunting of Apple and the iPhone.
Since much of this taunting came out of the mouths of Google senior executives, it was covered in the tech press and predictably stirred up comment threads all over the blogosphere. In truth, the schoolyard level of the rhetoric (see Kara Swisher) probably will not serve Google well in the long run. This is because Google needs its partners’ trust in order for them to continue as enablers, via their devices and services, in Google’s primary business of amassing massive stores of data against which to sell advertising.
(more…)
Add comment May 23, 2010