Health Care Industry Moves Slowly Onto the Internet

The health care industry, a well-known laggard in information technology, is where most of corporate America was a decade or more ago in adopting Internet-style computing. There are innovators, intriguing experiments and lots of interest, but the technology hasn’t yet gone mainstream.

Still, the direction is now clear, and only the pace of the shift is in question. The Obama administration’s plan to spend $19 billion to hasten the adoption of electronic health records that can share data across networks — “interoperable,” in techspeak — will only give more impetus to the shift toward Internet-style computing. And there is plenty of evidence of the emerging transition being demonstrated and announced this week at the health information technology’s big annual conference and trade show in Chicago, sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, or HIMSS.

One good example of the trend is a joint project, announced on Sunday, between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and GE Healthcare. The project will deliver individually tailored public health alerts to electronic health records in doctors’ offices. The goal, for example, is to have an alert pop up on a physician’s screen that a certain patient, based on location, age and perhaps occupation, might be at risk for an influenza outbreak that is nearing a certain community or for contracting a food-borne illness.

“Public health mostly deals with problems now as broadcast communication, with warnings to the general population,” said Dr. Charles Safran of the Harvard Medical School, who is also a senior scientist at the CDC’s Center for Public Health Informatics. “This changes that communications paradigm from broadcast to targeted.”

The project, Dr. Safran said, was evidence of a broader shift at the CDC and in public health, especially under the head of the CDC’s informatics center, Dr. Leslie Lenert. “There is a real emphasis on developing Internet services for public health,” Dr. Safran said. “Public health is coming of age as far as this technology is concerned.”

No one is suggesting that everything moves online. Instead, the Internet shift means a technical transition to Web-based capabilities and open standards, and also a more collaborative style of work in health care technology.

For example, the researchers at Mayo Clinic and I.B.M. are launching a Web site for collaboration in the tools used for searching records and data stores of all kinds in medicine. The new project is the Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium.

The application of natural language processing — simply, understanding human language — to medicine is becoming increasingly important as more patient and research information is moving to digital form instead of paper. But much of that information, like doctors’ clinical notes, is not in traditional databases. So natural language processing tools, developed for medical terms, will be crucial for researchers looking for clues to disease patterns and trying to improve decision-support tools for doctors.

Both Mayo and I.B.M. will put medical research tools into the natural-language project. The goal, they say, is for a large share of the estimated 2,000 researchers and developers working on clinical language systems worldwide to contribute to the project, and to benefit.

“By making it an open-source initiative, we hope to enable wide use of natural-language processing tools so medical advancements can happen faster and more efficiently,” said Dr. Christopher Chute, a bioinformatics expert at Mayo.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/