medical

IBM IMPACT Day 2 Keynotes

May 1, 2012

Johan Gerber of MasterCard kicked things off on day 2. MasterCard does not actually issue the cards with their logo on, they are a technology company that provides a network to link consumers, 32,000,000 businesses and 22,000 card issuers. The network is very high performance, handling 100 pieces of information and processing each transaction in [...]

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We need medical decision management not just electronic medical records

March 21, 2012

An article on electronic medical records in the New York Times caught my eye recently. In this article was the comment:
Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often, a study published on Monday concludes.
Now I don’t know specifically what about the specific [...]

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Opening keynotes at IBM IMPACT 2011

April 11, 2011

Nancy Pearson and David Farrell kicked off the main event. 8,000 people at IBM IMPACT apparently and Nancy introduced the key themes – helping companies optimize for growth and focus on delivering results. The topics are based on a continued focus on getting business and IT to work together (a key theme of Decision Management [...]

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Decision Management and reforming hospitals

August 17, 2010

The McKinsey Quarterly had a nice piece on Reforming hospitals with IT investment that contained a great paragraph:
Combined with clinical-decision-support (CDS) tools that give physicians best-practice guidelines for medical procedures and with stricter coding classifications, electronic health records not only broaden access to medical information but also serve as a forcing agent [...]

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Why do doctors insist on remembering all the rules?

June 7, 2010

I was sent this link to a NY Times article over the weekend – Dizzying Symptoms. In it we read of a patient with an unusual set of symptoms that baffles various doctors. Eventually they find out the cause and it turns out to be a vitamin deficiency that is a not uncommon side effect [...]

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Keynote at the Drools bootcamp

March 18, 2010

[ April 21, 2010; 9:00 am to 10:00 am. ] I am giving a keynote at the Drools bootcamp in San Diego. The bootcamp has some days focused on the healthcare industry as well as some more general sessions

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IT at the Heart of Real-Time, Personalized Healthcare #PBLS

October 29, 2009

Last session at the SAS/BetterManagement.com event this week on IT and personalized healthcare. Yan Chow of Kaiser Permanente presented on their vision for IT-enabled healthcare. Kaiser is an integrated system with 8.6M patients and 180,000 employees and physicians. Integrated means that insurance/delivery are all aligned and Kaiser is very focused on prevention. It is also [...]

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First Look – FICO Insurance Fraud Manager

October 20, 2009

I got a chance to catch up with Andrea Allmon of FICO to hear about their new Insurance Fraud Manager release (3.0 in July). This is a timely topic because of the debates around healthcare at the moment. In all the discussions about healthcare costs you never hear about the amount of fraud involved, yet [...]

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Rules-based innovation

August 27, 2009

An old friend of mine, Anders Björlin, has just won a 2009 Humanitarian Impact award from The Itanium Solutions Alliance. The press release says:
Judges selected Kiwok of Sweden for its BodyKom(TM) Series remote ECG monitor. Deployed in conjunction with caregivers and health systems, BodyKom allows heart patients to live independently while their heart is monitored [...]

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Using decision management for meaningful EMR

July 20, 2009

I saw this comment last week in The US stimulus program Taking medical records online – McKinsey Quarterly – Health Care – Strategy & Analysis and it struck a chord with me:
health care providers to upgrade their IT systems rapidly to reach the act’s standards for “meaningful use” of EMR (Electronic Medical Record)
This phrase – [...]

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DIALOG Agile IT Infrastructure

February 6, 2009

Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways:

Start small and in a well known area to prove out the technology but have [...]

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Mr Obama, smarten these systems!

January 20, 2009

Like millions of my fellow Americans I listened to our new President today. As I did I was struck by the opportunities for decision management to deliver the smarter systems that will be critical with some of the priorities President Obama laid out in his speech. There were four commitments he made that struck me [...]

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Decision management is critical for successful e-prescription

December 19, 2008

MSNBC had an interesting article on Docs to get bonus pay for e-prescriptions. The article had a great comment:
The biggest reason for the paperless push is to improve safety. More than 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by medication mistakes. Deciphering doctors’ chicken-scratch — was that 100 milligrams or 100 micrograms? — does play [...]

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Decision Management and fixing healthcare

November 14, 2008

I think alot about how decision management can be used to improve healthcare. Neil Versel is one of the bloggers I read in this space and he had a post this week called “A modest proposal” in which he repeated some comments about the failure of the medical profession to use Clinical Decision Support systems [...]

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Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience

October 30, 2008

Two gentlemen from Deloitte presented Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience. 80% of healthcare costs are incurred by 20% of members and traditionally the 20% get all the focus. Analytics and data mining get applied to claims, authorization, costs as a result. Segmentation focuses on the unprofitable and unhealthy. Increasingly [...]

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Credit Scoring in Healthcare. In Healthcare!

July 24, 2008

I saw a post today on medical credit scoring that made me think I should post something about how credit scoring can be used in healthcare. Now saying that, of course, makes everyone nervous – are we talking about refusing people treatment because of their credit score? Why should financial questions like credit worthiness have [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Breakthrough in Claims Excellence Management

February 26, 2008

Last session of the day was from Rodolfo Viola of Swiss Medical Argentina on Breakthrough in Claims Excellence Management. Claims is, of course, a prime target for rules-based automation so I was excited to hear how an organization outside of North America/Europe was handling it.
Swiss Medical is a privately owned company founded as a clinic [...]

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