Last week, I attended the National Rural Health Association Quality and Clinical Conference. The NRHA has made the handouts from the conference available at http://tinyurl.com/l48pgb. Topics include electronic health records, telemedicine, and models for rural health care. [SD]

Two MCR liaisons, Sharon Dennis and Siobhan Champ-Blackwell, attended the Woods Hole Bioinformatics course recently. We would like to form an alumni group of librarians who have attended Woods Hole in the last few years. The purpose of the group is to help us determine the best way to disseminate the information we learned at Woods Hole to other librarians in the region, as well as looking at ways the knowledge we gained has been or could be integrated into the librarian’s role.

If you have attended the Woods Hole course and would like to participate in the group, please contact Sharon Dennis at sdennis@lib.med.utah.edu. [SD]

The National Library of Medicine’s Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications has produced MyDelivery, a prototype tool for communicating health and biomedical information.  A result of R&D in Internet communications, MyDelivery enables two individuals to securely exchange information reliably, even through potentially unreliable wireless networks. The email-like user interface allows file attachments to be large in size (several gigabytes) or quantity (several thousand). This tool has potential applications in library document delivery, biomedical research, and HIPAA-compliant communication of patient health information.

MyDelivery is currently in beta testing, and libraries and their customers are invited to use it and provide feedback on its utility. The free registration and Windows client software are available at http://mydelivery.nlm.nih.gov. [da]

The federal government has announced open source gateway software, called Connect, which will allow the electronic health records of various federal agencies (including the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, and the Indian Health Service) to communicate with the Nationwide Health Information Network. See the Connect project site for more information:  http://www.connectopensource.org/display/Gateway/2009/04. [SD]

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference is currently being held in Chicago, but even if you can’t attend, you can follow it online. Visit http://www.himssconference.org/ and click on “HIMSS09 Online Update.” You can visit the conference official Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/HIMSS. You can also follow comments about the conference using the #himss09 “Twitter hashtag” (a keyword that marks Twitter comments about a certain topic) - to see the updates, go to http://twitterfall.com/?trend=%23himss09!%23494234. Note that you don’t have to sign up for Twitter to view either for these since the updates are publicly published - [SD]

The March 31 issue of The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper, published an article describing early patient experiences at the Cleveland Clinic with Microsoft HealthVault. Patients with chronic conditions, such as hypertension, take regular measurements that are sent to Cleveland Clinic’s EHR system via HealthVault. Doctors at the clinic can monitor the results and adjust the patient’s treatment as needed. The article gives a real-world example and includes a video. See http://tinyurl.com/dk9uj3 for the original article, and http://tinyurl.com/c49qzs for some interesting commentary about the article. [SD]

The International Journal of Medical Informatics has published an article entitled “The State and Profile of Open Source Projects in Health and Medical Informatics.” The study reviewed open source projects listed in the open source database SourceForge. The article concluded, “A wide range of OSS applications are in development, from bio-informatics to hospital information systems. A profile of OSS in health and medical informatics emerges that is distinct and unique to the health care field. Future research can focus on OSS acceptance and diffusion and impact on cost, efficiency and quality of health care.” Find a summary of the article at http://tinyurl.com/cezabw. [SD]

A new study detailing the use of electronic health records was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 25. The study showed a very low level of adoption of EHR’s in U.S. hospitals. You can read the paper here, and listen to an NPR interview with the paper’s author here. [SD]

Last December, NPR’s Diane Rehm aired a radio show about e-health. The show discussed “Advances in information technology are leading to major changes in our health care system. A look at some of the trends, including health-related web searches, on-line prescriptions, digitized medical records, and doctor’s appointments via webcam.” Guests included Eric Horvitz, principal researcher, Microsoft Research; Jonathan Weiner, professor of health policy and management and of health informatics at Johns Hopkins University; and Dr. Don Detmer, President and CEO, American Medical Informatics Association. You can listen to the podcast of the show through RealAudio or Windows Media here:

http://wamu.org/programs/dr/08/12/02.php#23197

If you didn’t hear the show when it originally aired, it’s worth a listen!

[SD]

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) GotEHR? initiative is designed to explore “ways to expand understanding about, support for, and use of EHRs.” The GotEHR? web page has a list of resources related to electronic health records. Take a look at:

http://www.amia.org/content/got-ehr

[SD]