Grant Central is Here!

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On Thursday, our team released Grant Central, a tool to help life sciences researchers find grant opportunities, identify new collaborators, and manage the grant application process. It’s one of the things, along with Clickframes, that we’ve been working on for most of 2009.

Here are the highlights:

  • Search through all US government grant opportunities for life sciences, including all HHS agencies, (including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control) as well as the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. Searches can be by keyword or award size.
  • Comment on grants, enabling a conversation across the Harvard community.
  • Query the Harvard faculty Profiles database for new collaborators and invite them to participate in a grant project.
  • Manage grant projects using the aptly-named “Projects” module. Projects allows you to track due dates, tasks and documents, as well as maintaining an online discussion forum for your grant project. Grant Central also allows users to manage their NIH Biosketches, Other Support Forms and Lab Information documents -  no more chasing them down the day before the proposal is due!

We’ll post more about it over the next week or two. You won’t be able to see the whole application if you don’t have a Harvard Medical School eCommons account, but you can still use the grant and collaborator search engines.

And if you’re interested in Grant Central for your own institution, drop us a note. The application was developed as part of Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center – if your institution has a CTSC, you can get Grant Central too.

Yes, it’s been a little quiet around here…

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Summertime, and all that. However, the big reason has been the impending release of a pretty major project we’ve been working on for the last several months. We took a couple of government databases, some existing systems at Harvard Medical School, the latest lightweight, web based productivity tools, put them all in a blender, and kept the really good bits.

It’s not available to the public yet, but we’re planning for later in August – development is done, and we’re in integration and scalability testing right now. If you do academic research, you’re going to like this this one.

In the meantime, blogging to intensify.

Future of Google Health

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John Moore at Chilmark Research asks today if Google Health is irrelevant. I’m re-blogging it because I agree with him. Microsoft is easily the leading player in broad audience Personal Health Record platforms. That doesn’t mean their product is ideal – it’s certainly not – but they’ve been improving it steadily and have integrated it with a very cohesive strategy aimed at engaging with the healthcare industry as a whole. Google hasn’t done that.

One take-away I had from the Microsoft Health Solutions Group conference in June (besides one heck of an airplane-acquired infection) was how tightly Microsoft is linking Amalga UIS – its hospital intelligence/data warehousing offering – with HealthVault. Amalga is the back-door – hospitals will make the data integration investments because of bottom-line and quality improvement benefits that are realized by UIS. But once that work is done, integrating with HealthVault is just flipping a switch. Microsoft has allocated its R&D money accordingly.

Google, on the other hand, still strikes me as simply dallying in healthcare. They’ve done some good work in focused healthcare search, but that’s pretty much where it ends. I completely agree with John’s statement that Google has gotten disproportionate attention simply because it’s Google. I’m not really inclined to start trying to take down the myth of Google here, but it’s safe to say that the company isn’t omnicompetent. From very personal experience, it was quite difficult to get projects in PHR off the ground during the six months after Google Health leaked but before it launched. There was a huge chilling effect – everybody wanted to wait and see what Google would do.

Boston Globe Says Boston Rocks (in Health IT)

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Nice article in the Boston Globe on Massachusetts’ leadership role in the Health IT community. “The Silicon Valley of Health IT.” And it’s true, too – more HIT innovation, both academic and corporate, has come out of the area inside Route 495 than anywhere else in the country. Even the big out of state players (Epic, Cerner) and the new entrants (Google, Microsoft) have at least some technological roots here.

So good for us.

Chrome OS has nothing to do with PHRs

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I usually don’t bother picking on other people’s editorials. But this one, from FierceHealth IT (which I usually like, incidentally – it’s a nice roundup of daily HIT stories) just struck me as trying to fill space:

Google’s Chrome OS may heat up PHR competition with Microsoft – FierceHealthIT.

Google’s Chrome OS has nothing to do with healthcare. This is not a signal of the shift to cloud computing – that signal flare went up several years ago. Google won’t “tightly couple” Google Health to Chrome OS. HealthVault is just as web based and interactive as Google Health (admittedly, a little more complex to use, but you get more out of it).  Both systems have all kinds of big, enterprise-class integrations behind them.  Chrome OS is about Netbooks – they’ll ship a few million units on cheap hardware, and it will be easier for us to sit in front of the TV at night checking email. I won’t say it will never be a competitive desktop operating system, but that would be many years and several paradigm shifts down the road. A new version of Google Calendar would be more significant – at least you could integrate that with appointment reminders somehow.

The last sentence kind of sums it up:

I don’t pretend to have any kind of crystal ball here. But I do think it’s hard to argue that the PHR world is a lot more interesting with the Chrome OS in it.

That’s verbatim. And I agree – it is VERY hard to argue the proposition that Chrome OS makes any kind of difference whatsoever.

Android, by the way, is a different story – while it’s also too early to say, Google’s OTHER OS project, intended at the moment for cell phones, could enable a range of interesting healthcare applications. Since it doesn’t require always-on connectivity, Android could form the base of a handheld computing ecosystem in healthcare. Apple’s iPhone OS could do the same thing, and if Apple brings out a tablet, as they’re now expected to, I’d look for a wave of innovation coming off that platform. Local storage coupled with intuitive interfaces and great performance? That matters.

EHR Challenges in the Netherlands

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My friend FJ, who blogs at TechSocioTech, sent me a link to a news article from a Dutch newspaper, covering the results of a survey of 1800 patients by the Dutch Patient Consumer Federation. Since my Dutch is poor, he kindly provided me with a quick translation (probably not intended for blog publication, but it’s a lot cleaner than Google translate!). It speaks for itself:

AMSTERDAM – Medical records are often full of errors and incomplete. Almost 60 percent of the people who responded to a campaign to notify the Dutch Patient Consumer Federation (NPCF) had to correct or supply missing information to caregivers because insufficient information was available.
Moreover, participants regularly noted egregious mistakes.Therefore a large majority has a negative attitude towards digital medical records. The case files of one in five patients were even lost at one point or another, a spokesperson said.
Most people who are already worried about the medical data are therefore also skeptical about the safety of the SPD. While they worried, two thirds believe that digital exchange of patient data is helpful in case of emergency,  medication, and clinical insights. 1800 people took part in the campaign of NPCF. (ANP)

I’ve been trying to find an English copy of the press release, but no success so far. Do we have an entire country of ePatient Daves? This reinforces a simple observation about EHRs in general – they probably won’t be widely accepted until the data quality reaches a sufficiently high level, and that just hasn’t happened yet. Right now consumers expect that EHR data is both more widely available than it actually is, and over higher quality. What happens when they find out?

Porter on Healthcare Reform

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In the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Michael Porter, the Strategy Czar from Harvard Business School, has a very interesting manifesto on how to fix the healthcare system. Since it’s a Perspective, the NEJM is letting you read the whole thing for free.  For what it’s worth, I’m pretty much in agreement with Porter’s vision on the end-state of healthcare reform. We need to fix payment by bringing everyone into the system (and yes, that more or less means universal coverage, whether by government administration or simple mandate) and we need to restructure the delivery system in a way that creates powerful incentives for care coordination and health maintenance.

Porter suggests we have to start all these changes at the same time, because they’re self-reinforcing. And as I think about it, I have to – perhaps a bit reluctantly – agree. Anybody who has been seriously interested in healthcare reform for any amount of time has invested quite a bit of thought into “process patches” on the existing healthcare system. Personal Health Records are one such, but as promising as it is, consumer controlled healthcare information isn’t going to do more than create some small efficiencies. That may still add up to billion dollar sums, but against a $2 trillion backdrop even the odd billion doesn’t go as far as it used to. There just aren’t enough little fixes to add up to one big fix.

Since this is nominally an informatics blog, I’ll call out Porter’s very sound observation on the role of EHRs:

Sixth, electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems.

Aggregating data across time and providers may sound scary to anyone concerned with patient privacy, and Porter doesn’t mention that part of the equation at all.  If there is going to be systematic reform, the average citizen is going to wonder about its implications for medical confidentiality. One nice thing about universal coverage is that it dramatically reduces “breach consequences” for medical privacy. It doesn’t eliminate them – there will always be conditions that create social awkwardness or worse – but the big threat, loss of health coverage, no longer applies.  I’m surprised that isn’t pointed out more often.

The Tories and HealthVault

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The Google froth turned up an interesting op-ed from the Guardian newspaper in London. Apparently the Conservative party has started agitating for use of systems like HealthVault and Google Health to replace the large, centralized National Health Services databases.  Certainly fits the small-government agenda, but as the article correctly points out there’s a lot more in a real EHR than you’re going to find in HealthVault. Patients do need their records – but so do physicians.

The Guardian: Don’t ask the public to care for its data.

To be fair, the proposal only came from a think tank, and they weren’t really focusing on healthcare per-se; they were focusing on large government programs. But still, I’ve heard the same question come up from very educated sources outside the health and health IT areas.