The Cleveland Clinic is testing an electronic health technology that could help transform the way its doctors and other caregivers practice medicine.

The Clinic is partnering with Microsoft HealthVault to enable certain patients to monitor chronic conditions -- high blood pressure, diabetes and heart failure -- at home. These patients will use high-tech devices, home computers and the Internet to keep Clinic doctors posted on their conditions.

The doctors could rely on the information to adjust medications or order aggressive medical care without seeing patients for office visits. Early medical interventions could lead to healthier patients and fewer hospital admissions, lowering costs.

"There is evidence in the literature that these kinds of more continuous monitoring programs do improve the health of patients over time," said Dr. C. Martin Harris, the Clinic's chief information officer.

"This allows us to begin thinking about treating patients when they're not in a hospital bed or in our office," Harris said.

The Clinic and Microsoft are providing patients with digital blood pressure and heart rate monitors, as well as blood sugar meters, said Peter Neupert, vice president of Microsoft's Health Solutions Group.

The monitors and meters can be plugged into computers, which upload information into HealthVault -- the online service that enables users to collect, organize and share their health information.

The Clinic's electronic health record system, called MyChart, would grab the information from HealthVault, making it available to doctors in the form they choose, Neupert said.

The Clinic hopes to involve between 400 and 500 patients in the 90-day pilot project, which began Nov. 5, Harris said.

Frequent monitoring of chronic conditions could arm patients with information to better manage their health.

"One of the good parts of MyChart is it runs an ongoing graph of my blood pressure readings," said William Joseph Moore of Lorain, who has participated in the HealthVault pilot for about a week.

Moore takes his blood pressure reading at least once a day. "It gives you a good opportunity to interact with your doctor on a daily basis," he said.

Because home monitoring technologies have the potential for lowering the cost of health care, Moore also believes they could have "far-reaching implications" for people who lack insurance or money to pay for regular doctor office visits.

SOURCE: Cleveland.com


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San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) November 9, 2008 -- Resilient Trust Networks announced today it is launching a trust network in the state of Utah, with the Fourth Street Clinic in downtown Salt Lake City. This network will serve as a model for the rest of the nation enabling continuity and coordination of care, secure messaging for scheduling and referrals, collaborative case management, disease management, medication adherence, patient access, patient safety and surveillance, medical research, and protection from medical identity theft and claims fraud.

The initial trust network will focus on coordination of care, case management and disease management for safety-net patients, enabling on-demand personal health networks that provide seamless, secure and convenient sharing of fragmented health information by the patient and all of their clinicians and authorized caregivers. The pilot will demonstrate the ability to improve healthcare outcomes, lower healthcare delivery and coordination costs, and improve convenience for patients, providers and payers.

Our goal is to provide the enabling SOA backbone and to work hand-in-hand with Resilient to roll-out the trust network model through other similar initiatives.

"One of the fundamental goals of the Utah Trust Network, Fourth Street Clinic demonstration pilot, is to prove that an unaffiliated network of regional health care providers can freely exchange, access and share health information while maintaining full patient privacy," says Allan Ainsworth, Executive Director for The Fourth Street Clinic. "We did this by leveraging many third-party products which were integrated with the Resilient Trust Network in less than 30 days. More than 30 partners are providing an array of trust services for authentication, identity, verification, audit and consent - confirming the value of an Open Services Architecture within a real world setting."

The trust network will provide a framework for secure interoperability supporting the Intel® SOA Expressway product and 30 other partners with different services and technologies, so any user or vendor can collaborate over an open services trust network to provide best-of-breed services to patients.

"The trick is to hide all the complexity," said Esther Dyson, Chairman of EDventure Holdings and an investor in Resilient. "We want to show that it's possible for people to share their data while still controlling it. It all sounds like buzzwords, but in practical terms it means individuals can say who can see what -- and trust that their wishes will be observed."

"We have been collaborating with Resilient Trust Networks on delivering access to health information while maintaining full patient privacy through the integration of Intel® SOA Expressway, the trust network, and the Fourth Street Clinic's electronic medical record systems," said Girish Juneja, director of SOA Products, Intel Software and Services Group. "Our goal is to provide the enabling SOA backbone and to work hand-in-hand with Resilient to roll-out the trust network model through other similar initiatives."

The trust network will provide a framework for secure interoperability supporting over 30 other partners with different services and technologies, so any user or vendor can collaborate over an open services trust network to provide best-of-breed services to patients.

"I was attracted to Resilient Networks because it represents a breakthrough in the historical Achilles heel of all security systems… key management," says Dr. Eric Haseltine, Chief Scientist of Resilient Networks and former Associate Director of National Intelligence for Science and Technology.

"I personally believe Resilient has the key to medical information systems," said Bill Coleman, Founder/CEO and Chairman of Cassatt Corporation and founder of BEA Systems. "This is a problem whose time has come and the next administration could really put it on the front burner. I believe that every other approach to solving this problem has one or more of the following three fatal problems: 1) privacy & security are not guaranteed, 2) health care data must be centralized and/or integrated if not transformed or re-created, and 3) business models (economics) are compromised on one or more of the traditional stakeholders in the medical value chain. Resilient has solved all of these problems, created a neutral value-added network, and demonstrated its validity in Utah and will be starting in other areas."

"Establishing and managing online trust is critical to the wide scale deployment of Internet-based healthcare services, said Brett McDowell, executive director, Liberty Alliance. We salute the teams involved in building and deploying the Utah Trust Network for providing patients and providers with a trusted environment for conducting identity-enabled transactions based on Liberty Interoperable technologies and open, secure and privacy-respecting SAML 2.0 standards."

About Resilient Trust Networks
The Resilient Trust Network is a new class of internet infrastructure that shifts control of data access from organizations and software applications to the owners of the data. The Resilient Trust Network impartially, agnostically, and transparently enforces whatever access rules a data owner specifies, thus assuring both data security and owner/user privacy.

By solving the previously-intractable problem of security and privacy for distributed personal information, the Resilient Trust Network enables the creation of new business models for a number of markets. These areas include health care, financial services, retail, social networking, supply chain management, and government.

Additional information about Resilient Trust Networks is available at: http://www.Resilient-networks.com

Some of the partners participating in the Utah Trust Network include; Intel, Liberty Alliance, CapMed, Authentify, Arcot WebFort, TriCipher MyOneLogin, Diabetes Health Institute, DMREX, ViaWest, HIPAAT, Health Choice Networks, Thrasys, MyCareTeam, and iMedicor.

JWT INSIDE, one of the world’s leading recruitment marketing and internal communications companies, is bringing Web 2.0 solutions to hospitals and health care systems. In order to engage the employees of a large health care system that is geographically spread out, JWT INSIDE incorporated PURL technology in their recent internal communications campaign.

New York (PRWEB) October 22, 2008 -- JWT INSIDE, one of the world’s leading recruitment marketing and internal communications companies, is bringing Web 2.0 solutions to hospitals and health care systems. In order to engage the employees of a large health care system that is geographically spread out, JWT INSIDE incorporated PURL technology in their recent internal communications campaign.

PURL stands for Personalized URL, a web address that incorporates the recipient’s name. For example: www.johnsmith.ourcompanysite.com. This technology provides relevant content in response to preferences and engages responders in more meaningful dialogue.

The PURL campaign was initiated as a pre-cursor to a recruitment campaign. After uncovering the institutions Employee Value Proposition (EVP), the promise between an employer and its employee’s defining what employers expect of their employees and vise versa, JWT INSIDE proposed the PURL solution to engage employees in the employer brand roll out, so they could understand the EVP and what the goals of the campaign were. Once employees are engaged and informed, they can become ambassadors for the brand.

To drive employees to their own PURL site, each were sent a personal electronic postcard and direct mail piece, which included their personalized URL. Also, posters in every one of the large number of facilities directed employees to their PURL site. When they arrived at their PURL site, employees were encouraged, by the CEO via video, to upload their personal story about working at the organization through video, audio or in writing.

JWT INSIDE is consistently looking to do what’s next first and this PURL marketing campaign was a great way to engage employees around the launch of an employer brand. This campaign showcases a 360 degree approach to employment communications. It began with the EVP, moved to engage current employees with the message, and will now be communicated to candidates, with the support of the current staff.

To find out more about the innovative health care employment communication solutions from JWT INSIDE contact the team at healthcare(at)jwtinside.com or call 877-665-8768.

ABOUT JWT INSIDE
JWT INSIDE helps organizations advance employee engagement through comprehensive advertising, marketing and employee communications services. Measurement tools, consulting resources and strategic approaches are employed to put the right people in the right jobs and keep the workforce engaged. The agency has 12 offices and 9 satellite locations across North America and internationally. It is a subsidiary of JWT, the largest advertising agency in the United States and the third full-service network in the world. Its parent company is WPP (NASDAQ:WPPGY).

This press release was distributed through eMediawire by Human Resources Marketer (HR Marketer: www.HRmarketer.com) on behalf of the company listed above.

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Health insurer Aetna Inc. is becoming the first health insurer to team with Microsoft Corp. to give its customers an Internet-based vault for storing medical records they can access even if they change jobs or leave their health plan.

Starting next month, Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna will allow some customers to transfer electronic personal health records to Microsoft's HealthVault, a platform that lets care providers look at the information, if they have patient permission.

The vault will give the insurer's customers "continuous access" to their claims information and anything the patient wants to add, like clinical data or past medical records, Aetna President Mark Bertolini said.

The insurer sees several advantages in the move, including improved communication with providers.

"We can avoid duplicate testing, we can avoid mistakes that occur as a result of not understanding the member's complete condition," he said. "Because we don't have a national health information technology network, this will stand as a first-generation of that kind of capability."

The announcement marks the latest step in a push by several companies into the storing and sharing of medical records.

Google Inc. opened a Web site earlier this year that allows people to store health information such as doctor, hospital and pharmacy records in one place. IBM and Duke University also have created a Web site that allows people to pay medical bills, schedule doctor appointments and store medical records, among other things.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft launched the free HealthVault Web site a year ago. About 40 companies currently allow customers to store information on it, a list that includes hospitals and CVS Caremark's Minute Clinic. Aetna would be the first health benefits company to do so, according to Microsoft.

The customer has complete control over who looks at the data and what information they see, said Peter Neupert, vice president for Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. He said doctors and providers, even Microsoft officials, will not be able to access the information unless they receive permission first from the patient.

"This is simply a place for you, like a safe deposit box, to store your data that is yours and yours alone to decide how you want to use it," he said, noting that it won't be used for data mining.

The information also will be protected under the new "Connecting for Health" guidelines devised earlier this year by Microsoft, Google and others that wanted to set ground rules for keeping sensitive information private.

Experts have said that consumers are wary of the protection offered for electronic medical records, but Neupert said Microsoft is "very confident and vigilant about providing security for this data."

Aetna makes electronic personal health records available to about 6 million customers, and the fee for that is part of their premium. But the insurer plans to charge nothing for the HealthVault transfer.

The insurer expects to recover costs tied to setting up the agreement.

"Right now, we spend tens of millions of dollars answering the phone telling providers if a person is eligible or what their benefits are," Bertolini said. "With the availability of this information, those calls go away."


SOURCE: Associated Press

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