Categories
HIT

Hot Dogs and Health Records

The next time you’re at Costco ogling flat screens and buying a pallet of paper towels, you may also be surprised to learn that Costco members are now eligible to receive incentive pricing on a Costco-branded cloud-based electronic medical record. During my maiden voyage to Costco after arriving in the Bay Area,  I saw a promotion for a Costco-branded EMR, billed as a “Service of the Month.” I was so baffled that I almost crashed into the guy with the cart brimming with hot dog buns. Fortunately, he was more amused than annoyed with me. (When I asked him to pose for this photo, he thought I was crazy.)

I’m not sure if posting marketing materials in Costco’s exit lane is an effective way to target a potential audience of EMR purchasers. However, it demonstrates that EMR marketers will take just about any approach to find a customer.

I picked up the promotional materials on the way out of the store and conducted some research after getting home. I was also surprised to learn that the Costco/EMR partnership was not a first for big-box retailers. Sam’s Club and Dell had a brief affair with another EMR company, eClinicalWorks in 2009, but soon dissolved its partnership due to lack of interest among members.

Given the failed relationship between Dell, Walmart and eClinicalWorks, why is Costco now selling a cloud-based EMR? I asked myself this question. Then I asked this question on Quora and am beginning to collect responses. What’s yours?

(This post originally appeared on Dr. Chrono’s Blog)

Categories
Data Viz Health Data

Really Touching Data

houseofsweden

Opened in 2006, the House of Sweden is a stunning contemporary building that houses both the Swedish and Icelandic Embassies in Washington DC’s Georgetown. The front of the building, comprised of a towering glass facade, provides visitors with a full-scale view of the clean lines of the interior architecture and the workings of the occupants. The four storey building was designed specifically to foster an atmosphere of positive and creative cooperation. The architects envisioned unusual features in an embassy — a combination of openness and transparency.

The building’s architectural elements translate into the technological approaches of Sweden more generally (i.e., their influence in the Open Source movement). Additionally, the spirit of the relationship between technology and medicine is captured beautifully in the Virtual Autopsy Project, an academic-industrial partnership that led to the development of a new commercialized product called the Sectra Visualization Table. In early 2010, the Embassy hosted an exhibit of home-grown technologies that I was lucky enough to see when I was biking around Georgetown and stopped in to check out the exhibit hall.

A dining room table-sized touch screen (basically a giant iPad) obscuring a giant CPU with plywood and tablecloths (this was a prototype) allowed users to interact in with 3-D images generated by CT and MRI scans. Developed at Sweden’s Center for Medical Science and Visualization, the table demonstrated how visualization can serve medical education, screening, and diagnostics.

While a rite of passage for a first-year medical student is a cadaver dissection, the availability of virtual cadavers may enhance opportunities for investigation and thankfully limit the time a student has to withstand the odor of formaldehyde in a dissection lab. The Swedish research team has also demonstrated the potential of touchscreen technologies in clinical care, especially in specialties like cardiology, neurology, surgery, orthopedics, and veterinary medicine. As touchscreen devices reach ubiquity in clinical medicine, there is a world of opportunity for developers of these tools and and expanding toolkits for their users.

Anders Ynnerman, one of the researchers who developed the table, in a recent TED Talk, gives a history of the Virtual Autopsy Table and samples some of the applications.