Creative Health Labs

Much has already been said about physicians' frustration at becoming data entry robots, and here's a great graphic to communicate some of the true costs of ICD-10: Click to Enlarge Image

The number and characteristics of people in California who have been certified eligible for Medi-Cal is changing dramatically over the last several years. Here's some data I extracted from the following dataset: Statewide Medi-Cal Certified Eligible Individuals, by Aid Code, 2013 - 2015 . Where M1 (the light blue line) = " Adult 19 to 64 at or below 138% FPL Citiz/Lawful" and 3N = " AFDC-MN-1931(b) Non CalWORKS" (more info here:  http://healthconsumer.org/cs0151931b.pdf). It would be interesting to dig deeper to understand the basis of this change (is this a true change, or just a change in definitions?).

As an Emergency Medicine physician in the year 2015, it is really astounding to think that we landed a man on the moon more than 40 years ago, yet I have patients walking in the door who had tests done at a facility across the street yesterday and I can't access those records. Thankfully some states have taken this situation into their own hands and developed systems for sharing medical records, such as the CRISP system in Maryland . Alas, most states have not yet built health information exchanges, and even those that have (like Maryland) don't necessarily have a patient portal. There are many different models for how medical records should be stored and shared in the future, and I'm not sure which model will win out in the end. What seems most compelling is for records to revolve around the patient (as opposed to the hospital), and two products out there that do this well (to my knowledge) are: PicnicHealth and Gliimpse . Both PicnicHealth and Glimpse will help retriev...

Much has been made of using Google Search data to predict health events, especially flu outbreaks. Here's how this flu season is proceeding compared to prior years: The blue line represents the influenza trend for 2015, and so far it is the second highest year of the last 5 years. Note that the highest year was the 2012-2013 season which actually started off quite slow.

This is another really cool way to connect data sources to Tableau.

  From the article: http://www.aha-solutions.org/newsletter/v2-i4/feature.shtml  “If you can’t bill in a clean, simple way, it makes your entire organization look dysfunctional,” says Alex Mohseni, MD, FACEP, chief innovation officer at Emergency Medicine Associates, which manages emergency departments in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding region. “I think hospitals underestimate how important billing is as a patient touch point. No other industry is still doing billing in the outdated fashion that most health care organizations are doing it. Any unnecessary friction in the payment process will lead to lost revenue.” Mohseni’s very title — chief innovation officer — is another example of the changes organizations are making in response to consumer-driven care. The C-suite is being redefined as hospitals create positions like chief innovation officer and chief experience officer.  

Emergency Medicine jobs for physicians My good friend (Puneet Chopra) and I just launched Jobmap.io - an interactive map with Emergency Medicine jobs , listing every hospital in the United States. We've taken a different approach to the job search process. It turns out that most groups are always hiring, or at minimum always wanting to receive more CVs. In fact, there is so much constant flux in Emergency Medicine, that there is no way a recruiter can update a bunch of different ads on different job boards constantly. It's just too fragmented. We realized that what Emergency Medicine needs as a specialty is a single site where every hospital is listed and physicians can easily connect with the recruiter for that site. Additionally, it would be very helpful to have data filters and points to help physicians decide their career options. Here's some of the data points we've added and why: Door-to-doctor - We think this is a good measure of the overall function...

I found a very interesting dataset  (update May 2016: it looks like this dataset has disappeared from data.gov... very fishy!) showing the number of hospital installs each major EMR/EHR has since 2011. I put the data into a simple chart: It is interesting that in the last 12 months almost all of the EHRs' growth has plateaued except for Epic and Cerner: But to see what is REALLY going on, take a look at another angle on the same data. Of the 135 additional hospital installs of EHRs (going to the top 6 vendors) in 2014 , EPIC got a whopping 68% of new hospital installs, according to the same public data set: Given the many articles on user interface and integration problems with EPIC, this is a scary trend: 1. Why do users dislike Epic so much. 2.  Stockholm syndrome and Epic’s takeover of medical records 3. Why EMR companies don't care about usability 4. Bad EMRs 5. “On a really good day, you might call the system mediocre, but most of the time it’s lousy,” ...

I put together an interactive map with data tables showing nursing home quality data from Nursing Home Compare . The table is specifically the Nursing Home Deficiencies table, which tabulates deficiencies in safety, fire safety, and health. Learn About Tableau In the above interactive map, you can search for nursing homes by adjusting the filters on the right side. The filters include state, number of deficiencies, general type of deficiencies (they are generally categorized into fire safety and health), and "scope severity code", which is well defined on the following website:  http://www.in.gov/isdh/reports/QAMIS/ltccr/matrlink.htm . There is a good report on the completeness and accuracy of Nursing Home Compare data from the OIG on this site:  http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-01-03-00130.pdf . Here are the typical types of nursing home deficiencies cited: Allow residents to easily view the results of the nursing home's most recent inspection. Reasonably...

In this post I'm going to show a step-by-step way to create your own data visualization map using *live* Hospital Compare data  . By "live" data I mean that the data visualization we create will update automatically when CMS updates its data set; we will not have to download the new data, rather we will build the connection between Tableau and the public data available on CMS' web site. Here is an example of the end product we will build: Learn About Tableau Just to summarize what the above map shows: Each hospital is represented as a circle on a map, color coded by its score on one of the questions from the HCAHPS survey. The user can click on the filters on the right and move the map to look at other state's hospitals, and switch which HCAHPS question he is interested in. What's *REALLY* cool though, is that this data is not static. When CMS updates the hospital scores, our map will update automatically. To build the above: First, download the...