Farhad Manjoo, the NYTimes tech reviewer, wrote a story this week about the Amazon Echo, a device for the home using the Amazon Alexa voice recognition service to allow natural-feeling interactions with web searches and web-connected home devices. My immediate reaction was that this will be the human-computer interaction with the future EHR. Where we now use the mouse and keyboard to search endlessly through complicated menus, in 5-10 years, we will instead be able to say alo

A rapidly growing number of health innovations such as mobile apps, diagnostic tools, and sensors are being developed with a focus on enabling health and wellness outside of the traditional medical office visit. As Eric Topol points out in his new book, The Patient Will See You Now, many of these tools will help people independently understand and manage their health. A long history of medical paternalism will be overturned as health information is returned to the individual

Our UCSF Clinical Informatics group met a few months ago with several representatives from a major Health IT vendor. The vendor, we’ll call them RxLabs, is a provider of pharmaceutical related knowledge in many domains, including decision support tools for the EHR. Our conversation centered around how to better customize medication alerts. We talked about the popular topic of “alert fatigue,” and how to improve EHR decision support tools to improve their impact, rather than j

Epic’s User Group Meeting (UGM) is a Healthcare Conference The Epic EHR is so ingrained in healthcare now that the UGM conference is really a healthcare conference, not an IT conference. This was a conference where more than 10,000 healthcare professionals met to share best practices about how to run a healthcare organization and deliver care, and oh by the way, the tool you’re using is this software called Epic. There were clearly dominant themes this year among the priorit

Does this sound like something that has happened to you?  You are driving, you stop at a red light, and all of a sudden you find that your iPhone has migrated its way from your pocket or the passenger seat of the car into your hands.  You push an elevator button and pull the phone out of your pocket to glance at it in that split second while waiting for the door to open.  You eat dinner with a group of six friends and everyone is buried in Facebook rather than making eye cont