Louise Schaper, PhD, CEO, Health Informatics Society of Australia: "What's Missing From the Health IT Investment? - Health Informatics"

Louise Schaper, PhD, CEO of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA, http://www.hisa.org.au/), graciously extended an invitation in 2011 that I could not attend, and again in 2012 (that I accepted) to give a keynote presentation at HISA's annual convention, Healthcare Informatics Conference (HIC).  A writeup of my HIC2012 presentation in Sydney is at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-presentation-to-health-informatics.html.

I unfortunately could not make it Down Under for HIC2013 in Adelaide.  However, HISA has posted videos of a number of presenters.

One of the presenters is Dr. Schaper.  Her presentation "Health Informatics: A megatrend driving investment, careers & delivering the future of healthcare" is at http://www.hisa.org.au/page/hic2014videos (bottom video).  It is well worth watching.

Louise Schaper PhD, CEO, Health Informatics Society of Australia

After reviewing the potential benefits of heathcare IT, Dr. Schaper asks what I consider the most critical question of all.

At 08:20 she asks:  "What's missing from this [multi-billion dollar] investment?"

The answer is "Health Informatics."

Dr. Schaper then indicates the real-world implications of the field of commercial health IT largely missing its critical founding scientific discipline:

At 13:00 she amplifies the point further:  We are not learning our lessons!  The themes of that slide are familiar to readers of this blog, and to current health IT users:

Dr, Schaper then goes on to cover some real-world issues related to impediments to meaningful health informatician engagement in health IT design, implementation and other aspects of leadership.

The presentation is worth watching in its entirety.  The issues in health IT of meaningful involvement and leadership by those with expertise in healthcare informatics (as compared to, for example, those in manufacturing, mercantile, and management computing whose experience is often ill-suited for high-level roles in healthcare projects) are truly international.

Finally, for those in the U.S. not used to Australian accents, Dr. Schaper's is quite enjoyable to listen to.

-- SS

My Presentation to the Health Informatics Society Of Australia: "Critical Thinking on Building Trusted, Transformative Medical Information: Improving Health IT as the First Step"

In early 2011 I was invited to present at the annual convention of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) by its CEO, Louise Schaper, PhD.  HISA was aware of my writings and thought a presentation at their conference would be of interest to the Australian informatics and healthcare governance community.

Dr. Schaper wrote:

From: Louise Schaper
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:50 AM
To: Scot Silverstein
Subject: HIC invitation to deliver a keynote presentation

Hi Scot,

I trust this email finds you well and I hope spring is bringing you some warmer weather and cheer.

I wanted to let you know that the Health Informatics Conference committee met recently and expressed a high level of interest in having you deliver a keynote address at HIC and also to form part of a panel presentation. 

I know you may not be able to make a commitment to come to Australia in August, but I wanted to let you know what we would love to have you, if circumstances permit you being here.  I’m confident we could have your trip sponsored (providing you don’t mind spending some face-time with the sponsoring organisation) and generate some media coverage around your visit.

The preliminary program will be advertised in the next few weeks and at the moment I’m leaving a ‘spot’ for you in the hope that you may be able to join us.  I know you are in difficult and upsetting circumstances so please know that I’m not intending to add to any pressure – I just wanted to let you know that we would be honoured if you are able to deliver an address at HIC this year and I will keep a speaking spot reserved for you if you think you may be able to accept our invitation.

Thanks for your time Scot.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Kindest regards,

Louise

Sadly, the "difficult and upsetting circumstances" she mentioned were my involvement in caring for my mother, seriously injured in May 2010 in a healthcare information technology-related medical misadventure and, by this time, dying.

I was thus unable to attend.

My mother passed away June 6, 2011 of her injuries.

In January 2012, Dr. Schaper was gracious enough to re-invite me to the annual 2012 conference in Sydney.  I accepted.

I attended HIC 2012, held in the Darling Harbour Convention Centre in Sydney 30 July - 2 August 2012.

I enjoyed taking pictures like this with my trusty (and portable) Canon SX110 IS.  Click to enlarge.  More photos here.

My powerpoint slides for the presentation entitled "Critical Thinking on Building Trusted, Transformative Medical Information:  Improving Health IT as the First Step" are at this link.

Darling Harbour Convention Centre, Sydney, Australia. Click to enlarge.

Australia has embarked on a national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) project under the auspices of Nehta, the National E-Health Transition Authority.  I find this an interesting approach to national health IT; unlike the U.S., whose project is top-down (centrally controlled records), Australia seems to have learned from our mistakes and is initiating health IT as a bottom-up (patient-controlled) initiative.

At the conference last week, I delivered a keynote address on the theme of improving health IT as an essential step in leveraging the capabilities of the technology.

Being that I am anti-"bad IT" and pro-"good IT", implicit in my address was the issue of the technology's untrustworthiness in 2012, largely due to the unregulated free-for-all its market represents and the poor engineering that is the result.

I also participated in a Panel Discussion led by Australian investigative journalist and popular political TV program host Tony Jones.  Mr. Jones hosts the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Q&A - Adventures in Democracy."

Panel discussion moderated by Australian political commentator Tony Jones, who hosts the show "Q&A" on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  Click to enlarge.

I will highlight several key points I made in my keynote and on the panel:

• Critical thinking is essential at all times in healthcare ... or your patient's dead.
• Critical thinking is not mindless criticism; on the contrary, it is reflective, inquisitive, logical thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.
• Health IT must be trusted by users and patients [and be free of major downsides] - as a primary step before HIT can optimally benefit healthcare 
• I pointed out I am not suggesting anything new and that, in fact, I am suggesting something old:  "First, do no harm."
• I pointed out the "revolutions" usually have downsides, and IT always produces winners...and losers (per the empirical research of Social Informatics). 

Me presenting my keynote, driving home the point that IT on its own won't "revolutionize" healthcare; it is a tool to facilitate the true enablers of healthcare - clinicians - a point that should never be forgotten.  Click to enlarge. From the excellent multimedia piece on the conference at this link.

I then posed a series of questions of great relevance to understanding health IT realities.  Click to enlarge:

  

 

I left it to the audience to answer these questions.

I then posed the question "Is health IT being done well?"

I provided links to various evidence that it was not, such as the National Research Council 2009 report on health IT; AMIA's report on its workshop on healthcare IT failure, the 2012 U.S. IOM report on safety, the 2012 U.S. NIST report on usability, work by Australian Professor Jon Patrick of U. Sydney on health IT defects, and other sources as aggregated at this link.

Again, I did not impose views on the audience.  I didn't need to, as that corpus speaks for itself.

I also clarified terminology that reduces essential caution, such as the terms "electronic medical record" (EMR) and "electronic health record" (EHR) - a source of endless, wasted contention on definitions of which is which - being anachronisms from an earlier age of IT.  I pointed out that in 2012 what these innocuous terms somewhat deceptively and disarmingly represent are in reality complex enterprise clinical resource management and clinician workflow control systems – where many, many things can go wrong.

"EHR":  an innocuous "file cabinet" for records, or something else entirely?  Click to enlarge.

I asked if case reports of health IT unintended consequences (UC’s) were “anecdotal” and to be played down, while studies of health IT benefits to date solid science.  I then asked if the reality might be that studies of health IT benefits to date were mostly anecdotal (e.g., in specialized settings; weak observational studies vs. randomized clinical trials) while reports of UC’s are risk management-relevant incident report “red flags” pointing to possible systemic problems.

I pointed out the common seller marketing memes of beneficence and deterministic efficacy, and asked if these were realistic.  I also pointed out the need for transparency about HIT risks, and the impediments to this transparency.

Finally, I indicated what was the likely problem affecting all countries involved in EHR projects: that the rigor, ethics and skepticism of medical science itself not applied in the domain of health IT.

I suggested a simple solution:  a paradigm shift in thinking about health IT as another medical device, that needed to be subject to the same methodologies and ethical considerations applicable for decades (or more) in the healthcare delivery sector such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and research (and other risk-prone industries e.g., aviation and automotive).

My goal was to provoke thinking about these issues, to circumvent blank, uncritical acceptance of industry and industry-supporter memes.

I believe I succeeded.  Feedback I received was that the audience, including government officials, found many new things to consider as they embark on their national health IT projects.

I also heard that some HIT seller representatives were squirming a bit.  That was not unexpected.  I was taking "control of their message" away from them.

University of Sydney Professor Jon Patrick presenting on computational linguistics.   Jon is the author of a treatise on health IT defects (at this link), mentioned numerous times on this blog.  Dr. Patrick graciously hosted me at his Sydney home for several days after the conference and he and his wife gave me a wonderful tour of the city.  Click to enlarge.

Finally, I had a question from the audience, from fellow blogger Matthew Holt of the Health Care Blog.  (I've had some online debate with him before, such as in the comment thread at my April 2012 post here.)

Matthew asked me a somewhat hostile question (perhaps in retaliation for the thrashing he received at the end of my May 2009 post on the WaPo's HIT Lobby article here), that I was well prepared for, expecting a question along these lines from the seller community, actually.  The question was preceded by a bit of a soliloquy of the "You're trying to stop innovation through regulation" type, with a tad of Merck/VIOXX ad hominem thrown in (I ran Merck Research Labs' Biomedical libraries and IT group in 2000-2003).

His question was along the lines of - you were at Merck; VIOXX was bad; health IT allowed discovery of the VIOXX problem by Kaiser several years before anyone else; you're trying to halt IT innovation via demanding regulation of the technology thus harming such capabilities and other innovations.

The audience was visibly unsettled.  Someone even hollered out their disapproval of the question.

My response was along the lines that:

• VIOXX was certainly not Merck at its best, but regulation didn't stop Merck from "revolutionizing" asthma and osteoporosis via Singulair and Fosamax;
• That I'm certainly not against innovation; I'm highly pro-innovation;
• That our definitions of "innovation" in medicine might differ, in that innovation without adherence to medical ethics is not really innovation.  It is exploitation.

(I forgot to mention that I gave an invited presentation to Merck's Drug Surveillance department in 2006, PPT here, long after I was their employee, on the potential use of EHR data to detect drug adverse events sooner than traditional phase IV studies or ad-hoc reporting allowed.)

When I spoke of medical innovation requiring ethics, nearly the full audience at my keynote address - hundreds of people - broke out in applause.

•

I knew at that point that my talk was a success.

This author with HISA CEO Louise Schaper , PhD. Click to enlarge.

More photos of my trip are here.

-- SS

Addendum:  Another added pleasure in my visit Down Under. As Australia and the U.S. respect each other's amateur radio licenses, I was able to operate my handheld radio as "KU3E portable Victor-Kilo." VK is the international radio prefix for Oz.  Contacting Australia from the U.S. is considered a "holy grail" of ham radio.  It was interesting to hear amateur radio "from the other end."

Yaesu VX-3 Multiband Transceiver

-- SS

Aug. 11, 2012 Addendum:

An excellent multimedia video of HIC 2012 produced as the conference proceeded has been posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZg_46wY0E0.  It was finished and shown immediately after the conference's conclusion.

-- SS

Upcoming Keynote Presentation to Health Informatics Society of Australia: Health IT Must First Do No Harm

Pulse+IT Magazine (http://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/) is Australasia's first, and they claim only, eHealth and Health IT periodical.

In a May 30, 2012 article entitled "Patient and safety advocates a highlight at HIC2012" at this link, writer Kate McDonald describes my upcoming panel participation and Keynote Presentation at the annual Health Informatics Conference (HIC) of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) in Sydney.

The focus of the HIC2012 meeting is "Building a Healthcare Future through Trusted Information."

Ms. McDonald had called me from Down Under to discuss my upcoming talk.  She writes:

 ... Also on the panel [one of the conference's annual Q&A panels - ed.] will be NEHTA CEO Peter Fleming, HISA board director and well-known consultant David Rowlands, and Scot Silverstein, an adjunct professor of health informatics at Drexel University in the US.

Dr Silverstein also has a personal story to tell that brings home the importance of what exactly is 'trusted' information. A qualified medical doctor and medical informatics researcher, Dr Silverstein is a strong advocate for safety in health IT systems, having been personally involved in what he believes was a case of medical misadventure caused by an electronic health record that resulted in harm to a close relative.

He will also deliver a keynote speech on the topic of improving health IT systems as a first step towards evidence-based medicine and better clinical outcomes.

Dr Silverstein told Pulse+IT that there is a “syndrome of over-confidence” in computer output that he finds puzzling.

“In other fields people, when they start getting incorrect bills or they keep coming and they can't stop them, it is always blamed on a computer system,” he said. “And yet in medicine, it seems to have evolved a culture around computing that machines in healthcare must deterministically create improvement and are purely beneficent and can't be capable of creating harm.

“It is a strange philosophy because in the same breath, people say healthcare information technology is capable of great benefit, that is a very powerful technology and when it is done well, it is. [As I've written before, "doing HIT well" is a challenge of 'wicked' complexity - ed.]  But anything that is a potential source for great good can also have a downside. There seems to be a cognitive gap in connecting computing in healthcare to its possible risk.”

She summarizes the views expressed in our phone conversation well.  My theme will be that health IT and the information it generates cannot be trusted until the technology itself is trustworthy, and earns our trust, through better engineering and implementation practices.

Ironically, I was invited to 2011's meeting.  I would have attended, but was tending to the injuries of my relative caused by the aforementioned medical misadventure. That relative is no longer with us and is hopefully resting in peace.

HISA was kind enough to re-invite me for 2012, for which I am grateful.

I will also be spending some time with several Medical Informatics professors in Australian universities, which should provide an excellent opportunity for sharing of views.

Sydney, Australia

I look forward to being in Sydney, never having been physically present in Australia, although being a ham radio operator, my single sideband (voice) and Morse code shortwave signals have been there on many occasions over the years.  This is a mere ~ 10,000-mile path.  No Internet or phone lines needed!  (I hope I get the opportunity to operate an Amateur radio station from "Down Under.")

More here after my presentation.

-- SS