Some FAQs for advanced features

I want it to be easy to find providers by Specialty, so that the patient who looks for a Pediatrician finds it right away.

A.: It is not foreseen. You can put the specialty after the surname, in the function of Administrator – Users. For example, Dr. Blanca Pérez Pediatra.

Q.:  I want to see an example of Provider schedule (doctors)

A.: In the Medical-records.net system I created Dr. Blanca Pérez Pediatra, who works on Thursday, all day (light blue). See the Calendar. Continue reading “Some FAQs for advanced features”

Health Insurance FAQ

How are the health insurance providers already admitted published?

First of all, each country has a different health system and denomination, but the most common is Health Insurance. In Argentina there are Obras Sociales (obligatory for all workers) or Prepaid Insurance o Prepagas (of voluntary affiliation). In Administration – Practice – Health insurance companies there is an editable list. Continue reading “Health Insurance FAQ”

Legal value of the Electronic Medical Record (Argentina)

This issue always arises in medical areas, especially hospitals. Sometimes, the possible unfavorable legal implications of computerization are an excuse for not computerizing, although increasingly weaker. Sometimes the subject highlights the inadequacy of the current legislation, still several decades behind reality.
For example, at a recent symposium in the Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires, a doctor from this advanced pioneer center in Medical Informatics, complained that as a result of a court case, a lawyer asked to seize the patient’s medical history, for which the judge wanted to take a complete server from the Data Center of the Hospital. This, regardless of the damage caused to the tens of thousands of patients whose stories resided on that same server.
Continue reading “Legal value of the Electronic Medical Record (Argentina)”

English description – PresuHisClinDig Budgeter for EMR

PresuHisClinDig is a software application that provides a cost estimation for an Electronic Medical Record System.

The budgeter is mainly oriented to OpenEMR – OpenEMR is an open source, free software for medical records. It fulfills all the security and quality requirements for HIPAA and other public agencies in the US. It supports the HL7 data exchange standard, exporting “Continuity of Care” documents with all the patient data, in a standard, compatible format.

PresuHisClinDig – screen shot:

The software is free to download, install and use. Professionals can charge for additional services, customization, hosting and related services.

PresuHisClinDig

This software calculates the cost of installation and maintenance of OpenEMR and other software, depending on the number of using doctors, patients and other variables. You can also check our online calculator.

Order PresuHisClinDig

No need to order. Just download from the link above, install and use.

UMLS, or Unified Medical Language System

UMLS – Quick start guide

What is the UMLS?

The UMLS, or Unified Medical Language System, is a collection of files and software that brings together many biomedical vocabularies and standards to enable interoperability between computer systems. It is developed by the National Library of Medicine of the USA.

You can use the UMLS to improve or develop applications, such as electronic medical records, classification tools, dictionaries and language translators.

The SNOMED dictionary in Spanish can be easily integrated into OPENEMR to standardize medical terminology in our language. Continue reading “UMLS, or Unified Medical Language System”

Telemedicine

Telemedicine refers to any medical action done at a distance. For some tasks this is a very easy, and does not really need the physical doctor-patient contact. Or the contact can be replaced by video cameras and touch-sensitive data gloves.

 

For instance, interpreting EKG, EEG or X Ray images is often done with the hard data alone. Actually, starting a marketplace for those interpretations could be a still virgin starting point. With Medicine going more and more the way of biochemical, electrical or other physical tests, there are always more data to be analyzed. Some of those data can be very complex, like the EEG, and benefit for computer treatment for signal improvement and processing. I am currently advisor in a project for Computerized Polygraph testing for the Federal Police in my country.  Images provided by X Ray, Tomography, Photography, Microscopy or Sonography can also be computer-enhanced, compared and stored, before expert interpretation, all of which can be done remotely. This opens the field of

Telemedicine for almost every medical specialty.

 

The few exceptions are those practices where direct contact is required, like taking samples, feeling, smelling or operating. And still, some of them can be left to nurses, technicians or beginning physicians, with remote supervision by experienced professionals.

 

We are only scratching the surface of the immense, fast-growing medical information market

 

Developing software able to analyze instrumental data is another form of Telemedicine that already started to grow.

 

Health has always been a conservative area, doctors are known to be anti-computing technology, and lawyers are anxiously waiting to take action against every little mistake or data glitch. But still, there is a lot do in this area, with enormous potential for growth and wealth.

 

 

Personal View

 

I took part in a successful project where overweight patients were followed by phone, to ensure they took the medication, followed the diet and lost weight. The phone calls really helped them to comply.

I cannot wait for Telemedicine to mature and allow me to work from home and collect as if I was in a fancy American clinic.

Health eBizz Proposals

 

While generating e-businesses I explored all of the sites that match Entrepreneurs (inventors, web business developers, small business owners) with Investors. There are many, and none of them was of any use for me. However, they have a place in the e-economy and some of them eventually produce transactions. There are a lot of unwanted consequences of entering a project in those sites, including registration fees, spam, fake offerings of capital with a small fee required in advance, fancy services for the entrepreneur like courses and business plan assistance, fake degrees and the like. Once the project gets funded, or when the entrepreneur gives up and stops paying a fee, the project disappears from the site. It would be nice to be able to track the projects for at least 2 years, let several small investors join forces to start a project, see it evolve and measure the success rate of those matching sites. The projects alive in the system could benefit from the distributed knowledge coming from the Problem Solver Marketplace and the Futurologist Arena, two proposals described elsewhere in this book.

 

Investing in a Net project seems to be a all/nothing operation. Of course, nobody expects that a real-life investor will fork 10,000 or more without a lot of expensive research, due diligence requirements, planning and contracts. However, 500 investors could be ready to contribute $20 to a promising project with decent guaranties, achieving the same result in a very short time.

 

This Virtual Shares business needs to be developed to help finance this site and its probable spin-offs. The first step in acquiring shares is to vote (for or against) the proposals in the News Aggregator system located at www.netocios.com. The votes will help other readers to estimate the value of the proposed business.

 

I am sure there will be many readers interested in betting a few dollars in some of these health proposals, but without the obligations arising from a formal partnership.

 

In order to issue shares, most countries have detailed and cumbersome legislation and requirements. For that reason, we keep all the matter within virtual boundaries, meaning that the shares traded here are in no way real. Any transaction arising from investors willing to partner with the author in the development of e-businesses will have to be treated separately, with specific contracts and documents.

Imagine a Reality Show where the participants are entrepreneurs carrying online projects.

 

In the meantime, contributions are treated as donations, and create a moral compromise on our part of further retribution. Moral compromises, I hope, are not enforceable, taxable or likely to create legal trouble. Virtual or moral shares offered in this site are payable as donations to my Paypal address.

 

The Reality Show structure is also an appealing alternative. Imagine a Reality Show where the participants are entrepreneurs carrying online projects. Being public is the price to pay for contributions from viewers and sponsors. Online popularity, traffic and sales are measures of success, and increase chances of participants to climb to the next level. This proposal for a Reality Show is so neat that can be even ported to TV…

 

Some businesses have, or can easily have, an associated domain name. We can register those domains to the name of the best bidder in an eBay.com auction. That provides an initial association between parties with a solid guaranty. A written compromise of keeping the new business within that domain and providing consulting can be a second step.

 

An alternative way to offer virtual shares for Internet businesses is to create a special Domain Register that allows combined registrations, by more than one party. Since all the parties would be needed to transfer the domain, this creates a control mechanism for those domain-based businesses with 2 or more owners. It is the equivalent of business bank accounts that require two signatures on every check. This should be a separate business proposal, but I leave it here for now.

 

Most business can be divided in parts, based on geographic boundaries, on items or type of clients. A contract can grant the rights of exploitation of that part of the business to an early contributor.

 

Another way to implement the virtual shares system is to base the business and website in a permissive country, like the Cayman or Bahamas Islands.

 

If the model turns to be successful, it can be sold to other websites offering business to the public. If most people enjoy picking up winners for a football match or a horse race, why they would not enjoy picking up winners for a business project?

 

 

Personal View

I like the Reality Show on Tv, why not? I sent the idea to a local producer but got no answer. Mr. Trump has the Apprentice show which is close but not exactly the idea. American Inventor is more like it, but they have no continuity and there is little chance for the audience to participate. I could focus on Entrepreneurs at large, or Netpreneurs alone.

I will receive all kinds of objections to my shares project from corporate attorneys. However, there must be a loophole. Venture Capital is fully developed as science and business in the 1st World, but hardly existent in developing countries. So, Virtual Shares are a way for us South American entrepreneurs from to raise seed capital from the Web.