After a few delays of various proportions—I am back.  Attended a local meeting last night Health 2.0 Meetup in Washington, DC.  It’s a local group who meet monthly to share—for 5 minute spots—solutions for healthcare.  There are two groups—Health Informatics Pulse or HIP and  Health 2.0 STAT –Web 2.0/Social Media. The HIP group (no pun intended) is more of hard core/research based informatics group; the STAT group is a softer version—social media for information dissemination on health.

 I was planning on writing about STANDARDS in health care, as they just keep popping up when it comes to informatics, using technology to generate outcomes and evaluating health care.  One of the speakers last night was Lisa Gordon, a brand new addition to the MicroStrategy Team.  To quote her bio:

“Prior to joining MicroStrategy, Lisa was a key member of the Portal Services team at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). Her knowledge and familiarity of clinical administrative data played a pivotal role in expanding and enhancing the analytical scope of the CIHI Portal, a secure web-based tool which provides external users with access to pan-Canadian healthcare data holdings to facilitate evidence-based decision making and comparative analysis at local, regional or national levels.”

Afterwards we spoke about Canadian standards, how they are able to find the “gaps” be collecting and analyzing data and then making corrections.  We also spoke about the “perception” around health care the Canadian way and agreed to meet again to compare notes.  One take away was that we sure need to embrace the media so the message is correct.  As Lisa put it, “Yes, you may read about the 6 month wait for hip replacement in Canada.  The difference is we discovered that from data reporting—and then we correct it, by boosting grants for training, incentives for adopting certain work.  By comparing notes and needs, it seems like the HITECH is on the right track.