- Our Mission is to assist medical leaders, health care professionals and others interested in and affected by health care decisions by
- Bringing science into medical practice in an easy-to-understand way. Using simplified methods to help navigate the complexities of such areas as evidence-based medicine and other topics.
- Building competencies and confidence in improving medical care through our consultations, educational programs and tools.
- Providing inspiration to others to improve medical care and help bring about needed change.
This is an interesting endeavor – it will be interesting to see if they can make a living by providing EBM consulting. The problem wityh excellent healthcare practices is that there is no clear ROI for the people who would pay for it. For example – in my few years with medremote, we developed WONDERFUL prototypes proptotypes for bayesian algorithms that would extract salient items from free text notes. This has enormous protential for improving the quality and potentially the quality of care.
Huh?
ok .. here's how it goes: The progres note says "Marge has a hx of hypercholesterolemia, hypertension and type 2 diabetes. She's not allergic to anything but her mom had hives when she took Bactrim."
ITEA would be able to make this:
- Hypercholesterolemia
- HTN
- Diabetes – Type 2
- Allergies: NKDA
(notice that it isn't fooled by the mom's Bactrim Allergy).
Now we can use the computer to prompt the physician to check A1c, treat or monitor the cholesterol, etc … and this is all WITHOUT an EMR. That is the cool part.
But it's hard to get anyone to invest in this component of the services .. and I'll be surprised if people become instantly motivated to push EBM either. EBM is a religion (of which I am a faithful congregant) yet it's hard to convert the masses. As CMS devises methods of reimbursing better practices .. perhaps this will fall into place. Then again .. maybe not. Time for Matthew Holt to chime in. I feel like we're getting into his terrritory.
I too am an EBM fan. I’ve been to three EBM conferences sponsored by the Group Health folks.
Re: How can they make a go of it? My primary care group sponsors a forum in town by the Delfini group. We send our new PCP hires and invite specialists. Very popular…
Interesting to see your use/application of bayesian.
There has recently been some novel reimbursement systems put into place in ?Ireland and ?England – the kind that reimburses physicians for EBM and getting patients to target goals. And they’ve had amazing successes.
Thats an area I don’t know all that much about, but the concept is intruiging, so I enjoy hearing about people who can make it work. Did you have to develop the algorithms from scratch, or were you able to modify/extend existing text search materials?