Pulling together 11 colleges and 12 hospitals

Expansion is a sign of success, but it also brings new organizational challenges, particularly when that expansion is built on knitting together various organizations. That's the situation that Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health (TJU) were in as they sought to bring together what now amounts to 30,000 employees in 11 colleges, two universities and 12 hospitals.

Achieving a coherent vision for the newly expanded entity was built into the job description for Jeffrey Stevens. He said that he was hired as chief human resources officer to accomplish two key tasks. One was to establish HR locally. The second was to deploy an HR tech strategy that would "consolidate everyone onto a single core system."

Read more in 

University Adopts a Unifying Vision and Platform

Holographic Imaging Aids Surgeons

It looks like something out of a science fiction film: a human heart floating in mid-air in such a way that a doctor can walk around it and see it in action from all sides. This technology has the potential to completely revolutionize the way surgeons get to see inside their patients. Already tested in pilot programs, the technology should start appearing in medical care facilities in 2016.

Fans of the television show Grey's Anatomy got to see a holographic clip of the technology in an episode that aired this past spring. In We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, Burke arranges for Cristina to go to Zurich where she gets to see a hologram of the heart they are to operate on. In reality, the work on the technology behind the holography was performed in Israel by RealView Imaging.

Read more in 

Holographic Images for Healthcare

Tablets for a better hospital experience

Tablets have already made a place for themselves in healthcare as doctors use them to upload information to patient electronic health records. Successful pilot programs have proven that there are even more benefits to be realized from putting tablets into the hands of patients. 
Read about two successful pilot programs in 

Tablets for Patients: Pilot Programs Demonstrate Benefits

For more ways in which such technology can be tapped to improve the patient's hospital experience, see 

Tablet Computers: The Way Forward for Better Patient Experiences

Giving the green light to emergency responders

No one likes to be stuck in traffic. Time is money, after all. But what represents an inconvenience or even loss of income for most of us can turn into a much more serious loss for emergency response workers. Read more in 

Technology Gives Emergency Crews a Green Light

RX for Prescription Errors: Big Data Analytics

We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the doctor with bad handwriting whose prescriptions are all but illegible. While the use of electronic medical records (EMR) eliminates that chicken-scratch problem, it unfortunately doesn't fix other, often fatal, errors.

(Source: Carbon Arc)

In fact, EMR's introduction has made “new and alarming types of errors that didn't exist in manual records” creep up, says Dr. Gidi Stein, co-founder and CEO of MedAware, a startup using big-data analytics to combat the problem of prescription errors. Automatic selections are faster and neater than individual writing, but they also make it possible for doctors to put in errors they wouldn't have made on their own.

As reported in "Medical Errors: a Report by the Staff of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer" (available in PDF format), prescription errors account for many of the 210,000 to 440,000 deaths in America each year that result from "medical errors and other preventable harm at hospitals.” 

read more in 

Analytics Startup Prescribes Fix for RX Errors

Big Data Health Hazards

If anything can go wrong, it will." Murphy's Law (or Sod's Law, as it is known in the UK) applies to big data projects, as well. When those projects concern someone's health, something going wrong in the data can lead to something going very wrong with the patient.

The more one relies on the accuracy of the system, the higher the potential for error. Electronic health records (EHRs) are considered a boon to data aggregation, but they hold a potential downside.  Read more here

Big Data Applied to Health

I've written several pieces on the topic from various angles:

On how cell phone data is used to map the spread of Malaria in order to come up with effective prevention in Africa Analyzing Cellphone Data for the Greater Good

On Retrofit's approach: Data Gets Personal to Fight Obesity

On UPMC $10 million dollar big data plan: Creating Custom-Fit Healthcare