Zack McCartney

The mHealth Alliance is celebrating its fifth year of coordinating mHealth projects around the world. Patricia Mechael, the Alliance's executive director, discusses her life and career, and explains why she's driven to expand mHealth adoption in low- and middle-income countries.

It seems that the apparent failure of current EHRs to accommodate patients as unique cases has sparked a shift in attitude in the health IT industry. Some insiders say the issue may not be so much the failure of EHRs, as their falling short of unduly high expectations from users and the vendors themselves.

Every country, every government, every population is participating in a global trial and error when it comes to improving health outcomes. As it finds uptake around the world, health information technology is central to this care revolution, with nations learning from each others' struggles and successes.

With all the hype surrounding big data, pinning down its ideal usage is important for planning the development and expanding uses. What goal should the healthcare industry have in mind as it explores the possibilities for improved care and lowered costs that big data presents?

Stage 2 of the Meaningful Use Program requires that at least 5 percent of patients view, download, and transmit their health information and send a secure electronic message to their provider. But this objective, lowered from 10 percent, still worries the healthcare community.

As meaningful use advances, a dilemma has emerged: balancing structured patient data with the narrative data physicians have long collected in the still-important conversations with patients.

Healthcare, which has always been based on the doctor-patient interaction, is nearing the end of Stage 1 meaningful use, and as the industry increases its reliance on electronic health records, it faces a new challenge. That conundrum, says Nick van Terheyden, MD, and CMIO at Nuance Communications, is how to reconcile the need for standardized structured data capture with the importance of narrative in patient-doctor interactions.