Arwin Jerome Manalo Onda

Reading through the answers of my classmates, I agree with them about the disclosure of HIV status: it is not my duty to disclose any health information that the patient did not consent to be disclosed.

As a health professional, every patient interaction is confidential. It is part of the patient-healthcare professional interaction that the…[Read more]

Here is my analysis of the COVIDKaya in terms of ADKAR:

Awareness: The DOH and DICT made aware to COVID-19 referral hospitals and laboratories that they plan to roll-out a centralized repository of COVID-19-related information.

Desire: I am not knowledgeable on this part if the stakeholders had personal motivation to use the new system. However,…[Read more]

In my previous organization, the Department of Health collaborated with the Department of Information and Communications Technology to launch a central database for storing COVID-19 tests and results. It is called COVIDKaya. While I am not part of the team that built it, I can say that it does a decent job (moderately successful) in fulfilling its…[Read more]

Overall it’s a brilliant project! Transferring from paper-based to electronic-based database will, theoretically, be beneficial to the patient in the long run. Having a central repository of medical records enables accessibility and efficiency in the process. Visualization is also crucial in interpreting patient records, glad that it is integrated…[Read more]

Thank you for sharing your insights. Indeed, telemedicine has truly revolutionized medicine especially in this time of COVID-19 pandemic. It fundamentally attains the core principle of eHealth – that is, facilitate access to information and/or data. Consultations can be done anytime and anywhere. I believe it is cost-effective for the patient…[Read more]

I have this Health app on my phone and it is simple and very easy to use. However, it is not my go-to application for Wellness.

The introduction of Apple Watch revolutionized the digital health industry because of the innovative features the Apple Watch – which syncs beautifully into the Apple Health app. However, to fully utilize the Apple…[Read more]

The closest technology that I had used that functioned as Clinical Decision Support System is UpToDate. The website contains a lot of useful, up-to-date, concise, and relevant information on a particular disease or disorder. It provides schematic diagrams on triaging a person and eventually, the appropriate treatment to be given. There are also…[Read more]

In a health insurance payer perspective, it would be chaotic for them to allocate the appropriate amount for reimbursement/payment, or “case rates” as we call it here in the Philippines. A particular case rate, let’s say a metastatic-castration resistant prostate cancer, has two components – a payment for the institution and another for the…[Read more]

I don’t have experience using an EMR, nor I have heard from a colleague regarding the difficulty of using an EMR in the healthcare setting. However, based from the article, difficulty in integrating EMR to day-to-day tasks may be attributed to lack of proper trainings to its end-users. EMR aims to centralize the repository of medical records from…[Read more]

I agree on emphasizing that eHealth enables patient-centered care. The healthcare system has long been transitioning from disease-based to patient-based care. eHealth technologies would help facilitate in achieving this goal.

Taken all in consideration, eHealth can simply be defined as “technologies facilitating access to health service or data through interconnected communication networks”. As pointed out by the author and Black et al, eHealth technologies have 3 main overlapping functions – enable storage, retrieval, and transmission of data; support clinical…[Read more]

I think it’s innate to human nature to resist change especially if that process has long been accepted and routinely done. However, as they say, “the only constant in the world is change.” We must be able to embrace change if it’s for the better. Sure, there are knockbacks in the beginning but starting now will be beneficial to the future generation.

Good example on using social media! Nowadays, fake information have spread on social media and they affect mainly the veracity of information. Misinformation can skew analytics to a wrong direction.

An example would be health data collected from fitness tracker/ smartwatch, let’s say the Apple Watch, implemented on a pilot program by a health agency.

Volume – Implemented at the population level, the amount of health data taken over time will get larger over time.
Veracity – Quality of data depends on the reliability of technology to collect,…[Read more]

unlike my peers who shared before me, I was not part of any development of a health informatics project in my previous organization. However, I could provide an example to which my organization attempted to digitize contact tracing through the use of a web-based app. Around June 2020 when our government was easing restrictions allowing businesses…[Read more]

Speaking of “pretending to be someone”, I once received a text message telling me that my parcel from the post office is waiting for delivery and I’m being asked to pay for the customs fee. To be fair, I was waiting for an international package to arrive so I didn’t raise any suspicions yet. The text message has a website link that when opened, it…[Read more]

Excellent summary.

To add, I would advise Advocate Aurora Health to perform independent audits on the vendor’s system to help in identifying potential security flaws. Audit reports would generate the necessary actionable points for improvement, and/or assess the capability of the vendor to address the further audit findings.

Good read. An information that was publicized but not intended to be shared is still a breach of privacy, nonetheless.

I definitely agree that continuous assessment of system vulnerabilities is one of the major solutions for this kind of problem. In fact, it was the solution at the top of my head. I would like to add that limiting privilege…[Read more]

Thanks for summarizing the case. It’s good that the company advised its affected consumers of the security incident.

Other preventive measures include deployment of multiple layers of security aside from antiviruses, which include firewalls as well as the users themselves (through educational campaigns). Likewise, stored data encryption should…[Read more]