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iotaMed - Issue Oriented Architecture for Medicine

Introduction

A project built on modern principles, intended to create the medical records systems that serve primarily to improve the diagnostic and therapeutic workflow in clinical practice.

A good place to start is the Presentation Outline.

News

November 2015: Next book review!

• one more book review was published in "Läkartidningen".

April 2015: Martin gave a presentation during the "Vitalis-mässan"

• 22 April 2015, 14:00-15:00, back to back with dr Anders Westermark: "Digital journal och beslutsstöd: vad vården egentligen behöver och hur man får läkarna med sig i utvecklingen.

1. Ett läkarperspektiv (Anders),
2. Ett utvecklarperspektiv (Martin)" during the session "Teknik - utvecklingsmetodik".

March 2015: Book review!

• a very nice book review was published in "Allmän Medicin" on page 61.

November the 15th 2014: Martin spoke at TED x UU.

• you can watch it on YouTube!

September 2014: The first book is here!

• and can be bought on Amazon.

October 2013: Here you can see a short movie: iotaMed with a checklist for "Save the Brain" developed by the neurologist Erik Lundström from Karolinska:

• Save the Brain (Rädda Hjärnan).

August 2013: Our second state funding for iotaMed!

• We have got funding from ALMI . We are still very happy (even more than in April!).

April 2013: Our first state funding for commercial verification of iotaMed!

• We have got funding from Innovationsbron-ALMI . We are very happy!

April 2012: We have (again) presented iotaMed during the "Vitalis-mässan"

• 17 April 2012, 15:15-15:45, "iotaMed, kvalitetsregister och Snomed CT" during the session "Ledning och implementation". Here you can find a handout (in Swedish) which we distributed during Vitalis.
• we made a movie too! It is in Swedish.

January 2012: Our website is (almost) ready!: "MITM - Man In The Middle AB"

• we keep improving the website, but one can find there a lot of information about iotaMed already now.

April 2011: We presented iotaMed during the "Vitalis-mässan"

• Our presentation in Swedish, 7 April 2011.

Demo movies for iotaMed

• Case of Diabetes type 2 in Swedish. Made 29 March 2011.
• Orthopedic Case in Swedish. Made 31 March 2011.
• Diabetes type 2, with more explanation about a "regular" patient record, in Swedish. Made 31 March 2011.
• iotaEd: iotaMed issue editor in Swedish. Made 1 April 2011.
• The making of iotaMed. The movie shows how we work in MITM AB head office. Made 2 April 2011.
• iotaMed for orthopedics in Swedish, by Anders Westermark and Martin Wehlou. Made 3 April 2011.
• MyIota - application for patients in Swedish. Made 26 May 2011. Martin presented iotaMed and ""MyIota"" during the SPD-seminar in Karolinska Institute (Professor Ingvar Krakau) 27 May 2011.

Some important links

• Our forum for Healthcare IT in Swedish.
• Martin's blog about Healthcare IT in Swedish.
• Martin's blog about technology, security etc in English.

Some documents which can give you a better picture of iotaMed project

• A handout (in Swedish) which we used during the "Vitalis-mässan" (a healthcare-IT congress) in Göteborg 5-7 april 2011. The first page is an adapted copy of our poster which we presented during "Kvalitetsdagarna" at the University Hospital in Uppsala on 8-9 December 2010. On the second page there are some links and contact information to iotaPeople.
• A list of iota's presentations until April 2015 (in Swedish).
• Our vision of iotaMed and the need for an iotaMed-like solution for health informatics explained in Swedish.
• Martin's cv in English.
• Hania's cv in English.

You can see a first short (4 minute) presentation of the first prototype of iotaMed on an iPad here. I'm speaking in Swedish, but you can just watch the pictures if you want.

Lecture at Karolinska Institute

I was invited to give a lecture at Karolinska Institute to the International Masters Programme in Health Informatics. We made a video of it, all 12 sections. With the limitations ""YouTube"" has, it resulted in 20 videos which we collected into a ""YouTube"" playlist. The lecture is in English as are the lecture notes.

The lecture playlist is here and the lecture notes as pdf is here. iotaMed is presented in section 12, which consists of four ""YouTube"" videos since that part alone was more than 50 minutes.

Introduction

Yet another open project... as if we didn't have enough already. But we really do need this one. This open project is initiated by one very disillusioned physician/developer who is going totally crazy trying to use really poor software to do his job, while knowing full well that it needn't be so.

The software we have today is built to document everything you do, but it doesn't help you one bit to find out what you need to do in the future, and that is what we really need the software to assist us with. But, as I said, it doesn't. Do you know that the medical records software we use today don't even have the concept of "disease" in them? That's like having accounting software that doesn't have the concept of "money". And about as useful.

Typically, a medical record system looks like this, seen from an entity relationship standpoint:

Clearly, the designers must have thought that we doctors are extremely interested in knowing which other doctors the patient has met and exactly when, but this is a huge misunderstanding. That may be interesting for people arranging cocktail parties, but has very little to do with medicine. What we do want to know, though, is what ails the patient, that is what health issues he has, so a few of the entities at the top should be related as follows:

This little change in the basic domain analysis has wide-ranging consequences. First is that the medical record finally starts to work for us instead of against us. Secondly, that we have a channel to feed new scientific discoveries and guidelines to the doctors that need them, and at the right time and place when they need them.

Note that the second diagram doesn't even contain the entities "doctor" and "encounter". By that I don't mean that they aren't kept somewhere in the system, of course they are, but that they're not important enough to qualify for a top level diagram.

The Project

The project documentation.

Background

• The evolution of medical records
• How current systems work
• How medical records should work
• Evidence Based Medicine vs Experience Based Medicine
• Frequently Asked Questions and Frequently Misguided Solutions
• The problems we solve with iotaMed
• Critical Success Factors
• Presentation Outline

The parts

• The basics of Iota
• The Iota Medical Journal project
• The Iota Apple iPad project
• The Iota Desktop project
• The Iota data interchange project

Related projects

• OpenEHR
• OpenEMR

Related sites

• Ursecta - English language blog on tech and medicine
• Vård IT - Swedish language blog on IT in healthcare
• Vård IT Forum - Swedish language forum on IT in healthcare

The plan

This is about how to make this come true.

The business plan