Kaiser Permanente and the small nation of Denmark seem to be forming a mutual admiration society.
Several top Kaiser executives, including Chairman and CEO George Halvorson and Chief Information Officer Phil Fasano have visited the tiny Scandinavian nation in recent years. Fasano went last fall with a U.S. delegation, to study its successes on the health information technology front.
They found that the nation of 5.5 million people has a sophisticated electronic health record system linking virtually all of its hospitals, clinics and doctors‚ offices, and is rapidly cranking out new ideas and products in the HIT sphere.
Denmark has now returned the favor, inviting Kaiser’s Hal Wolf, senior vice president and COO of its Permanente Federation (representing all of Kaiser’s internal medical groups) to keynote its “The Future of Health Innovation Conference: Bridging Danish and U.S. innovation in Healthcare” this week at Stanford University.
Wolf, in his keynote speech and later remarks, praised Denmark’s efforts, especially in areas such as telemedicine and extending electronic capabilities in mobile directions, such as home monitoring devices, saying that’s also a key goal for Kaiser.
That could include software using algorithms “that make recommendations to physicians and patients,” possibly including self-help tools of various types for enrollees, such as reminding seniors which pills to take and when. Communicating with patients via mobile phones is also a target area, Wolf said.
Wolf mentioned several Danish companies by name in his talk. They included Med!sat, an entrepreneurial venture that’s created an easy-to-use monitoring device for late-stage bronchitis or emphysema patients who aren’t adept with PCs, and Delta, which is trying to find a U.S. market for its biomedical patch that it says can replace a multitude of wires and tubes in a hospital setting or be used as a home monitoring device.
Danish delegations have also visited Kaiser to garner ideas for further reforms and improvements, including a visit this week to Kaiser’s Garfield Innovation Center by Bertel Haarder, Denmark’s minister of interior and health, the second keynoter at the conference.
In an interview with the San Francisco Business Times, Wolf said Kaiser is looking into developing clinical utility and population management software tools to help it “capture best practices (from its databases of clinical information) and put them into clinical use.”
One example is building what Kaiser calls “registries” of data about particular diseases or conditions that drill down into data, looking at information about diabetes in various sub-sets of the patient population to dig out superior ways of treating those patients.
“We’re working very hard on (these) utilities and focusing on mobility, on how to maximize the mobile space,” Wolf said. “We’re working on that strategy literally as we speak. That’s the next forefront of care.”
And a surprising number of the ideas behind that thinking are coming from a small out of the way country that many Californians couldn’t locate on a map.
In fact, Kaiser recently announced a donation to the international health care community of its convergent medical terminology and related tools to help develop U.S. and international standards on the definitions used to help bolster efficient electronic communication between unrelated health care systems.
Kaiser's CMT terminology was donated late last month to the International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organization, based in -- you guessed it -- Prince Hamlet's land of Denmark.
The CMT terminology is based in part on a technical vocabulary known as SNOMED-CT, a standard terminology used in 50 nations. Wolf said the effort involves "coming up with common definitions that can be used across the world."
"We use it internally, and we support its international use," he told the Business Times, noting that health information technology experts at the White House have been following these developments with interest.
Organizers of the forum included the SD Forum and Innovation Center Denmark Silicon Valley, which aims to foster links between Bay Area organizations and their counterparts in Copenhagen and environs.
Email Chris Rauber at crauber@bizjournals.com