Howard Strasberg
Vice President, Medical Informatics
Wolters Kluwer Health – Clinical Solutions
As the VP of Medical Informatics for Wolters Kluwer Health – Clinical Solutions, Howard focuses on building products that answer clinical questions and integrate knowledge with electronic medical record (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems. He is also actively involved in standards development as a co-chair of the Health Level Seven (HL7) Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Technical Committee, which develops CDS standards in areas such as Infobuttons, order sets, and decision support services.
Prior to joining Wolters Kluwer Health in 2003, he was CEO of Skolar, Inc., an online provider of clinical information and "in context" continuing medical education (CME) for medical professionals.
Howard received his MD degree from the University of Western Ontario and his MS degree in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford University. He is board certified in Family Medicine. As a hobby, he enjoys following the airline industry, especially with regards to the latest schedules, routes, fares and frequent flyer programs.
Posts by Howard Strasberg
Written on May 16, 2012
Clinical alerts are a type of clinical decision support (CDS) intervention designed to improve both patient safety and healthcare quality. One of the challenges with this type of CDS intervention is alert fatigue, which is the tendency for providers to start to ignore alerts when alerts are presented too often. On this blog I have previously reviewed some studies looking into this area, including the importance of design in alerting systems and the context factors most important to prioritize alerts. Read further >
Written on April 16, 2012
Last week I attended a very informative HIMSS webinar on the health IT implications of the US Supreme Court case regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). For those outside of the US who may not be following this case, in March 2010 President Obama signed the ACA, which among other provisions, requires individuals who do not have health insurance through their employer or one of several government-sponsored programs to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. This provision is referred to as the individual mandate. Read further >
Written on March 09, 2012
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s prime time for Infobuttons. Infobuttons are context-sensitive links from electronic health records (EHRs) to knowledge resources. I have written about them extensively on this blog, addressing standard and service-based implementations as well as patient privacy. I have also previously written about the Meaningful Use incentive program in the United States, in which eligible professionals and eligible hospitals may receive incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful use of certified EHR technology. Read further >
Written on February 03, 2012
Infobuttons are context-sensitive links from electronic health records (EHRs) to knowledge resources. I have described them in more detail in two previous posts, covering both a standard implementation and a web services implementation. In this post I would like to share with you some recent discussions around that topic. Read further >
Written on January 09, 2012
On this blog I have previously described the importance of medication safety screening, along with one of its major challenges, which is alert fatigue. Alert fatigue is the tendency for providers to start to ignore alerts when alerts are presented too often. I have also previously reviewed a study (JAMIA; Seidling et al) that underscored the importance of design in alerting systems. In that study, the factor most responsible for alert acceptance was the design of the alerting system. Read further >
Written on December 02, 2011
This year Wolters Kluwer introduced a Global Innovation Award initiative to recognize employees and teams who significantly contribute to innovation. Four winning projects were selected from over 240 submissions that represented innovative activities throughout the company. One of the winning projects was the Clinical Solutions Innovation Lab, with which I have had the pleasure of being involved since its formation. Read further >
Written on November 11, 2011
Recently I attended the annual meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). For the benefit of readers of this blog who weren’t able to attend the meeting, I’ll provide a few highlights below. Read further >
Written on October 12, 2011
When I decided to go into medical informatics 17 years ago, I did so because I was convinced that a system of electronic health records could provide better patient care than a system of paper-based records. Many of my colleagues in this field, both in academia and in industry, entered it for very much the same reason. Read further >
Written on September 16, 2011
I’ve previously described the notion of offering clinical decision support via web services. In that post I mentioned two different ways to summarize a patient’s medical information – the HL7 Continuity of Care Document (CCD) and the HL7 Virtual Medical Record (VMR). The latter has advanced since my last post in that an informative ballot of a Domain Analysis Model was approved. Read further >
Written on August 12, 2011
Screening for potential drug-drug interactions is an important component of patient safety. In a previous post I commented on a study that looked at the ability for drug-drug interaction software to detect clinically significant interactions. I also remarked that it’s important for this type of software to minimize the number of minor interactions displayed; otherwise, providers may start to ignore all of the alerts. The challenge of course is to try to discern which alerts are signal and which are noise. Read further >
