July 20, 2011 John DeGaspari
blog
At a time when hospitals are being pressured to do more with less, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, an 864-bed teaching hospital in Houston, is taking steps to improve its operational efficiency, which it expects will allow it to realize significant cost savings, better manage the length of patient stay and improve patient satisfaction.
June 15, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
In May 2009 Boston Medical Center (BMC), a 508-bed academic medical center, implemented an automated eReferral management system from the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Carefx Corp. to fund its community information exchange and solve a key problem of lack of system-wide referral standardization.
May 25, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo and John Degaspari
article
In the rapidly changing healthcare IT landscape, the top IT vendors are the enablers that provide the largest percentage of crucial tools that will allow hospitals and physician groups to meet the challenges of healthcare reform. What follows is a sampling of six vendors that have established themselves as technology leaders with innovative solutions on a variety of fronts, from a virtual tool to interact with patients, to e-prescribing, mobile chronic disease management, and accountable care solutions.
May 18, 2011 David Raths
article
With so much news being made on the clinical front these days, the April 26 announcement of a merger between Lawson Software and Infor, backed by private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, may not have made a huge splash in the industry. But Lawson’s healthcare enterprise resource planning customers are keeping a watchful eye on the merger. Most seem to be cautiously optimistic about how the combined companies will proceed.
May 17, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
At the “Health IT in an Era of Accountable Care: Update from the Beacon Communities” meeting, hosted by the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings (Washington, D.C.) in collaboration with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) payment reform was one of the topics at the forefront of the conversation. With WellPoint Inc. announcing its mandatory value-based purchasing program, the time has never been more prescient for continuing the conversation about getting payers involved in quality-based medicine and payments.
January 31, 2011 Ajay Kandelwal
article
What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Thanks to wonderful marketing programs, courtesy of both software consultants and vendors, you may already know what it is. In fact, you might know a little too much-vendors create buzzwords to package “old” products into “new” concepts, which often leads to confusion regarding SOA and its associated terms, such as, Web services, enterprise service bus (ESB), and business process management (BPM). It's not surprising that you may be asking yourself some fundamental questions: How can SOA affect patient care? Can SOA improve the state of technology in a healthcare organization? How are other industries adapting SOA? And, should you start working on SOA before your boss hears about it at a Gartner Conference? If you are asking these questions, rest assured, you're not alone.
November 28, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
While the outlook for the U.S. economy in general, and the hospital and healthcare economy in particular, continues to appear mixed these days, some industry experts are seeing a definite, if gradual, shift towards increased confidence among many hospital senior executives, when it comes to reaching out for the capital to make new and expanded investments, particularly in information technology. One expert who is seeing this in concrete terms is Randy Waring, who is managing director at the Brookfield, Wis.-based GE Capital Financial Healthcare Services.
October 20, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
Utah started building its All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) three years ago to bring public transparency to the cost of healthcare. Last September the APCD started collecting claims data from four commercial payers, and is now analyzing episodes of care ranging from maternity to chronic disease management. Utah's APCD has more than 2.2 million unique Utahns identified, linked, and grouped, and more than $10.5 billion Utah healthcare claims charges represented. Keely Cofrin Allen, Ph.D, the director of the Office of Healthcare Statistics at the Utah Department of Health spoke with HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo about the competing priorities she has to balance and what laid the foundation for her organization’s success.
August 24, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
Earlier this summer, a team of researchers from the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND Corporation examined issues around pay for performance initiatives in five different industries: transportation, child care, education, emergency response, and healthcare. The researchers wanted to find out what issues, potential, and pitfalls, the various industries had around performance-based payment of some sort.
June 23, 2010 Mark Hagland
blog
My colleague and friend Yancey Casey in media relations at McKesson had a very clever idea, which he executed at the HFMA-ANI Conference this week.
February 1, 2010
blog
My son was very proud of his new car audio system. It even came with an iPhone adapter. My only question to him was; “Don’t you still have engine problems?” It struck me that many organizations approach IT upgrades and installs much the same way. They take on an IT project before working on the Revenue Engine!
January 29, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
Whatever the controversies around health insurance reform on Capitol Hill, there's a strong bipartisan consensus as to the need for reimbursement reform, including a shift towards value-based healthcare purchasing under Medicare. For healthcare CIOs who will need to implement data reporting and sharing systems that can facilitate new reimbursement arrangements nationwide, the implications are huge.
