Articles

In today’s healthcare, the doctor-patient relationship is not what it used to be—studies show that doctors spend more time with their computers than their patients. But the relationship doesn’t have to become extinct; in an interesting twist, technology could actually help restore the fading marriage.

This summer, a group of healthcare researchers published a research article that evaluated the effects of standardized vascular health checks on health outcomes, for patients in six European countries. The implications for electronic health record-facilitated chronic care management and preventive health care in the U.S. are clear.

Samaritan Medical Center, Watertown, N.Y., a 294-bed community hospital, has seen its volume of data to grow significantly in the few years. That, in turn, has prompted the hospital to streamline the ways it manages and backs up its data from a business continuity perspective.

Medical identity fraud has increased nearly 20 percent compared to the year before in the U.S., affecting an estimated 1.84 victims and having a total out-of-pocket medical costs incurred by medical identity theft victims to be $12.3 billion. Those are takeaways of the 2013 Survey on Medical Identity Theft, an annual survey now in its fourth year, which was released yesterday by the Ponemon Institute LLC, Traverse City, Mich., and sponsored by Portland, Ore.-base ID Experts. The report’s release roughly coincided with the launch (on August 29) of the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance (MIFA), an industry group formed to raise public awareness and to come up with potential ways to address the medical identity theft.

Fast on the heels of an announcement by the ONC that the agency was launching a patient matching initiative, CHIME’s Russ Branzell gave HCI’s Mark Hagland an industry-first interview regarding CHIME’s praise for ONC’s announcement, and CHIME’s response to that announcement.

Systems that read and manage outside CDs containing medical image studies (X-Ray, CT, Ultrasound, etc.) are a real benefit to healthcare users who have been challenged with issues associated with the CDs patients bring along with them to hospital and office visits. Many times CDs are difficult to handle because the imaging systems used to burn the CDs are from different manufacturers or use different software to write to the CD; and some require different readers.

Like many large health systems, the Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare is responsible for maintaining large and growing volumes of data. That is an important challenge, but not a new one, according to Don Franklin, Intermountain’s assistant vice president of infrastructure and operations, who notes that the 22-hospital health system currently manages about 4.7 petabytes of data. “This is not a new phenomenon for us. Intermountain is well known for its data analytics, for its massive amount of data and for managing that data,” he says.

The results of a new study, conducted by the Atlanta-based Porter Research and sponsored by Covisint, seem to indicate that healthcare and healthcare IT leaders are ready to turn to the cloud in order to support population health management and accountable care organization development

As the Cleveland Clinic prepares to host its annual Cleveland Clinic Innovation Summit, Gary Fingerhut, who helps oversee health IT commercialization at the organization, shared his perspectives on what the organization hopes to gain in this rapidly evolving arena.