April 11, 2012 John DeGaspari
An interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times described what it says is part of a growing trend in healthcare: trying to cater to the medical needs of elderly patients. A few months ago Mount Sinai Medical Center opened its first geriatric ED, which was modeled on one at St. Joseph’s regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., according to the Times. Mount Sinai maintains that its geriatric ED is the first one of its kind in New York City.
April 5, 2012 John DeGaspari
With the digitization of medical records, there has been a lot of interest lately in storing information on the cloud. But storing data on the cloud—particularly clinical data—also presents risks to the hospital, which is legally responsible for the data it stores on the cloud is safe. That’s a tall order, and there are plenty of potential pitfalls to avoid when negotiating a contract with a cloud vendor. “The cloud is great, but the trick is that the customer doesn’t have control of the data, and yet they are still responsible for it,” says Diana J.P. McKenzie, partner and chair, Information Technology and Outsourcing Group, Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, P.C., Savannah, Ga.
March 29, 2012 John DeGaspari
Cloud computing is becoming a valuable tool for hospitals, and there are good reasons for that, as more organizations digitize their clinical systems. I recently had a conversation with Richard Temple, executive consultant at Beacon Partners, Inc., Weymouth, Mass.
Typically, a lot of the computerization by hospitals has centered on financial systems, and hospitals typically wanted to keep that information close, housing it in their own data centers, he says. But things were more manageable, in terms of what needed to be available. After all, if a billing system went down at night, lives didn’t hang in the balance. But with the advent of the computerization of clinical systems, hospitals are faced with requirements of uptime and redundancy. “Hospitals aren’t necessarily geared up to support a computing infrastructure of that magnitude, so they look to the cloud,” Temple says.
March 13, 2012 John DeGaspari
There has been a lot of publicity lately about the benefits of cloud computing in healthcare, although hospital systems have been taking a cautious approach when it comes to moving certain applications to a cloud platform.
March 8, 2012 John DeGaspari
One of the most persistent problems in healthcare is care transitions between sites of care. Unfortunately, patients who find themselves caught in that gap don’t have a lot of support. That’s the view of Pat Rutherford, R.N., vice president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvements in Cambridge, Mass.
February 23, 2012 John DeGaspari
During HIMSS 12, Mac McMillan, chair of the HIMSS Privacy and Security Task Force (and CEO of Austin, Texas-based CynergisTek, Inc.), said that business associates will come under increasing scrutiny in HIPAA audits by the HSS Office of Civil Rights.
February 23, 2012 John DeGaspari
In anticipation of the publications of the Stage 2 meaningful use rule tomorrow, CIOs and other health industry leaders expressed concerns over the timelines for ICD-10.
February 21, 2012 John DeGaspari
Listening to the sessions on performance measurement on Monday, I was impressed by the central role that performance measurement plays in care improvement. Charlene Underwood, chair of the HIMSS Board of directors, who also serves as director of government and industry affairs at Siemens Healthcare, acknowledges that the challenge of applying data to improver care is a difficult one, but she also believes that health providers are up to the task.
February 9, 2012 John DeGaspari
Will 2012 be a year in which significant progress will be made on care management transitions? There is reason to believe that some headway will be made on this persistent problem.
February 2, 2012 John DeGaspari
One of the biggest signs of how important social media is to the nation’s social (and business) fabric can be found in today’s headlines: Facebook Inc.’s filing of an initial public offering that could raise as much as $10 billon when it begins selling shares this spring, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal article says the IPO could raise the value of the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion.
Also noteworthy is the social network’s membership, with 845 million users globally, up 39 percent from the year before. “In just eight years, Facebook has the world’s social bazaar, where friends gossip, play games and swap 250 million photos per day,” the Journal article says. It might also have added that that Facebook, and social networks in general, is changing the way many patients are becoming engaged with their own healthcare.
