April 10, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Leaders at Augusta Health in northern Virginia have made pioneering advances in developing tools to assess the potential for the readmission of high-risk inpatients. What they've learned is potentially industry-changing; and their leveraging of clinical IT tools for performance improvement offers a path forward for their hospital organization peers nationwide.
April 9, 2012
blog
.....only clinician involvement can orchestrates the process by which clinicians are “integrated” in the process of delivery of quality-centered care. An obstructionist clinician team can derail an otherwise successful HIT adoption project and/or your EHR application implementation.
April 4, 2012
blog
I don’t understand why application vendors place little importance on reporting requirements. I get the fact that customers like to customize their reports, but why not make that an inherent feature? Maybe that is why the market is constantly creating so many 3rd party Business Intelligence (BI) vendors. But what about Clinical Intelligence (CI) requirements?
March 22, 2012
news
The New York City-based Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and IBM (New York City) are collaborating on the use of IBM’s Watson technology to help create a decision support tool will help doctors everywhere create individualized cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients based on current evidence.
February 28, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Jerry Osheroff, M.D., principal at TMIT Consulting in Cherry Hill, N.J., the lead author of Improving Medication Use and Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: A Step-by-Step Guide and the chair of the HIMSS Clinical Decision Support Workgroup and Task Force (sponsored by the Chicago-based Health Information and Management Systems Society), has spent years collaborating with physicians and others to move forward important clinical decision support (CDS) concepts and embed them into clinical information systems in order to improve patient care.
February 21, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
With 20-plus years of experience in the medical informatics field, Khalid Moidu, MD, PhD, director of medical informatics at Orlando Health, has seen a lot. As a physician and someone with a PhD in clinical informatics, Dr. Moidu can safely say he sees both sides of HIT implementation, clinical and IT, within the walls of a hospital. At this week’s HIMSS12 conference in Las Vegas, Moidu discussed with HCI how seeing both sides allowed him to successfully push for a diagnosis decision support system (DDSS) within Orlando Health.
February 21, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
During the Monday session on performance measurement and CDS, Paul Tang, M.D., vice president and chief medical officer of Palo Alto Medical Foundation and is vice chair of the federal Health IT Policy Committee, gave his perspective on the approach taken with Stage 1 meaningful use, and the direction for future stages.
February 14, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
When on Jan. 18 in Washington, D.C., executives and leaders of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Premier health alliance held a live-plus-telephonic press briefing to announce three years of results from the organization’s ongoing QUEST High-Performing Hospitals Collaborative program, one of the member hospital executives participating was from the McLeod Regional Medical Center in Florence, S.C., the flagship of the 771-bed McLeod Health, whose five hospitals see patients from across a broad service center that encompasses parts of northeastern South Carolina and southeastern North Carolina.
February 9, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
St. Louis-based Ascension Health, one of the largest multi-hospital health systems in the U.S., has been a virtual beehive of process and performance improvement in recent years. Leaders of the 81-hospital system (with about 1,400 associated or affiliated care facilities) have been spreading performance improvement —both clinical and non-clinical—across all of its 30-plus regional organizations, known as Health Ministries, all with the goal, in the words of health system leaders, "transform healthcare by providing the highest-quality care to all, with special attention to those who are poor and vulnerable." And a core component of their work has been leveraging information technology to facilitate every type of process improvement in its hospitals and clinics.
February 6, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
The potential now exists to dramatically improve the outcomes of patients admitted to hospital emergency departments with acute ischemic stroke symptoms. But actually making those improvements will rely on enabling a particular combination of process, information technology, and medical technology changes first.
February 4, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
Clinical informaticists are finding that the route to success in developing evidence-based order sets within advanced clinical decision support systems really does mean sweating the little things.
February 1, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
In this second in a series of Healthcare Informatics Innovator Award podcasts, Managing Editor John DeGaspari interviews Maureen Kahn, R.N., CEO of Blessing Hospital, a 420-bed facility in Quincey, Ill., which tied for third place in this year's Innovator Award program for its advanced clinical decision support system.
