May 20, 2012
blog
I was trained to think of coding as a downstream process to care that is of little clinical significance. But, as I learned during the course of the week; I was dead wrong. Rather than simply polishing the chart, those downstream processes are intended to strengthen it. And, with the rapid evolution of MU and value care, the focus on clinical documentation integrity is moving upstream, directly to the provider.
I also found that getting the diagnosis correct, whether for coding, clinical care, quality improvement, or value-based payment is straight-forward but not at all simple.
May 17, 2012 David Raths
article
The real promise of personal health records is in their integration with electronic health record systems, rather than as a set of files sitting idle on an individual’s PC. But getting to that type of integration may be one of the trickiest challenges the health IT community faces. Yet some organizations are making progress on getting patients to use health IT tools and share their data.
May 1, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
Today, May 1, Facebook is stepping into the personal healthcare sphere by adding organ donor status to its Timeline structure, which asks users to check off their status and directs them to Donate Life America's National Registration Page, allowing them to designate a donation decision if they have not done so already. Will this one step lead Facebook closer to becoming the next personal health record?
April 27, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
A pledge was made at the National Quality Forum eMeasure Learning Collaborative’s “Best Practices in eMeasure Implementation” meeting on April 26 to align the close to 1,000 eMeasures that are now being used for various quality reporting programs. The sheer amount and complexity of eMeasures for quality measurement have long been a thorn in the side of providers and challenge industry-wide.
April 26, 2012 David Raths
blog
About a year ago, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School launched an intriguing research project to study what would happen if patients had regular access to their primary care physicians’ notes about their visits. On April 25, the investigators discussed some of their findings during a National eHealth Collaborative webinar.
April 11, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
To change the way children's hospitals perform comparative effectiveness research and generate evidence for researchers, Child Health Corporation of America (CHCA) is in the process of collecting lab, microbiology, and radiology results for inpatient encounters to enhance its administrative and clinical database, known as the Pediatric Health Information System + (PHIS). To tackle the daunting task of normalizing and standardizing the disparate feeds from the six participating children’s hospitals, CHCA is using a terminology management solution to assist with this interoperability initiative. Ultimately, CHCA leaders see this development work expanding beyond the realm of pure research to supporting performance improvement.
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 find it ironic that after investing money and effort in an EMR implementation, many organizations are still handing out paper forms to collect history, insurance updates and HIPAA acknowledgements.
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?
April 2, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
The leaders at Aria Health focus on time savings and patient safety, leveraged through smart IT. One key learning: it’s vital to ask the front-line clinicians what it is they think is important to measure and move forward to improve on.
March 13, 2012
news
Varying healthcare organizations including the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the American Heart Association (AHA) are teaming up to provide consumers with a guide to using personal health records (PHR). The organizations are creating informational brochures to help promote the understanding and use of PHRs among consumers and clinicians.
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.
