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.
January 24, 2012
news
The Franklin, Tenn.-based MedQuist Holdings , a provider of integrated clinical documentation solutions, has announced the unification of the Company's advanced speech and language understanding technologies, medical transcription, coding, HIM professional services and analytics under the name M*Modal.
January 19, 2012 By David Raths
blog
The segments of the National Cardiovascular Data Registry are taking on increasing value both as research tools and as aides to hospitals and individual practices in reporting to regulatory agencies and in getting feedback on quality improvement efforts.
January 17, 2012 David Raths
article
One key question brought up at the eHealth Initiative conference—and one that is at the forefront of meaningful use Stage 3 development plans—is how patient-generated data can be integrated with health systems’ data infrastructure. Some patient advocacy groups are creating community-based portals that allow patients and providers to avoid the problem of organizational health IT silos.
January 13, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
Recently, the National Quality Forum (NQF) unveiled a new version of its Measure Authoring Tool (MAT), a web-based tool that allows measure developers to create standardized electronic measures (eMeasures) that came out in September. These eMeasures are created without writing XML and can be read by humans and computers and benefit measure developers, as well as quality and health IT stakeholders.
June 28, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
After five years as a grassroots initiative, the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) initiative becomes a not-for-profit organization, to continue to promote nursing IT education and development.
June 5, 2011 Joe Bormel, M.D.
blog
Physician documentation plays a critical role in the Meaningful Use process. Current research makes an interesting point that should encourage us to rethink the functionality of physician documentation tools so they better address the priorities required to make them effective.
May 13, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
Karl Kochendorfer, M.D., is director of clinical informatics, and medical director of the Living Lab within the Tiger Institute, an entity within the University of Missouri Health System in Columbia, Mo. He and his colleagues at the University of Missouri Health System (UMHS) have been collaborating with their core EHR vendor, the Kansas City-based Cerner Corporation, in the development of a solution called ChartSearch, a solution that allows clinicians and clinical informaticists to identify areas of free text within patient charts, and makes it possible to perform semantic search—to look up and extract keywords from the patient chart. Kochendorfer spoke recently withHCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding this IT research and development work.
May 6, 2011 Joe Bormel, M.D.
blog
Electronic Physician Documentation is quickly becoming recognized as a nightmarishly messy and incoherent linchpin to Meaningful Use. Electronically capturing documentation previously done on paper or through dictation sounds pretty straight forward. It’s not.
April 26, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
Douglas Johnston, M.D., a cardiovascular surgeon, and director of the length-of-stay and throughput initiatives taking place at the Cardiovascular Institute, a division of the Cleveland Clinic Health System, Cleveland Oh., is a practicing surgeon who is very supportive of the medical documentation improvement efforts taking place at Cleveland Clinic. He has been working closely with William Morris, M.D., vice chairman of clinical systems, and a practicing hospitalist in the organization, and with Susan Belley, manager of coding and documentation improvement, on a project to improve the quality of physician documentation among doctors practicing in the Cardiovascular Institute there.
