October 11, 2012 Gabriel Perna
news
The Chicago-based American Medical Association (AMA) recently invited its member physicians to share insights and opinions on the latest EHR technology through a joint survey with AmericanEHR Partners, which is a physician resource that offers access to ratings and information about EHR systems and vendors. According to AMA, findings from this member survey are intended to support physicians in the selection and use of EHRs and improve the value of this technology for both physicians and patients.
October 11, 2012 George Conklin
article
With 44 hospitals and hundreds of additional facilities and services located across the southern U.S. and Mexico, Irving, Texas-based CHRISTUS Health is committed to using IT innovations to support the quality of care of its patients. There's a tremendous amount of technology that sits between that end-user device and the data center to deliver applications services to the end user—everything from networks, infrastructure, the cloud, and the applications to the back-end databases. Problems can and do arise anywhere in this complex application delivery chain, and they can be extremely hard to pinpoint. CHRISTUS Health has implemented application performance management (APM) to enable it to proactively in identify and fix performance problems.
October 8, 2012 Gabriel Perna
news
According to a new study from the Hudson Valley Initiative, a Fishkill, N.Y.-based healthcare reform effort from three providers: Taconic IPA, Taconic Health Information Network and Community, and MedAllies, the use of EHRs in an physician office leads to better quality care. The study, "Electronic Health Records and Ambulatory Quality of Care," found that physicians using EHRs scored significantly higher on quality of care for four screening measures for diabetes, breast cancer, Chlamydia, and colorectal cancer.
October 8, 2012 David Raths
blog
The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSHERA), a nonprofit organization set up to facilitate open source EHR development will hold its first annual summit meeting Oct. 17-18 in Washington, D.C.
October 4, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
There’s no doubt that the ability of hospitals to manage large data sets has resulted in fundamental improvements in patient care delivery. Physicians and nurses have access to data to measure their performance in a way that is actionable to improve the lives of the patients. Yet timing is everything, and data that can make a significant difference in patient care before discharge is wasted if it reaches the clinician well after the patient has left the hospital. Cleveland Clinic in Ohio has addressed this care gap with a short-cycle measurement dashboard, a project focused on coordinating the use of the electronic medical record to provide caregivers with actionable information on their performance that result in better patient care before discharge.
October 3, 2012
news
According to a recent study from the Oakland-based integrated provider, Kaiser Permanente, use of EHRs can lead to improvements in drug-treatment intensification, monitoring, and risk-factor control for patients that have diabetes. The study, which appears in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, found that with patients who have poor control of their diabetes and lipids there were greater improvements as well.
October 3, 2012 Jeff Smith, Assistant Director of Advocacy at CHIME
article
The subject of electronic health records, and the billions of dollars set aside to digitize the country, made national headlines this week – and not in a way that most proponents of health IT would have liked. Stemming from two independent analyses, headlines in The New York Times and the Washington Post detailed how greater use of electronic records might be making it easier for hospitals and doctors to submit erroneous payment claims.
October 2, 2012
news
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) is calling for improved and unified health information governance to standardize EHR use, the non-profit advocacy organization recently announced. The group said it is ready to work with healthcare industry providers, health plans, quality organizations, and vendors as well as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish standards so that healthcare providers have clear principles to guide their patient documentation.
October 2, 2012 Ted Reynolds
article
Understanding that applying a “big-bang” approach can be counterproductive; that EMR implementations must be clinician-led; and establishing good IT governance, are among the key pieces of advice that Ted Reynolds wants to share with EMR implementation leaders, based on his experience with many implementations over the years.
September 28, 2012 Joe Bormel
blog
In Part 1 of this blog, we discussed the fact that the approaches we used to achieve Stage 1 of Meaningful Use may not be sufficient to move forward to achieve Stage 2. Here in the final installment, I’ll provide some detailed examples of why scalability will be a key to success in Stage 2. And in the end, the most important factors will be understanding and communicating your own local practice experience.
September 18, 2012
news
The Ohio State University College of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Informatics announced that the National Library of Medicine has given it a $1.3 million grant for an EHR data integration initiative. The initiative will aim to integrate information within a patient’s EHR to generate a "longitudinal medical history that can help accelerate recruitment of patients into clinical trials," the college says.
September 18, 2012 Joe Bormel
blog
Achieving MU Stage 2 is a complex undertaking that requires, among other things, the proper and efficient application of scalability. We need the ability to scale up what we did to achieve MU Stage 1. However, not all methods are scalable. So as we move forward to MU Stage 2, I’d like to make some recommendations for those of you who are resilient, but who really don’t like surprises.
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