November 26, 2012 Gabriel Perna
news
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced the first three participants in a new data sharing initiative aimed at getting more information to consumers to improve healthcare quality. The organizations in the Medicare Data Sharing for Performance Measurement program are Health Improvement Collaborative of Greater Cincinnati, Kansas City Quality Improvement Consortium (serving the Greater Kansas City area in Missouri and Kansas), and Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation.
November 15, 2012 Gabriel Perna
blog
More healthcare systems are beginning to mine patient data for marketing purposes. This trend could increase with the rapid adoption of EHRs and leave many providers with an ethical dilemma.
October 26, 2012 Gabriel Perna
news
According to a report produced by a Loma Linda University Medical Center researcher, and posted on the Annals of Emergency Medicine website, a number of intubated emergency patients within a federal database were listed as both dead and alive. The report calls into the data quality of the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), which is produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
October 10, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
On Oct. 9, Premier healthcare alliance senior executives and volunteer leaders held a press briefing to announce the results of both the Charlotte-based health alliance's broad comparative effectiveness analysis of blood utilization processes, and to describe the work of two Premier member hospital systems in optimizing processes in that key area.
October 4, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
At the vast UPMC health system in Pittsburgh, Francis X. Solano, M.D., and Jim Venturella have been deeply involved with a broad cadre of their colleagues in helping to support practicing physicians in the organization’s medical groups with the evidence-based information needed to improve care quality—and document that improvement
October 2, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
As tip-of-the-spear healthcare industry leaders, senior executives at the UPMC health system see where the proverbial puck is headed, and they’re skating towards it as powerfully as they can.
October 2, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
In contrast to what happened on November 1, 1999, when the Institute of Medicine released its industry-shaking report, "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System," what happened on September 6, 2012, caused barely a ripple. That was the release of the IOM's third report in a series, this one called "Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America," which builds on the thinking presented in its two predecessor reports, and envisions the entire healthcare system continuously learning.
September 30, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
On Oct. 1, the 20-plus-hospital University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) health system announced that it had completed an agreement with several IT vendor partner organizations that will involve UPMC investing $100 million over the next five years on a comprehensive enterprise analytics initiative to foster personalized medicine and improve the patient care quality and cost-effectiveness of the Pittsburgh-based health system.
September 26, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
I was fascinated to read the September 17 joint announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that those two federal departments had successfully demonstrated the successful use of metadata tagging in the exchange of patient health data.
September 19, 2012 Pete Rivera
blog
Based on a WSJ Opinion piece EMR software is “is generally clunky, frustrating, user-unfriendly and inefficient.” Although I will not disagree with this “generalization,” I do take exception with the articles naïve view that Health IT systems have not improved patient health.
September 18, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
In this podcast, Healthcare Informatics Associate Editor Gabriel Perna speaks with John Stanley, Principal with Impact Advisors. John discusses the fallout of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, and how that has played into the role health information exchange and analytics technologies will play into the future of healthcare delivery. John also talks about how these two technologies are playing off each other, what providers should know when they are picking out a vendor, and what are the dangers of not addressing these technologies.
September 15, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
As David Share, M.D. and his colleagues at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan collaborate forward with local providers to master care management and utilization strategies, the criticality of leveraging analytics thoughtfully becomes ever-more-apparent. We’ll be discussing these issues in our upcoming Healthcare Informatics webinar on Sept. 25, and learning from the experiences of some of the most pioneering organizations nationwide.
