August 14, 2013 Gabriel Perna
article
At Cullman Regional Medical Center (CRMC), a 145-bed facility in Cullman County, Ala., leaders have implemented an iPhone app that helps providers with medication reconciliation, readmission rates, and nursing accuracy and efficiency. President and CEO Jim Weidner explains why this technology was a worthy investment.
August 7, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
article
As the penalty for avoidable readmissions will continue to grow, one hospital has been proactive in connecting with outside care facilities to help lower its readmission rates—and the results have been impressive.
August 5, 2013 Mark Hagland
blog
A sometimes-heated discussion taking place in New York City around introducing a physician pay-for-performance program into that city’s immense public hospital system speaks to the broader debate around how best to transform U.S. healthcare
July 29, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
The Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C.-based healthcare-purchaser organization focused on patient safety and value, has launched a new online tool that allows purchasers to calculate how much they spend annually on unnecessary costs due to medical errors that occur within general acute care hospitals.
July 20, 2013 Mark Hagland
article
Reid Conant, M.D. of the Tri-City Emergency Medical Group, a 23-doctor emergency physician practice in Oceanside, California, shares his perspectives on the role of speech recognition solutions in optimizing physician documentation processes in the emergency medicine sphere. One key point: it’s not about typing ability.
July 9, 2013 David Raths
blog
After creating a simulation of their Epic EHR, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University are studying the number and types of errors clinicians miss when reviewing simulated cases in the ICU. Over-sedation was the least-recognized error (16%) and only 32% of the participants recognized inappropriate antibiotic dosing. Could making simulation a regular part of training improve these numbers?
July 4, 2013 M. Wayne Craige
blog
It’s Monday July 8 and you woke up feeling sick, and you know you better see your doctor. In the office, your doctor looks you over, listens to your symptoms, but before he prescribes a drug, the doctor said, “Lets get a sample of your blood so that I can take a look at your Deoxyribonucleic Acid”. You heard me right, your DNA!
July 4, 2013 Mark Hagland
news
The U.S. healthcare system could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by improving medication adherence rates, a new report from CVS Caremark finds
July 2, 2013 David Raths
news
A patient safety plan introduced July 1 by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) outlines how Health & Human Services plans to respond to calls for health IT to play a greater role in reducing medical errors. Central to the effort is the push to establish mechanisms that facilitate incident reporting among users and developers of health IT.
June 5, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
Bon Secours Hampton Roads Health System, a seven-hospital system based in Suffolk, Va., has announced that they are proactively contacting former patients via letters on behalf of Bon Secours Mary Immaculate Hospital to inform them of an electronic medical records security breach.
May 6, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
The University of Rochester Medical Center has sent letters to a group of 537 former orthopaedic patients, alerting them that a resident physician misplaced a USB computer flash drive that carried protected health information.
April 23, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
A report by consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP (PwC), commissioned by the Canada Health Infoway—a not-for-profit organization tasked with accelerating the development of electronic medical records (EMR) across Canada—has found $1.3 billion in savings from the implementation of EMRs by family physicians across Canada over the last six years.
