April 19, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
Members of a new workgroup that will focus on identifying key considerations to improve patient safety and promote innovation in health IT, including mobile medical applications, have been selected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The workgroup will report to the Health IT Policy Committee, which advises the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).
March 4, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
article
Three core healthcare IT issues—meaningful use, interoperability, and consumer exchange—dominated discussions during the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Town Hall on March 4 at HIMSS 13 in New Orleans.
March 3, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
article
Two nurse leaders from Oakland, Calif.-based integrated healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente revealed real-world lessons learned for transforming care to improve quality, safety and efficiency in the clinical setting utilizing clinical decision support, data mining and advanced analytics at the pre-conference nursing symposium at HIMSS13 in New Orleans.
February 7, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
article
On Feb. 7, public officials and healthcare IT leaders gathered in Manhattan to celebrate the ongoing success of a New York City IT initiative. Among those speaking were New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, M.D., and CDC Director Thomas Frieden, M.D.
February 6, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
A new report from the American Medical Association (AMA) outlines a list of five responsibilities physicians in outpatient settings should consider when caring for patients who have recently completed a hospital stay.
January 9, 2013 John DeGaspari
blog
At a time of rancorous political divisions, it’s worth noting that most Americans are deeply concerned about the quality of healthcare—in particular, medical research. In a poll by Research!America, 72 percent of respondents say the new Congress and the President should take immediate action to expand medical research within the first hundred days of the 113th Congress. Their views are relevant as Congress considers funding cuts that could affect medical research, but it also suggests that healthcare issues in general are topmost on many people’s minds.
January 2, 2013 John DeGaspari
news
Medical centers that elect to keep psychiatric files private and separate from the rest of a person's medical record may be doing their patients a disservice, a Johns Hopkins study concludes.
December 27, 2012 Mark Hagland
news
A new study is casting a harsh light on so-called “never events” in the surgical sphere, finding that such adverse events, which can include leaving a sponge inside a patient or operating on the wrong side of the body, led to malpractice litigation in more than 4,000 instances every year, and cost healthcare professionals at least $1.3 billion in malpractice payouts between 1990 and 2010.
December 19, 2012 John DeGaspari
news
In an analysis of national malpractice claims, Johns Hopkins patient safety researchers estimate that a surgeon in the United States leaves a foreign object such as a sponge or a towel inside a patient's body after an operation 39 times a week, performs the wrong procedure on a patient 20 times a week and operates on the wrong body site 20 times a week.
December 18, 2012 by Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
When the University of Missouri Health System sought to optimize its bedside documentation workflows, it chose to enhance its current medication administration devices to allow mobile point-of-care documentation, an innovation that has led to a dramatic advance in speed to documentation of patient data, ultimately improving patient care.
November 19, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
In a hospital system’s ongoing efforts to improve patient safety, a collaborative approach with other health systems sharing the same goal offers significant advantages compared to trying to go it alone. After all, sharing the experiences with other hospitals provides a benchmark that a hospital can use to measure its progress, and can lead to best practices that can be shared among other hospitals.
November 1, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
As Hurricane Sandy pounded coastal areas, its enormous breadth put hospitals in jeopardy throughout the Tri-State region. In Newburgh, N.Y., located on the banks of the Hudson River about 60 miles north New York City, sustained winds of 40 to 60 miles per hour and gusts of 100 miles per hour downed trees and caused local power outages. Cletis Earle, vice president and CIO of St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital, a two-campus system with a 242-bed hospital in Newburgh and a second facility in nearby Cornwall, N.Y., described how his hospital fared during the storm and his view on disaster preparations.
