October 10, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Trying to predict a hospital's inpatient nurse staffing needs is a tough day-to-day challenge that involves matching often unpredictable patient demand to the nurse resources needed to care for those patients. Case in point: the Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy health system, a 31-hospital network serving Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, a hospital system that ranges from critical care hospitals with an average census of perhaps five to 10 patients a day to large tertiary care facilities. In March, 2011, Mercy implemented enterprise-wide web-based scheduling software that has significantly reduced the guesswork involved in its inpatient nurse staffing allocation.
September 23, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
The University of South Alabama Children’s and Women’s Hospital, located in Mobile, Alabama, is pushing ahead to optimize medication administration safety through the strategic implementation of key information systems
September 17, 2012
news
HIMSS Analytics (Chicago) recognizes Fort HealthCare in Fort Atkinson, Wis. with its Stage 7 Award. The Stage 7 award represents attainment of the highest level on the Electronic Medical Records Adoption Model (EMRAM), which is used to track EMR progress at hospitals and health systems.
July 31, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
The landscape around pharmacy information system implementation has changed so much in the past five years, it’s virtually unrecognizable from half a decade ago. And of course, that means that healthcare IT leaders, now compelled forward by meaningful use under the HITECH Act, and by data collection, reporting, and analysis mandates under federal healthcare reform, are working in a continuously changing environment.
July 23, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Colin Banas, M.D., CMIO at VCU Health System in Richmond, Va., is trying to make the best of a situation facing healthcare IT leaders in integrated health systems nationwide—how to manage the inpatient-outpatient continuum issues with regard to pharmacy information systems.
July 23, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Johnanne Ross, PharmD, director of pharmacy IT automation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) health system, based in Pittsburgh, Pa., has spent more than 12 years participating in informatics work. Ross spoke recently about the latest developments in her work at UPMC and her perspectives on what CIOs, CMIOs, and other healthcare IT leaders should be doing right now around pharmacy informatics.
July 23, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
The realities of evolutionary clinical IT implementation are keeping CIOs, CMIOs, and pharmacist informaticists very busy these days as meaningful use and healthcare reform mandates push healthcare IT leaders to more fully integrate pharmacy information systems with their core EHR/CPOE systems.
June 8, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Electronic communication is certainly changing the way physicians and patients interact, and if there is a single area where its impact is most evident, it is in telemedicine. This is worth paying attention to: in a report released last month, WinterGreen Research, Inc., a market research firm based in Lexington, Mass., forecast that the market for telemedicine devices and software will increase from $736 million in 2011 to $2.5 billion in 2018, implying a wide reach that will encompass a growing number of physicians and patients.
The question is what affect telemedicine will have on the quality of care and the relationship between physicians and patients. Alan Rosenthal, M.D., a board-certified internist who practices in Monterey, Calif., provides his perspective as a primary care physician.
May 19, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
At Spaulding Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., Joe Sacco, R.Ph., the hospital’s director of pharmacy, has been leading an initiative to optimize medication management through automation. With new Joint Commission and CMS medication labeling mandates in place, Sacco and his colleagues have been leveraging medication management solutions to master tricky and exceptional situations.
March 22, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Fairview Health Services, a 10-hospital, 42-clinic health system based in Minneapolis, has implemented a cloud-based communications platform that, among other things, allows its physicians to conduct virtual video “visits” with their patients, and schedule follow-up video visits.
February 15, 2012 David Raths
article
Electronic health records hold out great promise as a platform for pharmaceutical companies and regulators to offer providers patient safety and care updates such as automated drug alerts. Yet a lot of work still needs to be done to standardize how that data is presented and how it fits into physicians’ workflow.
May 12, 2011 Margret A., Mike Cohen, Jean Joslyn
article
Once the domain almost exclusively of hospitals, it now appears that the best of breed approach to IT may not only be solidifying its presence in acute care but inching its way into ambulatory care as well. Many hospitals are trying to move away from such a strategy because it is costly to maintain disparate systems and the degree of interoperability needed to make such an approach succeed is very difficult to achieve. As more clinicians use health information technology (HIT), they want a seamless “look and feel” to the applications they use and for all data to be accessible without effort. So why does it seem there are as many new vendors introduced into the mix as there are efforts to consolidate on vendors?
