February 6, 2013 Gabriel Perna
article
Backed by a study from the Office for the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC), researchers at the Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health System and the National Organization for Research at the University of Chicago (NORC) recently discovered that patients can help make the information in their EHR more accurate. These results were touted in a recent webinar from the National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC).
January 8, 2013 David Raths
article
At the Jan. 8 Health IT Policy Committee meeting, Farzad Mostashari, M.D., national coordinator for health IT, and Paul Tang, M.D., vice chair of the committee, outlined some priorities for the year ahead, including a glimpse of what Stage 4 of meaningful use might address.
December 18, 2012 Richard R. Rogoski
article
Moving forward in so many areas, including under meaningful use, will require the establishment of genuine interoperability across the inpatient-outpatient divide, and in particular, far more automated connectivity between hospitals and physicians, including those doctors in private practice. But building bridges in this area is far more complex than it first appears, say healthcare IT leaders who are guiding their organizations forward say the healthcare IT leaders who are guiding their organizations forward nationwide.
December 12, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
A recent study conducted by researchers at the Oakland, Calif.-based integrated healthcare organization, Kaiser Permanente, found that users of Kaiser’s personal health record (PHR), My Health Manager, visited their doctor’s office 16 percent than those who weren’t users of it. One of the study’s authors explains why this result shocked him and what it might mean.
December 11, 2012 David Raths
news
Several months after winding down a more ambitious state-level health information exchange architecture, the state of Tennessee has launched the Tennessee Direct Project, a scaled-down exchange based on the Direct secure messaging platform.
December 10, 2012 Gabriel Perna
news
The University of Utah Health Care, a four-hospital, 10-clinic health system, announced it has added an online tool that allows patients to score their satisfaction with their physicians. The physicians will be ranked on 40,000 patient surveys based on nine questions. Utah Health Care claims it is the first system in the nation to do something like this.
December 7, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
The October issue of The American Journal of Managed Care included a fascinating article, "Implementation of EHR-Based Strategies to Improve outpatient CAD Care," in which a group of researchers documented how EHR-facilitated physician alerts alone aren’t enough to improve outcomes for patients with such chronic illnesses as coronary artery disease. It turns out, success requires a savvy combination of financial incentives, IT alerts, and good data analysis.
December 5, 2012 Michael Craige
blog
Rapid improvements in technology, semantic data structures, informatics professional collaboration and sequencing technologies are not necessarily the only gaps needed for the realization of personalized medicine (improving genomic and phenotypic data integration) but these must be taken into account on how best to exploit the opportunities to facilitate personalized medicine.
November 5, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Four medical informaticists present findings and learnings from their research and development work in the area of providing clinical decision support to physicians treating patients with co-morbidities
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.
September 28, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
Cook Children’s Medical Center, a 428-bed facility in Fort Worth, Texas, has achieved wide adoption of an electronic barcoding system that verifies that medication delivery is correct before pediatric patients receive it. The hospital reports that recent scan rates of medications and patients before treatment are more than 97 percent.
September 26, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
At Northwest Hospital in Seattle, optimizing the planning for the implementation of CPOE and for evidence-based order sets has taken several fascinating turns. Gregory Schroedl, M.D., the hospital’s chief medical officer, shares his perspectives on what’s worked well and why.
