April 4, 2012
blog
I don’t understand why application vendors place little importance on reporting requirements. I get the fact that customers like to customize their reports, but why not make that an inherent feature? Maybe that is why the market is constantly creating so many 3rd party Business Intelligence (BI) vendors. But what about Clinical Intelligence (CI) requirements?
March 8, 2012 By John DeGaspari
article
Connectivity and integration are inherent challenges for hospitals using disparate biomedical devices across a complex care setting. Virtua, a four-hospital health system based in Marlton, N.J., has taken a serious look at the issue following a review of its patient-care IT portfolio of applications. Although Virtua had embarked on installing an EMR system well ahead of meaningful use as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, recording the data from bedside devices was still a manual affair, according to CIO Al Campanella.
February 27, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Will 2012 be the year of better care transitions? Many of the pieces are in place to make that happen, although there is still much work to be done to remedy this persistent—and multi-faceted—problem. A conference hosted by Kaiser Permanente in Washington, D.C., last October demonstrated the complexity of the care transitions problem. The meeting identified key areas of focus, including the discharge process, medication reconciliation, information flow, and patient and caregiver interaction. At the conference, Farzad Mostashari, M.D., national coordinator for health IT, urged the participants to embrace technology as a facilitator for improving care transitions, and he made a business case, as fee-for-service payment models are replaced by new models of payment.
February 8, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
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This podcast is one in a series of Healthcare Informatics Innovator Award podcasts, which are highlighting this year's Innovator Award winners. The HCI Innovator Awards Program recognizes leadership teams from patient care organizations -- hospitals, medical groups, health systems and others -- that have effectively deployed information technology in order to improve clinical, administrative, financial, or organizational performance. This year’s winners will be honored at the upcoming HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas.
February 2, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
During last week’s Care Innovations Summit, sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, I was intrigued by one presentation in particular, one by Christopher Chen, M.D., CEO of ChenMed during the Care Delivery/Primary Care Innovation Panel. A lot of what Dr. Chen said seemed intuitive, providing care teams for a well-defined population. And his company’s approach to technology has many applications beyond his four walls.
January 19, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Real-time location systems (RTLS) have been selected for asset tracking and nurse call location at the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Hospital. The selection process gives some insight into how one major hospital evaluates new technology.
The evaluations took place in the hospital’s 12,000-foot simulation center, followed by pilot runs in two of the hospital’s clinical facilities.
October 27, 2011 John DeGaspari
blog
I recently had an opportunity it to speak with Chuck Podesta, CIO of Fletcher Allen Health Care, Burlington, Vt., on the topic of computer hardware choices that hospital CIOs are making. He believes that hardware choices are not a one-size-fits all situation. At bottom, both hardware and software choices are workflow issues, he says.
August 22, 2011
blog
With so many hospital systems and physician groups across the country struggling to share patient information between disparate systems, one novel idea is to create a joint venture IT department that sits outside both organizations.
June 24, 2011 John Degaspari
article
Both provider organizations and medical device vendors have made significant, if slow-going, progress over the last several years to network their digitally-enabled medical devices. Recent strides in both the regulatory and standards arenas have provided renewed impetus on the part of both stakeholder groups to bring more interoperability to disparate medical devices, resulting in better security and quality of patient data.
June 14, 2011 By John DeGaspari
blog
Network medical devices surely offer the potential to increase patient safety and efficiency in hospitals. Yet those advantages also come with a new set of challenges, one of which is: who will take responsibility that the integrated system performs as it is designed?
June 2, 2011 By John DeGaspari
blog
Medical device interoperability, is a means to achieving effective and lower cost system integration. While acknowledging that the goal of achieving device interoperability will take time, the industry—provider organizations, vendors and regulators—should make system integration a priority.
May 26, 2011 Mark Hagland, Editor-in-Chief
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What strikes me as extremely significant right now is how the intersection of clinical IT and protocol-driven clinical care delivery processes is demonstrating more and more the potential for new approaches to improve patient safety and care quality, and support clinicians' ability to provide the best care. Indeed, it seems clear that the forward evolution of the electronic health record and other clinical IT products being offered by healthcare IT vendors, is producing more and more sophisticated, and useful, solutions every day.
