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
article
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.
May 26, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
When Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford (LPCH), in Palo Alto, Calif., went live with computerized physician order entry (CPOE) in the fall of 2007, healthcare IT leaders there were able to “stand on the shoulders” of other children's hospitals that had rolled out CPOE in the years immediately prior. So there was already experience with some of the particular challenges of CPOE go-lives in the pediatric environment, including with a specific vendor solution, says Christopher A. Longhurst, M.D., LPCH's CMIO.
May 26, 2011 David Raths
article
Of all the companies on the HCI 100 list, perhaps none garners more interest in the industry than Chicago-based Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. After pulling off a merger with Misys Healthcare the year before, publicly traded Allscripts doubled down last year by announcing a merger with Atlanta-based Eclipsys Corp. That deal was seen as a game-changer because it brought together EHR vendors with complementary strengths in ambulatory and hospital settings.
May 26, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
As the landscape around contracting with EHR vendors evolves rapidly forward because of meaningful use, CIOs need to think very carefully and very strategically about their relationships with vendors-both those they are now beginning to enter into contracts with, and those they've already partnered with.
May 24, 2011
blog
With image management, there initially was a need to store images, dating to the earliest days of the CT scanner. Due to the limited capacity of spinning storage in those days, images were off loaded to magnetic tape and stored for a fixed period of time. If there was a subsequent need to see the case again, the study was re-introduced from tape back to the scanner’s disk for display.
May 20, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
To help meet meaningful use and create patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs), Mid-Atlantic Community Health Center Association (MACHC), based in Lanham, Md., decided to support offer patient outreach software from the Dallas-based Phytel to its 19 members. MACHC, a nonprofit membership organization and the primary care association for Maryland and Delaware, provides healthcare to medically underserved and uninsured patients. One of MACHC’s main directives is to provide cutting edge tools for its member organizations to help them build PCMHs.
May 13, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
Karl Kochendorfer, M.D., is director of clinical informatics, and medical director of the Living Lab within the Tiger Institute, an entity within the University of Missouri Health System in Columbia, Mo. He and his colleagues at the University of Missouri Health System (UMHS) have been collaborating with their core EHR vendor, the Kansas City-based Cerner Corporation, in the development of a solution called ChartSearch, a solution that allows clinicians and clinical informaticists to identify areas of free text within patient charts, and makes it possible to perform semantic search—to look up and extract keywords from the patient chart. Kochendorfer spoke recently withHCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding this IT research and development work.
May 10, 2011 Pete Rivera
blog
If you have been around Healthcare IT for a few years you soon realize that there are two IT areas; Hospital and Ambulatory. The primary reason this exists is the differences in how each area views reimbursement, including reimbursement rate for procedures, professional fees, DRG’s, length of stays, and claim lag days. From a technology perspective, the line is truly blurred when you think about how ambulatory services has evolved over the years. Many procedures that required hospital admission and longer length of stays are pushed to the ambulatory setting.
