October 29, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Leaders at Northeast Georgia Health System have achieved health information exchange for images, while at the same time achieving Stage 1 meaningful use, and pursuing a broad clinical IT strategy, using state-of-the-art information technology.
August 23, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
CommuniCare Health Services, a regional provider of long-term care services that is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, needed a better approach to manage its data storage and backup. The organization, which owns and operates more than 40 nursing and rehabilitation facilities, specialty care centers, assisted living centers and retirement centers, and advanced specialty hospitals in four states, roughly doubled its size over the past four years through acquisitions. That rapid growth was matched by a corresponding demand for IT services. How did the organization evaluate its present and future data storage needs?
April 19, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
More hospitals are looking to the cloud as a viable way to store clinical, imaging, and financial data. Experts acknowledge its advantages, but caution it’s a step that requires careful planning and vetting of potential cloud vendors.
April 5, 2012 John DeGaspari
blog
With the digitization of medical records, there has been a lot of interest lately in storing information on the cloud. But storing data on the cloud—particularly clinical data—also presents risks to the hospital, which is legally responsible for the data it stores on the cloud is safe. That’s a tall order, and there are plenty of potential pitfalls to avoid when negotiating a contract with a cloud vendor. “The cloud is great, but the trick is that the customer doesn’t have control of the data, and yet they are still responsible for it,” says Diana J.P. McKenzie, partner and chair, Information Technology and Outsourcing Group, Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, P.C., Savannah, Ga.
March 29, 2012 John DeGaspari
blog
Cloud computing is becoming a valuable tool for hospitals, and there are good reasons for that, as more organizations digitize their clinical systems. I recently had a conversation with Richard Temple, executive consultant at Beacon Partners, Inc., Weymouth, Mass.
Typically, a lot of the computerization by hospitals has centered on financial systems, and hospitals typically wanted to keep that information close, housing it in their own data centers, he says. But things were more manageable, in terms of what needed to be available. After all, if a billing system went down at night, lives didn’t hang in the balance. But with the advent of the computerization of clinical systems, hospitals are faced with requirements of uptime and redundancy. “Hospitals aren’t necessarily geared up to support a computing infrastructure of that magnitude, so they look to the cloud,” Temple says.
February 2, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
Managing the flow of and access to diagnostic images and diagnostic imaging reports can become almost infinitely complex in some organizations. One multispecialty physician group in New York City, Manhattan's Physician Group, has leveraged IT to master its imaging informatics processes.
October 25, 2011 Vitaly Herasevich, Daryl J. Kor, Man Li, and Brian W. Pickering
article
As technology consumers, we have come to expect a high level of functionality on the computerized systems we have come to depend on for our everyday tasks such as banking, tracking of parcels, and airline ticketing. Unfortunately, that same functionality that is typified by those systems does not extend into healthcare, which is often hobbled by technical problems such as fragmented source databases.
July 20, 2011 Ajay Khandelwal
article
Thanks to web 2.0 and ubiquitous social websites, the amount of information available on the Internet is exploding. The same can be said for enterprise applications-data being gathered and generated across business applications are exploding, too. When looked at through different lenses, this untapped data, often thought a liability, can manifest itself into information and/or intelligence for an organization.
June 30, 2011 John DeGaspari
article
How secure is cloud computing as far as protecting patient data? At a time when many health providers are considering the use of the cloud, it’s a question worth considering.
March 23, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
Craig Roy, who has been with Radiology Associates of Sacramento (RAS) for more than 14 years, first as director of IS and then as CIO, has been focused intensely on improving and optimizing the informatics landscape for his 60-plus-physician medical group, Radiology Associates of Sacramento. As Radiology Associates of Sacramento, already the largest private radiology group in Northern California, has continued to grow and expand, the need for its physicians to make use of interoperability solutions has become more and more pronounced
March 23, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
The five-hospital Saint Thomas Health Services, anchored by Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro, Tenn., several years ago became one of the very first multi-hospital systems in the U.S. to create a fully replicated set of data archives, rather than simply a mirrored configuration, to support the continuity of its PACS and other capabilities. That organization's leaders have derived great benefit from their innovation.
March 17, 2011
blog
Reflecting on HIMSS and recent vendor announcements, I’ve been thinking about how difficult it must be for healthcare CIOs these days in terms of data management. Information Technology (IT) organizations have the unenviable task of dealing with all of a healthcare entity’s data, including operational and patient data.
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