News

Nine types of Usability Problems w/EHRs

There is no shortage of complaints about the usability of Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs). More and more evidence is emerging regarding the lack of EHR usability. Speaking at the 2013 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference & Exhibition, Michael S. Barr, MD, MBA, FACP, of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) warned that: “Satisfaction and usability ratings for certified electronic health records (EHRs) have decreased since 2010 among clinicians across a range of indicators.” Barr’s presentation at HIMSS focused on “ the need for the Meaningful Use program and EHR manufacturers to focus on improving EHR features and usability.”

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FDA to Advance Precision Medicine by Enabling Open Source Collaborative Informatics

FDA plays an integral role in President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, which foresees the day when an individual’s medical care will be tailored in part based on their unique characteristics and genetic make-up. Yet while more than 80 million genetic variants have been found in the human genome, we don’t understand the role that most of these variants play in health or disease. Achieving the President’s vision requires working collaboratively to ensure the accuracy of genetic tests in detecting and interpreting genetic variants. We are working towards that goal by developing an informatics community and supporting platform we call precisionFDA.

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When the Healthcare System Works

As I’ve written about several times in the past, this “care traffic control”, directing the patient to right intensity of care, then closing the loop for followup care is the future of medicine.  It’s high quality, lower cost, and improves outcomes. The IT systems required to do it are more about workflow and process than the simple capture of records. As we envision the next generation of electronic tools, support for team based care with handoff management and closed loop communication among the stakeholders will be the most important new features. Read More »

A Call To Policy Makers: Open Source Is Where Innovation Is Happening

The impact of technology on society and the economy continues to excite and challenge all of us. Policy makers are no exception. Their objective—writ large—is to put in place policies that encourage the development and deployment of beneficial technologies in order to drive growth, prosperity, and the general welfare of their citizens. Where should policy makers focus? The best place is where the future is happening. In other words, the best place is where innovation is happening...

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UK Health Service Nurtures Open Source Communities

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is nurturing a growing number of communities of software developers working on open source solutions. NHS’ Code4Health team is now supporting 17 communities that bring together health care providers, developers and supporters. Examples include Open Odonto, open source software for dentistry, and openMAXIMS, guiding the development of an open source electronic patient record system for the NHS. A third community working with Code4health is openEobs, a project that helps clinicians and managers ensure safer patients, safer wards and safer hospitals.

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EHR Interoperability With Long-Term Care Providers Wanted, but Who Will Pay?

CMS has urged skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and home care agencies to acquire electronic health record systems that are capable of exchanging data with hospitals and other health care providers, but it hasn't explained where these long-term and post-acute-care (LTPAC) providers will get the money to implement these health IT systems. LTPAC providers are ineligible to participate in the federal EHR incentive program. CMS has proposed raising payments to SNFs by 1.4% in fiscal year 2016, but that is barely enough to cover inflation. Beginning in FY 2018, CMS plans to apply the same value-based payment system to SNFs that it already is using with hospitals and physicians. Many of those providers, however, have more advanced health IT systems to help them make that transition.

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OSEHRA 2015: VA Secretary Articulates Open Source Strategy as the Core of VA’s Transformation During Summit

Robert A. McDonald, Secretary of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), articulated a clear strategy for the VA’s technology efforts based on open source, crowdsourcing and agile development during a speech at the 2015 OSEHRA Open Source Summit in Bethesda, MD yesterday. McDonald, who was the keynote speaker of the conference, gave an overview of the crisis that the VA was facing a year ago and the steps taken to address the crisis. McDonald said that his primary step was to change the focus of the discussion from problems within the VA bureaucracy to a focus of placing the customers, America's veterans and military personnel, at the center of things.

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OSEHRA 2015 Summit to Feature Several Major Open Health IT Projects

The 2015 OSEHRA Open Source Summit is opening in two days with a panel addressing the need for the open health community to join forces and work together to change the current health IT paradigm from expensive and outdated pre-internet mainframe solutions to innovative open solutions. The panel brings together six leaders from diverse open health communities and technologies to discuss how the community can join forces. I have the honor of being the moderator of the panel. The speakers for the Open Health panel are...

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Will PHIEs Lead the Consumer Medical Record Revolution and Bridge the Gap Between Personal Health Records and EHRs?

It has only been about two generations since traveling medicine shows were common forums for medical information. Phony research and medical claims were used to back up the sale of all kinds of dubious medicines. Potential patients had no real method to determine what was true or false, let alone know what their real medical issues were. Healthcare has come a long way since those times, but similar to the lack of knowing the compositions of past medical concoctions and what ailed them, today’s digital age patients still don’t know what is in their medical records. They need transparency, not secret hospital –vendor contracts and data blocking, like the practices being questioned by the New York Times. One patient, Regina Holliday resorts to using art to bring awareness to the lack of patient’s access to their own medical records.

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Why Open Source Hardware Creators Win

While recently demonstrating a prototype to a family member I was asked, "Are you going to patent that?" While happy to see such enthusiasm, I tactfully declared that I couldn’t seek a patent, as it was built using open source components. This perplexed my family member who, being from a generation or two (or three) before me, thought that is how "inventing things works." So, I did my best to explain the seemingly "hippie-ish" concepts of open source, copyleft, and Creative Commons licenses to someone from America’s Greatest Generation with little success. In the end, we simply agreed to disagree on the issues of patents and capitalist pursuit.

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