EHR interoperability
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Mutual self-interest leads to antitrust concerns
We have a bright new Attorney General here in Massachusetts who has already earned her bona fides with regard to putting the brakes on economically unsupported market power expansion by the local dominant provider network. That corporation, Partners Healthcare System (PHS), has now indicated that its primary expansion activities will be outside of the United States, but that statement hides a bit of misdirection. Indeed, PHS remains focused on maintaining its hold on physician organizations and its overall market share here in the state.
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Neuron Health: Building Clinical Applications On An Open Source Platform
Here are four reasons building on the Tolven Platform can benefit healthcare application development, along with lessons learned through the experiences of Roberts-Hoffman Software. Our team created the clinical functions of an inpatient EHR, many of which are available as open source plugins to Tolven under the Neuron Health project.
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Not All Snake Oil Is Digital
A different take on "snake oil" in health care was a thoughtful piece in Health Affairs, by David Newman and Amanda Frost, discussing the quality measurement morass in health care. They cite a study that estimated we spend some $15.4b annually collecting several thousand different quality measures, few of which have any meaning to consumers and all-too-few of which seem to be used to actively improve quality. It isn't that they don't think we should be measuring quality -- far from it -- but, rather: "Patients should not be able to choose substandard quality care, and substandard quality care should not be allowed to be offered in the market." Now, there's a novel concept!
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Notes on the August Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee
The August HIT Standards Committee meeting focused on the work ahead to accelerate interoperability. It’s no longer about Meaningful Use, it’s about Meaningful healthcare information exchange. I offered my opinion about the work ahead. ONC is in the middle of regulation writing for Meaningful Use Stage 3, so the standards work of the next 10 weeks is not going to be incorporated into the NPRM. Read More »
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Obama and Biden Blast EHR Vendors for Data Blocking
As they are winding their terms in office, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden dropped a stink bomb on the health IT industry. Speaking at different events on Friday, January 9th, the President and Vice President both criticized proprietary electronic health record (EHR) vendors as the primary obstacle to the success of their administration’s health care strategy. This is the highest level acknowledgment so far of the serious impact that “lock-in” EHR software vendors are having on America’s medical infrastructure and the ability of physicians to provide medical care.
ONC Releases 2018 HITECH Report
In early January the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued its annual report to Congress for 2018 on the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) and interoperability. This report is required under the HITECH Act and is further informed by requirements of the later 21st Century Cures Act...One thing that I think is notable was a short discussion about barriers to interoperability that we have heard before. The report identifies three types: technical barriers, financial barriers, and trust barriers. Within trust barriers the report mentions legal incentives to keep data from moving (I guess that would have better been phrased as legal disincentives to sharing), but this misses the point: It is the patchwork of inconsistent and incompatible State and local laws and regulations - not intentional information blocking - that presents a bigger challenge and barrier.
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ONC Releases New NPRM on Interoperability: How Might it Affect Public Health?
On February 11, 2019, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to Improve the Interoperability of Health Information. Referred to by some people as the "Information Blocking NPRM," since this was the primary topic anticipated, the document actually covers a host of other topics related to interoperability driven primarily by requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act. Besides the initial text of the NPRM, ONC also released a set of summary slides and fact sheets to help explain the document.
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ONC Selects Noam Arzt to serve on the ONC Trusted Exchange Framework Task Force
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has selected Dr. Noam H. Arzt, President of HLN Consulting (HLN), as a member of the Trusted Exchange Framework Task Force. This group of healthcare and health information technology specialists will advise ONC on various aspects of the Draft Trusted Exchange Framework. This framework outlines a common set of principles for trusted exchange of health information records and minimum terms and conditions for trusted exchange as directed by Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act.
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Open Health News Continues To Grow-Visitors Cross the 375,000 Mark
We have been very busy lately and did not have time this year to write a recap of major events related to our news web site. Well, a bit late, we start here with a review of our traffic figures. Traffic to the website continues to grow and we are now approaching 20,000 unique visitors per month. As the table shows below, the total number of unique visitors since we launched the site nearly four years ago has surpassed 375,000 and the total number of Page Views has broken the 8 million mark.
- The Future Is Open
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OpenEMR Community Releases Major Upgrade to their Open Source EHR
OpenEMR, the most popular open source electronic health records (EHR) and medical practice management solution, has announced today that OpenEMR version 5.0.1 has been released. A community of more than 50 OpenEMR contributors produced a staggering amount of new features and improvements for OpenEMR 5.0.1. "The amount of new features and improvements in this new release of OpenEMR is simply astounding and showcases the strengths, diversity, talents, commitment, productivity, and good will of the thriving OpenEMR community," said Dr. Brady Miller, an OpenEMR project administrator, and physician.
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OpenEMR Community Responds to HRSA Call for Advanced EHR Solutions for Community Health Centers
The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is taking major steps to help Community Health Centers across the US tackle the devastating opioid epidemic by providing funding for substance abuse services and modern EHRs. OpenEMR, a modern, customizable, open-source and ONC Certified EHR is the best solution for high impact and cost-effective information technology solutions for Community Health Centers
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Pentagon Accepts Bids on Long-Awaited Health Records Contract
The Defense Department on Monday opened its Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract to bids, beginning what could be an $11 billion effort over the next decade to modernize the way the Pentagon provides health care to service members. Read More »
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Plug and Play Healthcare: Open Middleware and the Emergence of a Functional Interoperability Framework
“A middleware architecture has been shown to be the best technological solution for addressing the problem of EHR interoperability. The middleware platform facilitates the transparent, yet secure, access of patient health data, directly from the various databases where it is stored. A server-based middleware framework supporting access to the various patient health data stores allows for a scalable, unified and standardized platform for applications to be developed upon. The middleware architectural design has been successfully used to link data from multiple databases, irrespective to the database platform or where the database is located,” says Voltz. Read More »
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Precision Medicine: Analytics, Data Science and EHRs in the New Age
The promise of genomics and personalized care are closer than many realize. But clinical systems and EHRs are not ready yet. While policymakers and innovators play catch-up, here’s a look at what you need to know. Considering how fast technology advances in the healthcare industry, it seems natural that a once-innovative concept could become obsolete in the span of, say, a dozen years. Knowledge, comprehension and capabilities continue moving forward, and if the instruments of support don't keep pace, it can cause a rift to appear. If nothing is done, it can exacerbate into a seismic event...
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PwC Pitches Open-Source Electronic Health Records
One of the entrants in the military's $11 billion electronic health record procurement is proudly flying the open source flag. The group led by PricewaterhouseCoopers includes General Dynamics IT and two open source health record providers whose products are based on the open source Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) -- DSS Inc. and MedSphere.
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