health IT (HIT)

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What If EMRs Worked Like Wikipedia?

Nick Dawson | The Health Care Blog | February 5, 2014

I’ve been thinking about EMRs, electronic medical records, lately. It’s a subject, despite some professional experience, I don’t feel particularly close to...And, as a patient I see them largely as an opaque blob of data about me with a placating window in the form of a portal.

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$100 Million Epic Install Dampens Lifespan Health System's Credit

Bob Herman | Modern Healthcare | June 6, 2014

A multimillion-dollar electronic health-record system installation is eroding the cash flow, and bond rating, of Rhode Island's largest health system. Read More »

$100 Million Epic Install Dampens Lifespan Rhode Island Healthcare's Credit

Scott Silverstein | Health Care Renewal | June 22, 2014

Lifespan Rhode Island Healthcare System's Siemens EHR was apparently causing thousands of electronically-generated prescriptions to become scrambled, as I posted in Nov. 2011 here: http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/11/lifespan-rhode-island-yet-another.html. Due to this "glitch" - and other factors, I surmise - they switched to Epic. Here are the current results [see $100 Million Epic Install Dampens Lifespan Health System's Credit]...

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21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead

I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly.   In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary  and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...

A Middleware Dose: the Antidote to Healthcare’s EHR Interoperability Bug

Despite wide penetration of EHR's in hospitals, clinics and physician offices, access to patient information between systems continues to plaque our healthcare system. From a physician's perspective, we have a duty to provide the best care to addresses our patients’ health needs with the least possible risks of adverse events...Zoeticx, a developer of EHR middleware, has developed such a platform that has already been demonstrated to go far beyond the limitations present in EHR’s. Adding additional functionality to patient data has been accomplished with a seamless connection to disparate EHR systems. An additional benefit of this technology is that front-line providers no longer need to worry about accessing many different systems to manually utilize the data for patient care.

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Bad EHR Design and Physician Dissatisfaction: It’s a Matter of Wasted Time.

As reported last year at HIMSS and by many online news and opinion sources since, physician dissatisfaction with EHRs is growing. Indeed, while this blog post doesn’t focus on the broader picture, general physician career dissatisfaction is disconcertingly high. The breakneck push for more and better EHR use as a component of regular medical care is a significant part of that malaise, but it is insufficient as an explanation. Read More »

Burgess Bill Addresses Interoperability, the Leading Health IT Issue in the US

Health care reformers around the country should be jumping up to thank Representative Michael C. Burgess (R-Texas), an MD who is working with his staff to write a bill to promote Health IT interoperability. Readers of Open Health News probably know that interoperability--in simple terms, the ability of any authorized user to read a medical record from any source--has emerged as one of the two top burning issues of health IT, the other one being the lack of usability of proprietary/lock-in electronic health records (EHRs).

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Can Data Provide the Trust we Need in Health Care?

One of the problems dragging down the US health care system is that nobody trusts one another. Most of us, as individuals, place faith in our personal health care providers, which may or may not be warranted. But on a larger scale we’re all suspicious of each other... Read More »

Cerner Enhances Critical Healthcare Application Hosting Services With Red Hat

Press Release | Red Hat, Cerner | June 5, 2014

Red Hat, Inc...today announced that Cerner Corporation, a global health care information technology company, has successfully leveraged Red Hat Enterprise Linux to enhance the stability and performance of its world-class application hosting services. Combined with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improved scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped Cerner meet the healthcare industry's growing demand for IT solutions and services...

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Closed Records, EHR Decertification and the DoD

In anticipation of House of Cards Season 4, and with all due respect to the show’s creators, I think real life is giving us a perfect plotline that includes politicians, corporate interests, their lobbyists and a big fat government contract. Maybe Francis and Claire have me seeing conspiracies everywhere, but it seems a chain of recent health IT events have created intrigue in what is historically our staid, conservative industry. Follow the timeline with me and decide for yourself if I’m hearing black helicopters.

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Cloud-based EHR Interoperability Takes Front Stage

Because our industry is still in diapers, we focus on the lack of basic interoperability and ruminate on why EHR vendors struggle (aka, refuse) to share even basic patient data. But we must take heart, health IT friends, stiffen our upper lips and look to trends and examples that create optimism (i.e., help get us out of bed in the morning): 21st century interoperation is happening in health IT. In a recent interview with Healthcare Dive, Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush laid out a vision for how the cloud is the disruptive technology to bring healthcare into the Internet age. He describes “level three interoperation,” where two cloud-based systems connect once and support multiple interoperations that accomplish more than just data sharing.

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CMS Inclusion of API’s for Stage 3 Meaningful Use Rule is the Right Decision

One of these rules, the decoupling of EHR certification and meaningful use brings some hope to those looking to build upon established EHRs and other health databases. Prior to this, there has been a very tightly held belief that EHR systems would contain the answers needed to fulfill all governmental regulations, something that has not been shown to be the case. EHR’s are becoming very important tools for healthcare delivery, yet their regimented, and for the most part proprietary data storage models, do not allow for easy customization to meet the needs of our patients and the various healthcare professionals dependent upon them for day-to-day management of patients.

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Communities Help Open Source EHRs Thrive (Part 1 of 3: Justification)

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | December 2, 2014

The next two articles in this series will examine various open source projects in the health IT space that have developed vibrant communities. But before we can appreciate the importance of those efforts, we need to understand why community is central to growth. That is the subject of this article...

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Crash Test Dummies and Electonic Health Records

EHR vendors are quick to say that the upcoming stage 3 Meaningful Use requirements are too burdensome, that they are too difficult to complete, and they are not necessary. (see this article for example). Many EHR vendors would say let market forces take over and the Health IT industry will heal itself. The big business interests of the Healthcare industry may cry wolf (and lobby hard) against the meaningful use program and its significant enhancements to the usability program because they don’t want to spend the extra time and money to provide a healthcare system that truly follows a safety-enhanced design philosophy.

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DeSalvo Strikes Interoperability Chord At AHIMA Conference

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | September 30, 2014

ONC chief Karen DeSalvo, MD, promised an audience of AHIMA members that the government would act "fast into interoperability." She drew applause when she added, "We cannot wait for 10 years to get this done." DeSalvo emphasized that every other industry has already achieved interoperability. Read More »