Health IT

See the following -

The Upsides Of Betting On Early-Stage IT Startups

Tom Sullivan | Medical Practice Insider | September 29, 2014

When Aetna chief information security officer Jim Routh became the first customer, literally, to buy email authentication software from a startup, that move was part of what he described as “a complete shift in thinking about purchasing products.”...

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The Value of EHR Interoperability that Money Can't Buy

There seems to be something missing in our national debate about health care and the use of health information technologies (IT) in this marketplace. Do we want a more 'open' healthy society, or a more closed system? What role should markets play in public health and medical sociology? How do we decide which EHR solutions to acquire? Should we be looking more closely at open source alternatives versus proprietary programs. Should money, quality of care, or some other non-market values determine what's best for the patient? This cuts to the heart of the debate. Consider the hospital that chooses to not pay an expensive proprietary EHR vendor for the enhanced code required by a doctor in order to get the latest real time knowledge for treating a patient's disease.

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The Way To Doctors' Hearts Is Through Their EMR

Nahum Kovalski | The Times of Israel | September 23, 2014

...EPIC is perhaps the most popular of the present EMRs in the States. There have also been many complaints about EPICs design...

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The Words Healthcare CIOs Don't Want To Hear

Mike Millard | Healthcare IT News | June 3, 2014

No matter what your job, there are certain phrases – whether said by bosses, colleagues or clients – that are just plain unwelcome: words that foretell frustration and added workload at best, panic and red-alert crisis response at worst.

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The Wrong Legacies of Health Information Technology

I read two articles this week that got me thinking, Robert Charette's "Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems" (IEEE Spectrum) and Douglas Holt's "Cultural Innovation" (Harvard Business Review). Both deal with what I'll call legacy thinking. It's a particular problem for healthcare...If you are in healthcare and rely on legacy systems, you're in trouble. If you are in healthcare and are not acutely aware of what your Achilles heel is, someone else is going to exploit it. Even if you are a new healthcare entrant with more modern technologies but still based on the current ideology, your impact is going to be limited.

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Theresa Cullen to co-lead Regenstrief's transformational Global Health Informatics Program

Press Release | Regenstrief | October 16, 2015

Theresa Cullen, M.D., M.S., an internationally respected leader in health information technology and its application in resource-limited environments, has been named associate director of the Regenstrief Institute's Global Health Informatics Program. She joins the institute's Center for Biomedical Informatics as an investigator following three-and-a-half years as chief medical informatics officer and director of health informatics at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

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Time to Extend my Extension Idea

Joseph Conn | ModernHealthcare.com | April 6, 2012

You should put together the success story of the health IT extension program and take it to Congress. Tell its members the country needs this program and should fund it going forward. Read More »

To Boost Engagement, Remove Barriers To Consumers' Access To Records

Susan D. Hall | Fierce Health IT | February 11, 2014

As healthcare organizations seek to boost consumer engagement, it's important to understand how traditional policies on access to health information might cause roadblocks, according to a practice brief at the Journal of AHIMA.  Policies and practices should be continuously examined and updated to ensure that they do not present impediments to consumer engagement, authors of the brief write.

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Top 12 Reasons Health Providers Pay too Much for IT

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | July 17, 2012

Healthcare pays more than any other industry for information technology. At least according to a new survey. "Our analysis shows healthcare organizations pay an average 17 percent more than that of the other 29 industries we sampled," write the authors of a paper by Net(net), which bills itself as a consultancy specializing in IT optimization, "and 33 percent more than the industry with the lowest average costs (food service).” Read More »

Top 5 Government Health IT Stories Of The Summer

Tom Sullivan, | Government Health IT | August 29, 2014

Call it the season of interoperability. That was the biggest topic of the summer among Government Health IT readers...

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Transforming Health Care Through A 360-Degree View Of Data

How medical care can be substantially improved through a full spectrum view of all factors that affect health was the topic of Payam Etminani's presentation at the 2019 IDGA Veterans Benefits Conference in Washington D.C. Etminani, the CEO of Bitscopic, argued that the ability to view all health data including social, environmental and genomic information in addition to the traditional clinical measures (vital signs, blood work, history of illness etc), would lead to significant improvement in care. Etminani described how recent advances in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) make combining and using these large and widely varied sets of information possible. Read More »

Two Healthcare Leaders Become Patients And Are Enraged By The Billing Bureaucracy September

Veronica Combs | MEDCITY News | September 9, 2014

There is nothing like a dose of reality to change your perspective...This is why all hospital CEOs and medical device executives should be a patient at a hospital on a regular basis...

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Two New Federal Reports Released That Have Major Public Health Impacts

Two new Federal reports were recently released that have a public health impact. First, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its 2022 Report to Congress: Update on Access, Exchange, and Use of Electronic Health Information. This report covers the current state of adoption of health information technology and access to electronic health information guided largely by the requirements of the 2016 21st Century Cures Act. The report observes that, “Although tremendous progress has been made with EHRs that capture and support the use of health information about individuals, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in health IT systems that support capturing and using population data. The challenges exposed during the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic pinpointed the importance of health IT to monitor population health regarding public health surveillance of testing, diagnosis, and vaccine distribution.”

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Two recent surveys of patients and their healthcare providers in the U.S.

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | June 8, 2012

Two recent surveys that showing general dissatisfaction with the healthcare industry amongst patients and their healthcare providers. The two surveys offer some interesting insight into the current state of affairs.

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U.S. Coast Guard Terminated Contract with Epic for EHR Implementation

Heather Landi | Healthcare Informatics | April 22, 2016

The U.S. Coast Guard has discontinued an Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) implementation project, which is an expansion of an electronic health record (EHR) implementation project as part of a contract awarded to Verona, Wis.-based Epic Systems in 2010, a USCG representative said. The Coast Guard is pursuing an alternative EHR system, and, in the interim, Coast Guard physicians are continuing to use paper-based records, "without interruption of service to members and dependents," the USCG spokesperson, Alana Ingram, public affairs officer, said...

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