News Clips
Increasing Health IT, EHR Investment Runs Up Practice Costs
New data from MGMA shows that increasing health IT and EHR investments are running up major practice costs. Health IT and EHR investments are costing physician-owned multispecialty practices thousands of dollars per physician, according to a new report from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). The 2016 MGMA Cost and Revenue Report shows that health technologies such as EHRs ran physician practices up to $32,500 per physician in 2015...
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ClinCapture Appoints Scott Weidley Chief Executive Officer
ClinCapture today announced that it has appointed Scott Weidley as Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board of Directors effective August 1, 2016. The appointment of Mr. Weidley, a leading cloud software executive specializing in electronic data capture (EDC), emphasizes a focus on customer-centric culture to drive product and business development for the brand. Weidley brings more than twenty years of experience in sales, management, marketing, and customer success...
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Why Healthcare Data Security, Compliance Issues Go Untreated
Secure managed file transfer solutions can be beneficial to covered entities as they work to overcome healthcare data security and compliance issues. If there ever was a pulse of healthcare operations, it’s data. From patient enrollment forms, electronic health records, and health insurance information, the amount of electronic data flowing through the medical community increases every day. With that, healthcare data security must also be a top priority...
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$85 Million Grant Supports UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute
UC San Francisco’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) has received $85 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue to provide training, research support and other services, and to launch new programs aimed at diversifying the patients in research and advancing precision medicine. The new efforts seek to remove barriers to utilizing electronic medical records and emerging technologies, so research can be conducted more efficiently and in a broadly representative patient population, while ensuring that it is done securely and with informed consent...
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US Digital Service Turns 2
The U.S. Digital Service, the White House tech wing launched by the Obama administration after the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, has become a federal mainstay in two years, positively affecting a number of critical services citizens and the government depend on. In a blog post Tuesday, the White House made use of USDS’ second birthday to highlight its most significant work...
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Federal Source Code Policy Requires Agencies To Share Code
The objective behind the White House's Federal Source Code policy is to ensure all agencies make custom-developed source code available for re-use across government. The aim is to make the government work more like developers in the private sector and to encourage sharing and collaboration. The White House officially released its Federal Source Code policy on Aug. 8, designed to support improved access to custom software code developed by or for the US government...
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UMD Researchers Develop Tool to Counter Public Health IT Challenges
Front-line protection of U.S. communities against disease epidemics relies on seamless information sharing between public health officials and doctors, plus the wherewithal to act on that data. But health departments have faltered in this mission by lacking guidance to effectively strategize about appropriate “IT investments. And incidents like the current Zika crisis bring the issue to the forefront,” says Ritu Agarwal, Robert H. Smith Dean's Chair of Information Systems and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business...
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FHIR App Provides Precision Medicine Support at Point of Care
FHIR is helping to power a new precision medicine oncology app that brings clinical decision support to the point of care. Two of the most intriguing trends in healthcare may be able to work together to bring advanced clinical decision support directly to the point of care, suggest researchers who developed a FHIR-based precision medicine application that integrates with electronic health records...
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Final policy requires feds to publicly release 20 percent of code
Nearly four months after issuing a draft policy to release most — if not all — code produced by government agencies as open source, the Office of Management and Budget dropped the final mandate on Aug. 8. The use of open source code for federal projects has been a major push from the administration over the last couple years and the new policy shows an effort for the government to abide by the same standards they espouse...
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Silicon Valley Was Going to Disrupt Capitalism. Now It’s Just Enhancing It
The tech giants thought they would beat old businesses but the health and finance industries are using data troves to become more, not less, resilient. The chances that, in a few years’ time, people will be able to receive basic healthcare without interacting with a technology company became considerably smaller after recent announcements of two intriguing but not entirely unpredictable partnerships. One is between Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline...
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The $100,000-Per-Year Pill: How US Health Agencies Choose Pharma Over Patients
Don Reichmuth survived prostate cancer once before, back in 2007, so his physician was concerned when tests recently revealed the cancer had returned. Reichmuth's physician prescribed a drug called enzalutamide, marketed by the Japanese company Astellas Pharma, Inc. under the brand name Xtandi. But when the physician sent the prescription to the pharmacy, the managers of Reichmuth's insurance plan sent back an immediate refusal to approve it. Reichmuth, a retired teacher who lives in Washington State, was puzzled by the logic. Then he learned the price of the Xtandi prescription: over $9,700 each month...
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Research Raises Questions About App Usability, Accessibility
While mobile health apps have the potential to help patients better manage their chronic conditions, consumers that would benefit most—the poor and minorities—are not able to access and use the technology to realize the benefits. That’s the finding of a new observational study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine researching the impact of apps developed to enable adults to manage their chronic conditions...
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Many Device Manufacturers May Miss Looming UDI Deadline
Vendors that sell medical devices to healthcare organizations will be scrambling to meet a mid-September deadline to get unique identifiers and meet requirements to match them with devices and accompanying software. Loftware, a vendor of unique device identifier labeling solutions, recently conducted a survey of about 120 medical device professionals and found that only 15 percent of respondents said they believe their organizations are ready for the September 24 deadline...
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This Gorgeous Photo-Sharing Website Is Everything Copyright ISN'T
A 100% free use photo-sharing site has is now the second-fastest growing photography website ever made (the first is Instagram). Unsplash, by creative marketing agency, Crew Labs, is a website that only publishes pictures licensed under Creative Commons Zero, meaning users are free to “copy, modify, distribute and use the photos,” for free, without the permission of the owner, according to the Unsplash licensing statement...
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MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor Onto Single Chip
Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a sensing technology based on laser light. It’s similar to radar, but can have a higher resolution, since the wavelength of light is about 100,000 times smaller than radio wavelengths. For robots, this is very important: Since radar cannot accurately image small features, a robot equipped with only a radar module would have a hard time grasping a complex object. At the moment, primary applications of lidar are autonomous vehicles and robotics, but also include terrain and ocean mapping and UAVs...
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