Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)

See the following -

Creating Beth Israel's FY16 Information Systems Strategic Plan

I recently wrote about the process of setting FY16 Clinical Information System Priorities for the next year. That project is proceeding well and in parallel I’ve created my own contribution. I do not want to influence the stakeholder consensus at all, but members of the IS Governance committee asked for my opinion. Here’s my thinking...Each year, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Information Systems works with business owners to support BIDMC annual goals with information technology tactics. This ensures that the mission of BIDMC is supported by suitable operational tools. From 2012-2015, all hospitals in the US were compelled to focus their attention on Meaningful Use, ICD-10, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, and the Affordable Care Act. Since those projects are nearly completed, it is important for BIDMC stakeholders to enumerate the new technology priorities which will best support their activities in the coming year. Read More »

Criminal Attacks On Hospitals Up 100 Percent

Erin McCann | Government HealthIT | March 12, 2014

Criminal attacks on hospitals are on a huge upward trend, with a whopping 100 percent reported increase just from four years ago. That’s according to a new Ponemon Institute study released today.

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Data Attacks On Healthcare Flying High

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | March 12, 2014

In the realm of privacy and security, heeding snooping employees and encrypting portable devices isn't enough in healthcare these days. Criminal attacks on hospitals are on a huge upward trend, with a whopping 100 percent reported increase just from four years ago.

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Dr. Halamka’s Dramatic MU Prediction In Boston

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | May 13, 2014

John Halamka, M.D. predicted on May 13 that 80 percent of U.S. hospitals would fail to attest to MU Stage 2 on time

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Epic Holdout Questions Install Craze

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | July 31, 2013

In a recent blog post, John Halamka, MD, chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, offers his views on why the Epic EHR has gained unprecedented momentum in the market among providers nationwide -- not least among an elite group of hospitals in Boston. Read More »

ER Doctors Use Google Glass And QR Codes To Identify Patients

Jon Brodkin | Ars Technica | March 12, 2014

A tech-savvy hospital in Boston developed a custom information-retrieval system for Google Glass, which lets ER doctors scan a QR code on the wall of each room to call up information about patients...

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GAO Hits EHR Incentive Program Hard

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | March 7, 2014

The GAO recently took a swipe at the government's Meaningful Use EHR Incentive Program, saying it lacked strategy and called for action to establish a strategy in order to achieve its goals, especially those aimed at improving care.

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Google Glass Handed Out To Medical Students At UC Irvine

Dara Kerr | CNET | May 14, 2014

The California school thinks the device will help students with anatomy, clinical skills, and hospital rotations. Read More »

Hackers Exploit Heartbleed To Swipe Data Of 4.5 Million

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | December 12, 2014

In the second biggest HIPAA breach ever reported, one of the nation's largest healthcare systems has notified some 4.5 million of its patients that their personal information has been snatched by cybercriminals...

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Halamka Discusses Three Disruptive Care Coordination Innovations In Use at Beth Israel

Would you buy an iPhone if the only apps that ran on it were written by Apple?   Maybe, but the functionality would not be very diverse. The same can be said of EHRs. Athena, Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and self developed EHRs such as BIDMC’s webOMR are purpose-built transaction engines for capturing data.  However, it is impossible for any single vendor to provide all the innovation required by the marketplace to support new models of care I’m a strong believer in the concept of third party modules that layer on top of traditional EHRs in the same way that apps run in the iPhone ecosystem...

Halamka Explains Background to athenahealth/BIDMC Collaboration

BIDMC and athenahealth announced a new and unique collaboration. The collaboration between the two organizations provides athenahealth the chance to take BIDMC’s experience to a much larger audience, hopefully making a difference to providers, patients, and payers across the country.   athenahealth will also accelerate its ability to develop expanded functionality more rapidly than doing it alone. Read More »

Halamka on What's Next for Electronic Health Records

With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement (including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what’s next for EHRs. Clearly the industry is in a state of transition. eCW will be distracted by its 5 year corporate integrity agreement. AthenaHealth will have to focus on the activist investors at Elliott Management   who now own 10% of the company and have a track record of changing management/preparing companies for sale. As mergers and acquisitions result in more enterprise solutions, Epic (and to some extent Cerner) will displace other vendors in large healthcare systems. However, the ongoing operational cost of these enterprise solutions will cause many to re-examine alternatives such as Meditech...

Halamka Outlines Social Media Guidelines for Beth Israel Clinicians

We recently published this guideline at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) based on the input from a multi-disciplinary working group. I thought it might be useful to share with the community, since many healthcare organizations are at the early stage developing social media policies...We receive reviews on all our social media sites. Some are informal, like a tweet. Some are formal reviews, like on Facebook, Yelp, Google+, etc. BIDMC monitors all sites 24/7 using a social media dashboard. To maintain our integrity, BIDMC follows the same social media guidelines as the universal online community. This means...

Halamka Pays a Visit to Oscar Health

Today I’m in New York City visiting Oscar Health, on my continuing quest to determine how best to integrate digital platforms, patient-family engagement, and care coordination in preparation for MACRA/MIPS and the transformation from fee for service to alternative payment models. At the moment, there is no single magic bullet, but there are early innovations that hold promise. At BIDMC we’ve thought the best approach to care management is to identify a cohort with a disease, then enroll that cohort in a program which involves tracking progress against guidelines/protocols, deploying telemedicine/visiting nurses, and measuring data from home-based devices...

Halamka Recounts Early Experiences with Ambient Listening Devices (Alexa and Google Home)

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has a long tradition of testing speculative technologies with the notion that breakthroughs often require tolerance for failure. For example, we’ve embraced blockchain in healthcare because we believe public ledgers have promise to unify medical records across institutions. Over the past few months, we’ve developed healthcare applications for Alexa, Amazon’s ambient listening device that combines natural language processing and easy to use application program interfaces. We have also tried Google Home. Here’s our experience thus far...