Darius Tahir

See the following -

EHR debacle leads to paper-based care for Coast Guard servicemembers

Darius Tahir | Politico | April 25, 2016

The botched implementation of an electronic health records system sent Coast Guard doctors scurrying to copy digital records onto paper last fall and has disrupted health care for 50,000 active troops and civilian members and their families. Five years after signing a $14 million contract with industry leader Epic Systems, the Coast Guard ended its relationship with the Wisconsin vendor, while recovering just more than $2.2 million from the company. But it couldn’t revert back to its old system, leaving its doctors reliant on paper.

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Epic Systems Feeling Heat Over Interoperability

Darius Tahir | Modern Healthcare | October 1, 2014

Epic Systems' August decision to retain a Washington lobbyist was widely seen as a sign that the leading electronic health-record system vendor is feeling political heat based on the perceived lack of interoperability between its EHR systems and other systems.

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Epic-IBM DoD EHR Modernization Award Bid Making Progress

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | January 9, 2015

Epic Systems and IBM continue to strengthen their pitch to land the $11-billion Department of Defense (DoD) EHR modernization award  with the formation of an advisory group and continued testing of its proposed EHR technology at a pilot site in West Virginia, according to multiple reports. Read More »

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Draw the Line - Time for the US to Embrace Open Source Emergency and Disaster Response

For nearly 20 years now the global open source community and applications have been a keystone to disaster relief efforts around the world. The enormous number of disaster relief applications and knowledge that has been developed through all these years, should, and needs to be leveraged in the current crisis. For that reason, Open Health News is starting a series of articles to highlight some of the most important solutions. A substantial portion the open source applications for emergency and disaster response that exist are actually already on the news website in the form of articles and resource pages.

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IBM, Epic Unveil Advisory Group As They Vie For Big Military EHR Contract

Darius Tahir | Modern Healthcare | January 7, 2015

IBM Corp. and Epic Systems Corp., likely hoping to show why their joint bid should win the Defense Department's $11 billion, 10-year EHR contract, Wednesday unveiled a 17-person group they've assembled to help advise the department and guide it through implementation if they win the work. Read More »

Open Source to the Rescue in Puerto Rico

Darius Tahir and Arthur Allen | Politico | October 16, 2017

This week, a collaboration of private sector companies, the government, and not-for-profits hopes to deliver an EHR system to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria, project leader Luis Belen told Morning eHealth's Darius Tahir. Belen, CEO of the non-profit, D.C-based National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved, has been personally touched by the disaster: two of his aunts died because of the storm. The organization is coordinating with teams from HHS to bring a package of satellite phones, pre-loaded laptops, Amazon cloud storage, and an open-source software, OpenEMR+.

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Tech Glitches at One VA Site Raise Concerns About a Nationwide Rollout

Spokane, Washington, was supposed to be the center of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ tech reinvention, the first site in the agency’s decade-long project to change its medical records software. But one morning in early March, the latest system malfunction made some clinicians snap. At Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, the records system — developed by Cerner Corp., based in North Kansas City, Missouri — went down. Staffers, inside the hospital and its outpatient facilities, were back to relying on pen and paper. Computerized schedules were inaccessible. Physicians couldn’t enter new orders or change patients’ medications.

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VA to Employees: Zip your lips

Darius Tahir | Politico | July 27, 2017

VA TO EMPLOYEES — ZIP YOUR LIPS ON EHRs: Some VA IT officials Arthur [Allen] has spoken to this week got emails instructing them to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding the Cerner deal with the agency. The emails were directed to people who “have been selected to participate in the planning for an electronic health acquisition,” and it prohibits them from discussing “all data, information and software” related to the purchase.

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We've been swindled

Paul Levy | Not Running a Hospital | June 24, 2015

...And the fraud is likely to be compounded.  The next step in the process is a forthcoming Department of Defense procurement of an EHR system to serve the military and its dependents, whether being treated at military healthcare facilities or other facilities in the communities in and around our bases and other military installations. As I understand, there is no language in this multi-billion dollar procurement that would require the vendor chosen to achieve interoperability with those EHRs in community facilities where the government will send its patients--or where they might end up for emergent care...

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