David Raths

See the following -

A Web Services Approach to Public Health Clinical Decision Support

David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | October 22, 2016

Although it is still early days, I am increasingly convinced that the movement to bring a web services approach to healthcare is real. Every week brings announcements of new efforts to create modules that do one thing well and that providers could subscribe to from within their EHR. This approach makes so much more sense than each provider working with its software vendor to recreate the wheel.This is especially appealing in the realm of clinical decision support (CDS), in which knowledge management is so time-consuming and difficult for provider organizations...

Read More »

CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid

After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.

Read More »

Creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for the ‘Learning Health System’

David Raths | KM World | September 14, 2017

The idea that the healthcare industry can study the data being created in electronic health records (EHR) to foster ongoing improvement is not a new one, but it is gaining momentum. A “learning health system” is one that commits to the use of data as a byproduct of care for continuous learning. Clinicians and health system researchers want to tackle perhaps their industry’s most significant knowledge management challenge: how to capture the results of research into clinical best practices and more quickly feed it back to doctors and nurses at the point of care...

Read More »

Sending Medicaid to the Cloud

David Raths | government technology | January 12, 2016

Led by Wyoming, states are ready to pioneer MMIS as a service. The Wyoming state government already has considerable experience with cloud-based services. It uses Google Apps for Government, NEOGOV for human resources and is looking at Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. But as its Department of Health prepares to issue an RFP to replace its Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), all eyes in the Medicaid IT sector are on Wyoming because it will be the first time a state has tried to move away from an expensive custom-developed system to an MMIS-as-a-service approach.

Read More »

What Ethical Issues Does the Precision Medicine Initiative Face?

David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | July 10, 2017

"This is the largest government study ever on its own people.” Nancy Kass, Sc.D., a professor of bioethics and public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, was talking about the Precision Medicine Initiative, now called the All of Us Research Program. Kass says she makes that bold statement deliberately and with humility, because she chairs the institutional review board (IRB) for the project, which aims to create a million-person cohort...

Read More »