diagnostic errors

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CMS Goes Live with Blue Button - With Life and Cost Saving Applications for 53 Million Americans to Use

On August 13 at the White House in Washington, D.C., the Office of American Innovation and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will host the first Blue Button 2.0 conference. This event will highlight CMS’ strong investment and leadership in Blue Button as a patient driven means for interoperability, cost-effective care and patient safety. Eight years after President Obama’s announcement of the Blue Button initiative to give Veterans, military beneficiaries and Medicare beneficiaries “easy access to their health information” with the use of a “Blue Button”, CMS Administrator Seema Verma took action with “Blue Button 2.0” so that 53 million Medicare beneficiaries can now make use of CMS approved patient facing Blue Button applications, turning a four-year history of claim data into actionable longitudinal health records to prevent costly medical errors, unnecessary redundant care or other harmful and wasteful care.

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Diagnostic Errors Top ECRI Institute’s Patient Safety Concerns for 2018

Press Release | ECRI Institute | March 12, 2018

ECRI Institute names diagnostic errors the number one concern on its 2018 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations. Each year, approximately 1 in 20 adults experiences a diagnostic error, according to published studies. These errors and delays can lead to care gaps, repeat testing, unnecessary procedures, and patient harm. “Diagnostic errors are not only common, but they can have serious consequences," says Gail M. Horvath, MSN, RN, CNOR, CRCST, patient safety analyst, ECRI Institute. "A lot of hospital deaths that were attributed to the normal course of disease may have been the result of diagnostic error."
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Houston VA Researcher Honored With Prestigious Presidential Award

Staff Writer | Cypress Creek Mirror | January 4, 2014

A patient safety researcher at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston has been named a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Read More »

Humetrix to Showcase Medicare Approved Blue Button 2.0 Mobile Platform at HIMSS19

Press Release | Humetrix | February 8, 2019

At HIMSS 19 February 11-15 in Orlando, Florida, Humetrix will demo its iBlueButton 8.0 mobile health platform approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to help millions of Americans covered by Medicare, Veterans, and military personnel in TRICARE receive safer and more cost-effective healthcare. A year after announcing the Medicare Blue Button 2.0 and MyHealthEData initiative at the HIMSS 18 conference, CMS Administrator, Seema Verma continues to emphasize the importance of "giving patients the necessary information they need to make the best decisions about their health care". Humetrix...has embraced this initiative from the start recognizing first and foremost that because Medicare beneficiaries are most at risk for medical errors and redundant tests across multiple providers they need to have access and use of their medical history wherever they receive care.

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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.

Press Release | Johns Hopkins Medicine | May 3, 2016

Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year. The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.

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The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make

Laura Landro | The Wall Street Journal | November 17, 2013

Misdiagnoses are harmful and costly. But they're often preventable. [...] Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Read More »