EHR interoperability

See the following -

PwC to Offer DoD Open Source EHR

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | September 8, 2014

PwC US announced Friday it would put in a bid for the Department of Defense EHR contract, proposing an open source system. Leveraging investments already made by the government into the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance by merging open source software with commercial applications, PwC plans to combine its healthcare operational and transformation capabilities with commercial EHR vendors DSS and MedSphere, and systems integrator General Dynamics Information Technology. Read More »

RedWood MedNet and CaHIE to Host Major Open Health Information Exchange (HIE) Conference

Leaders of major open source projects in healthcare and the open health HIE community are gathering for the annual Redwood MedNet Conference in Santa Rosa, CA next Thursday and Friday, July 24-25. While the focus of this conference is the growing open source HIE movement in California, the conference will feature successful open HIE implementations from around the world, including the extraordinary OpenHIE effort in Rwanda, and critical lessons for any HIE and health information organizations (HIOs) that want to develop cost-effective and successful interoperable solutions. Read More »

Ripple: Making Waves in Healthcare IT

The Ripple Program, based out of Leeds and building upon the lessons learned from the Leeds Care Record, has recently been set up to positively disrupt health and social care towards those ends. Importantly the ethos of “open” is at the heart of the work and for very good reason. It is clear that interoperability between Health IT systems will drive real change but, what is even clearer is that only an open source approach will positively disrupt this health and social care landscape across the NHS and across the globe. Funded by NHS England and hosted by Leeds City Council, the focus of Ripple is to support health and social care organizations by providing six open source elements which can be used individually, in combination or as a whole, and are consistent patterns of need when embarking on an work towards healthcare improvement with information technology.

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RWJF Report: Time to Transition to a Post-HITECH World?

Context and perspective matter. And it’s often both context and perspective that are lacking from the daily snapshots we get of health information technology, meaningful use, interoperability and the progress we are either making or not making, depending on your perspective. So I welcome a report like the one the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released last month on the state of health information technology circa 2015 in these United States. Subtitled “Transition to a Post-HITECH World,” the detailed report, created in collaboration with the University of Michigan School of Communication, the Harvard School of Public Health and Mathematica Policy Research, takes a 10,000-feet view of the ongoing digitalization of healthcare and what the priorities are as we approach the terminus of HITECH.

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Should ONC Decertify EHRs That Block Interoperability?

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | June 23, 2014

Interoperability is at the top of the list of industry-wide health IT goals, yet commercial EHR offerings with expensive add-on modules, proprietary data standards, and black-box systems that perpetuate data silos continue to be used to meet important goals like meaningful use attestation.

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Standards and Open Source Make Advances in Apps and Data Exchange for Health

I try to be optimistic about health care, and I managed to move my mood meter in that direction last month after talking about advances in data sharing, standards, and interoperability with a few people involved in the open FHIR standard: Grahame Grieve from the Core FHIR Development Team, David Hay from the FHIR Management Group, and Josh Mandel, a research scientist working on the open-source SMART Platform. Read More »

Task force summarizes barriers, mulls recommendations to improve EHR data sharing

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | August 25, 2015

Patient care coordination is the "key driver" to data sharing, but there are challenges to accomplishing that goal, according to the Health IT Policy Committee's task force on clinical, technical, organizational and financial barriers to interoperability. In its Aug. 25 meeting, the task force summarized information from hearings held earlier in the month regarding obstacles to electronic health record interoperability. Some of the major barriers to interoperability include the cost to interface, the lack of standards, the lack of infrastructure and platforms for interoperability, and the lack of a forum to pull together stakeholders.

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The Evolving Landscape of Health Information Exchange

The original vision for nationwide health information exchange was a “network of networks” model where local HIEs would interact HIE-to-HIE to form a virtual national network. But notice that many of the new initiatives are essentially solving a different problem: they are enabling point-to-point connections across a wider geography and set of clinical sites. This seems more like a large, single national network rather than leverage of more distributed organizations or implementations. Only time will tell if these private sector initiatives will collaborate, converge or compete. And only time will tell of the limitations of ONC’s ability to influence and provide leadership will creates gaps or provide new opportunities for innovation.

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The Patient-Data Pipeline: The Missing Juncture of Flow and Connectivity in Healthcare IT Systems

Part of today’s complexity in healthcare stems from the way our healthcare IT systems have emerged. There are multiple entry points for patients into the healthcare system, from a relationship with a primary care physician to the sporadic, disconnected and random interaction with emergency departments, urgent care and wellness clinics. Based on current technology and the overall nature of the beast, it is highly doubtful that a single point of entry into the healthcare delivery system will ever occur and is actually less important than the quality and cost of the care delivered.  The key is the understanding of how patients’ data flows through healthcare IT systems and building an infrastructure that optimizes that flow of data and information.

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The Value of EHR Interoperability that Money Can't Buy

There seems to be something missing in our national debate about health care and the use of health information technologies (IT) in this marketplace. Do we want a more 'open' healthy society, or a more closed system? What role should markets play in public health and medical sociology? How do we decide which EHR solutions to acquire? Should we be looking more closely at open source alternatives versus proprietary programs. Should money, quality of care, or some other non-market values determine what's best for the patient? This cuts to the heart of the debate. Consider the hospital that chooses to not pay an expensive proprietary EHR vendor for the enhanced code required by a doctor in order to get the latest real time knowledge for treating a patient's disease.

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U. S. Electronic Health Record Initiative: A Backlash Growing?

Robert N. Charette | IEEE.org | March 7, 2013

There seems to be a slow but steady backlash growing among healthcare providers against the U.S. government’s $30 billion initiative to get all its citizens an electronic health record, initially set to happen by 2014 but now looking at 2020 or beyond. Read More »

Understanding Effect of EHR Usability on Clinical Workflows

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | August 26, 2016

As EHR use becomes ubiquitous in the healthcare industry, questions about EHR usability come into play. Read More »

Updated OIG 2015 work plan adds EHR issues under review

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | June 8, 2015

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General continues to refine its scrutiny of electronic health records, adding a new focus area in an update to its work plan, but deleting several older items previously under review. The 2015 update says that for the first time, OIG will review the use of EHRs by accountable care organizations to coordinate care.

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US Defense Think Tank Calls for DoD to Adopt the Open Source VistA EHR and Avoid Closed and Proprietary EHRs.

One of the most prestigious U.S. defense think tanks, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), issued a white paper Thursday calling on the Department of Defense (DoD) to replace their existing dysfunctional “vendor-lock” medical records system with an electronic health records system (EHR) that is "extensible, flexible and easy to safely modify and upgrade as technology improves and interoperability demands evolve." The white paper warns that a "closed and proprietary" commercial EHR - such as the ones offered by Epic, Cerner or Allscripts - will lead to "vendor-lock” and isolation of health data. Read More »

VA Secretary McDonald Outlines Steps For VA Transformation at Institute of Medicine Annual Meeting

Press Release | US Department of Veterans Affairs | October 20, 2014

As the Nation’s foremost advisory body in medicine and healthcare, you know that the Department of Veterans Affairs is in the midst of overcoming problems involving access to healthcare. We own them, and we’re fixing them. But I know you also know that VA has a legacy of excellence, innovation, cutting-edge research, and achievements in healthcare delivery that is as broad and historically significant as it is profound—and often unrecognized. There’s something else. Right now, VA has before it perhaps its greatest opportunity to enhance care for Veterans in its history. Read More »