electronic health records (EHRs)

Better technology is out there serving other industries … and it can be applied in healthcare. Technology should ease administrative loads and put clinicians back in front of patients! I’ve talked about some of this previously and how we keep clinicians involved in our design process. When it came to building an entirely new EHR, the driving force behind our team researching and adopting new technologies was to imagine a clean slate...

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We know that electronic health records can cost a lot of money, sometimes millions of dollars.  So it would be pretty disconcerting for a provider to learn that it has to pay additional amounts on top of that initial layout.

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The health world is flirting with disaster, say the experts who monitor crime in cyberspace. A hack that exposes the medical and financial records of tens of thousands of patients is coming, they say — it’s only a matter of when...

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...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

A statement that health IT has a "lower risk profile" compared to other regulated healthcare sectors such as devices or drugs, in order to seek continued and extraordinary regulatory accommodations, is remarkable.  It is either reckless regarding something that the statement's makers should know, or should have made it their business to know - or a deliberate prevarication with forethought.

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Two-thirds of independent practices now deliberately selling out to hospital systems and larger groups or closing down by 2019 as the resource-intensive requirements of MIPS, administrative burdens, and under-optimized technology may make the transition to value-based care too discouraging...Despite small practice education, training and technical assistance programs promised from CMS to help onboard physicians with the MACRA programs, 89% of the remaining solo practices expect to minimize Medicare volumes as to not be required to submit reports for the quality and clinical practice improvement activities or report in the cost performance category.

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