Next week, 50,000 of our closest friends will gather together in Orlando to learn about the latest trends in the healthcare IT industry. I’ll be giving a few keynote addresses, trying to predict what the Trump administration will bring, identify those technologies that will move from hype to reality, and highlighting which products are only “compiled” in Powerpoint - a powerful development language that is really easy to modify! The Trump administration is likely to reduce regulatory burden but is unlikely to radically change the course of value-based purchasing. This means that interoperability, analytics, and workflow products that help improve outcomes while reducing costs will still be important...
health information technology (HIT)
See the following -
Greenway Founding Member Of Carequality Data Exchange Initiative
Greenway® is joining more than two dozen healthcare organizations representing providers, retail health, health information exchanges, health information technology, payers and other multi-platform networks in founding and supporting roles of Carequality (“care-e-quality”) during its launch at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society Annual Conference and Exhibition (HIMSS14) in Orlando. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Greenway Shows The Value Of Patient Data Beyond The EHR At HIMSS14
Company accelerates interoperability of data across platforms for care coordination, clinically driven financials and optimized population health; to demonstrate in booth 2503 Read More »
- Login to post comments
Groups Urge Obama To Delay Federal HIT, mHealth Regs
A group of more than 100 health IT stakeholders sent a letter to the Obama Administration this week, cautioning the quick implementation of regulation for the industry. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Growth Of SMART Health Care Apps May Be Slow, But Inevitable
This week has been teaming with health care conferences, particularly in Boston, and was declared by President Obama to be National Health IT Week as well. I chose to spend my time at the second ITdotHealth conference, where I enjoyed many intense conversations with some of the leaders in the health care field [...]. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Hagel Says DoD To Adopt Commercial EHR
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has notified the Department of Defense that it will look for an electronic health record system available on the commercial market rather than develop its own based on the Department of Veterans Affairs VistA system. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Halamka Explains Background to athenahealth/BIDMC Collaboration
BIDMC and athenahealth announced a new and unique collaboration. The collaboration between the two organizations provides athenahealth the chance to take BIDMC’s experience to a much larger audience, hopefully making a difference to providers, patients, and payers across the country. athenahealth will also accelerate its ability to develop expanded functionality more rapidly than doing it alone. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Halamka Gears Up for HIMSS 2017
- Login to post comments
Halamka on What's Next for Electronic Health Records
With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement (including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what’s next for EHRs. Clearly the industry is in a state of transition. eCW will be distracted by its 5 year corporate integrity agreement. AthenaHealth will have to focus on the activist investors at Elliott Management who now own 10% of the company and have a track record of changing management/preparing companies for sale. As mergers and acquisitions result in more enterprise solutions, Epic (and to some extent Cerner) will displace other vendors in large healthcare systems. However, the ongoing operational cost of these enterprise solutions will cause many to re-examine alternatives such as Meditech...
- Login to post comments
Halamka on Why he Disagrees with the "Snake Oil" Analogy
Earlier this week, the American Medical Association CEO called digital healthcare products modern-day "snake oil." As a provider and a technologist, I think we need a deeper dive to understand the issues, avoiding the kind of hyperbole that’s so common in politics today. Paul B. Batalden, MD, Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), once said “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”. Let’s take a brief look at the history of national healthcare IT efforts from 2004-2016 to understand how we’ve achieved exactly the results we designed.
- Login to post comments
Halamka's Cautionary Tale for Healthcare
During my CIO career, I’ve worked on a few Harvard Business School case studies and I’ve had the “joy” of presenting my failures to Harvard Business school students for over a decade. I enjoy telling stories and inevitably the cases I teach are about turning lemons into lemonade. In this post, I’d like to tell a story about a recent experience with Marvin Windows and lessons learned that apply to healthcare...
- Login to post comments
Halamka's Dispatch from Israel
This week Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker led a trip of clinicians, industry leaders, government officials, academics, and entrepreneurs to visit Israel (not at taxpayer expense) on a mission to establish Massachusetts as an incubator for the US growth of Israeli companies. I represented the healthcare IT innovation work we’re doing at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School. Israel is a remarkable place. With 8 million people in a nation the size of New Jersey situated in an unstable part of the world, Israel has no choice but to be a start up nation, creating companies that generate economic impact world wide...
- Login to post comments
Halamka's Health IT Observations from Japan and New Zealand
This week I’ve taken vacation time to help my colleagues in Japan and New Zealand with national IT planning. As I often say, the healthcare IT challenges are the same all over the world, but the cultural context is different. In Japan, I spent 2 days in Tokyo and 1 day in Kyoto, lecturing, meeting, and listening to stakeholders. There is a great desire to share data for care coordination and clinical trials/clinical research. Telemedicine/telehealth is increasingly important in an aging Japanese society that has increasing healthcare needs but a limited number of caregivers and few opportunities to increase healthcare budgets. Here are a few of the current issues we discussed...
- Login to post comments
Halamka's Reflections on US Health IT Policy Trajectory
I’m in China this week, meeting with government, academia, and industry leaders in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou. The twelve hour time difference means that I can work a day in China, followed by a day in Boston. For the next 7 days, I’ll truly be living on both sides of the planet. I recently delivered this policy update about the key developments in healthcare IT policy and sentiment over the past 90 days. I’ve not written a specific summary of the recently released Quality Patient Program proposed rule which provides the detailed regulatory guidance for implementation of MACRA/MIPS, but here’s the excellent 26 page synopsis created by CMS which provides an overview of the 1058 page rule...
- Login to post comments
Halamka: A Time of Great Turmoil in Healthcare IT Policy Making
We are in a time of great turmoil in healthcare IT policy making. We have the CMS and ONC Notices of Proposed Rulemaking for Meaningful Use Stage 3, both of which need to be radically pared down. We have the Burgess Bill which attempts to fix interoperability with the blunt instrument of legislation. Most importantly we have the 21st Century Cures Act, which few want to publicly criticize. I’m happy to serve as the lightening rod for this discussion, pointing out the assumptions that are unlikely to be helpful and most likely to be hurtful. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Halamka: Stage 2 Meaningful Use, ICD-10 Timelines Unrealistic
The current slew of health IT initiatives slated to hit the healthcare industry over the next year or so place unrealistic expectations on beleaguered providers [...]. Between Stage 2 of meaningful use, ICD-10 implementation, the HIPAA Omnibus rule, and the Affordable Care Act, providers simply have too much to handle in too short a timeframe to make everything work the way rule makers hope it will. [...] Read More »
- Login to post comments