Kaiser Permanente

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"What Systems Work In Healthcare And Why?" Is Focus Of 19th Annual Health Policy Conference

Press Release | ECRI Institute | November 2, 2012

Today’s healthcare systems face escalating challenges as they aggregate into larger and more complex health systems that are vertically and horizontally integrated. The trend is being driven by both business conditions and new government policies. But are the new systems producing better clinical and business outcomes? Read More »

An Epic conflict of interest

Pejman Yousefzadeh | The Daily Caller | December 27, 2011

Meet Judy Faulkner. She is the founder and CEO of Epic Systems Corporation in Wisconsin. She is also a member of the GAO Health Information Technology Policy Committee and an advisory board member of the Journal of Healthcare Information Management. She is also politically active...The $787 billion stimulus bill signed into law by President Obama in February 2009 included $19 billion for healthcare information technology (HIT), and created the Health IT Policy Committee, whose job it was to advise the federal government on spending the $19 billion allocation. The committee was to have one member responsible for representing information technology vendors. Judy Faulkner was designated as that member.

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An Epic Conflict of Interest: Part 2

Pejman Yousefzadeh | The Daily Caller | January 2, 2012

So we are left to wonder whether patient care and best practices are being sacrificed on the altar of favoritism, cronyism and special deals. If it matters to you what kind of care patients are receiving and how HIT systems contribute to the quality of patient care, then Faulkner’s willingness to prioritize political back-scratching above quality HIT practices ought to raise alarms.

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As Hospital Chains Grow, So Do Their Prices For Care

Chad Terhune | California Healthline | June 13, 2016

As health care consolidation accelerates nationwide, a new study shows that hospital prices in two of California’s largest health systems were 25 percent higher than at other hospitals around the state. Researchers said this gap of nearly $4,000 per patient admission was not due to regional wage differences or hospitals treating sicker patients. Rather, they said California’s two biggest hospital chains, Dignity Health and Sutter Health, had used their market power to win higher rates...

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Blockchain's Potential Use Cases for Healthcare: Hype or Reality?

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | February 22, 2017

At HIMSS17 on Wednesday, IEEE Computer Society and the Personal Connected Health Alliance hosted a day-long event focused on the potentially transformative promise of an intriguing innovation: Blockchain. Kicking off the symposium, "Blockchain in Healthcare: A Rock Stars of Technology Event," Tamara StClaire, previous chief innovation officer at Conduent Health (formerly known as Xerox Healthcare), made the case that the bitcoin-derived secure digital ledger technology could just maybe offer the answer to an array of vexing healthcare challenges – not least of which is interoperability...

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CIMI Group Goes with OpenEHR Archetypes & UML Profile

Thomas Beale | Woland's Cat | December 14, 2011

The Clinical Information Modelling Initiative (CIMI) group led by Dr Stan Huff (Intermountain Health, Utah) met here in London 29 Nov – 1 Dec to make a final decision on formalism, from the two remaining – openEHR archetypes and various forms of UML (previous posts on CIMI: DCMs & RM, on formalisms). Instead of simply choosing one, the group made a more strategic choice of designating openEHR ADL/AOM 1.5 as the core formalism, with a corresponding profile of UML being developed to enable the more numerous UML-based developers (e.g. VA, NHS etc) to use archetypes within their UML toolchains....

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Commodity Data Analytics For Health Care

Analytics are expensive and labor intensive; we need them to be routine and ubiquitous. I complained earlier this year that analytics are hard for health care providers to muster because there’s a shortage of analysts and because every data-driven decision takes huge expertise.

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Comparative Effectiveness Research Improves Outcomes, Kaiser Finds

Julie Bird | FierceHealthcare | June 10, 2013

The national Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) can look to Kaiser Permanente to see how comparative effectiveness research can enhance healthcare. Read More »

EHR debacle leads to paper-based care for Coast Guard servicemembers

Darius Tahir | Politico | April 25, 2016

The botched implementation of an electronic health records system sent Coast Guard doctors scurrying to copy digital records onto paper last fall and has disrupted health care for 50,000 active troops and civilian members and their families. Five years after signing a $14 million contract with industry leader Epic Systems, the Coast Guard ended its relationship with the Wisconsin vendor, while recovering just more than $2.2 million from the company. But it couldn’t revert back to its old system, leaving its doctors reliant on paper.

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Epic Systems' Tough Billionaire

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | April 18, 2012

Judith Faulkner...has made a fistful. From her remote midwestern outpost, Faulkner, 68, has quietly built Epic, which sells electronic health records into a $1.2 billion (2011 revenues) business—double four years ago...Helping enrich Faulkner is also a piece of government legislation that subsidizes the adoption of electronic medical records, by paying millions to qualifying hospitals. Forbes estimates her net worth at $1.7 billion.

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Epic-IBM DoD EHR Modernization Award Bid Making Progress

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | January 9, 2015

Epic Systems and IBM continue to strengthen their pitch to land the $11-billion Department of Defense (DoD) EHR modernization award  with the formation of an advisory group and continued testing of its proposed EHR technology at a pilot site in West Virginia, according to multiple reports. Read More »

FDA Launches Open Source Tool to Help Capture Data from Patients

Press Release | Food and Drug Administration | November 6, 2018

Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is announcing the MyStudies app, a new mobile technology to foster the collection of real world evidence via patients' mobile devices. Real world data can be collected from a variety of sources, such as electronic health records, claims and billing activities, and product and disease registries, as well as from patient-generated data including in home-use settings, or from data gathered from other sources, such as mobile devices. As part of the agency's work to foster greater opportunities around real world evidence, the FDA partnered with Kaiser Permanente on a pilot study to measure the functionality and engagement of the MyStudies app.

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Five Healthcare IT Leaders Adopt Carequality Interoperability Framework

Press Release | Carequality, The Sequoia Project | January 21, 2016

Carequality, an initiative of The Sequoia Project, today announced initial implementers of the Carequality Interoperability Framework released in December 2015. The companies are athenahealth®, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts. The five organizations have agreed to provide health information exchange services for their customers under the comprehensive Framework, which consists of legal terms, policy requirements, technical specifications, and governance processes. The Framework is an operationalization of the groundbreaking Principles of Trust to enable nationwide health information exchange. Read More »

Health IT's Next Big Challenge: Comparative Effectiveness Research

Paul Cerrato | InformationWeek | August 21, 2012

Healthcare providers are being pushed to deliver more cost effective medical care and to improve the health of not just individual patients but large populations. One key to carrying out both mandates is finding more clinically effective treatment options. Read More »

Health Tap: Intelligent Interface for Patients

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPAA | January 9, 2017

    allows patients to connect with doctors online, and additionally hosts an enormous repository of doctors’ answers to health questions. In addition to its sheer size and its unique combination of services, HealthTap is ahead of most other health care institutions in its use of data. I talked with founder and CEO Ron Gutman about a new service, Dr. AI, that triages the patient and guides her toward a treatment plan: online resources for small problems, doctors for major problems, and even a recommendation to head off to the emergency room when that is warranted. The service builds on the patient/doctor interactions HealthTap has offered over its six years of operation, but is fully automated...

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