New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)

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Health IT Can Learn From Past Screw-Ups

Paul Cerrato | InformationWeek | June 25, 2012

In healthcare today, we're seeing many clinicians give up paper recordkeeping systems by patching in EHRs. Then they're frustrated because they don't see the productivity spike they'd hoped for. What's really needed is process re-engineering by EHR vendors and clinicians alike.

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Hospitals' Struggles To Beat Back Familiar Infections Before Ebola Arrived

Staff Writer | Kaiser Health News | October 23, 2014

While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than one in six hospitals – including some top medical centers – are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show...

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How Superbugs Threaten Your Food And Life

Sanchita Sharma | Hindustan Times | May 10, 2014

...This worrying problem causing as much global concern as terrorism is antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics, the wonder drugs that made surgery safe and stopped disease outbreaks by preventing and curing all infections four decades ago, can no longer do so...

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It’s About Time: Open APIs Finally Burst Onto Healthcare’s Sluggish Scene

Sue Montgomery | Nuviun | June 9, 2014

In the midst of the struggles that we face with interoperability, efforts that support open API use may well hold the keys to the HIT Kingdom...

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Let's Do Public Health Better

Eric Reinhart, who describes himself as “a political anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and physician,” has had a busy month. He started with an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about “reconstructive justice,” then an op-ed in The New York Times on how our health care system is demoralizing the physicians who work in it, and then the two that caught my attention: companion pieces in The Nation and Stat News about reforming our public health “system” from a physician-driven one to a true community health one. He's preaching to my choir. I wrote almost five years ago: “We need to stop viewing public health as a boring, not glamorous, small part of our healthcare system, but, rather, as the bedrock of it, and of our health.” Dr. Reinhart pulls no punches about our public health system(s), or the people who lead them...

Moving Health IT Innovation Forward: A Vision For Substitutable Components

Tom Krohn | Eli Lilly Clinical Open Innovation | November 4, 2012

In the March 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Kenneth Mandl and Isaac Kohane of Harvard Medical School introduced the idea of a health information technology platform that works more like the iPhone than a traditional system. Read More »

Open Payments Website Opens Tuesday; Database Spotlights Physician Payments

Jaimy Lee | Crain's Detroit Business | September 29, 2014

Dr. Uzma Samadani, a New York City neurosurgeon, publicly discloses that she receives 6 percent of her revenue from research funding and has equity in a startup medical technology firm she founded.  Samadani and about 300 other doctors and clinicians are members of “Who's My Doctor?,” a new national group that encourages physicians to not only disclose to patients their financial relationships with medical manufacturers, but also report other details about their professional finances, such as whether they receive fee-for-service payments that could motivate them to perform more services...

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The Republican Case For Waste In Health Care

Phillip Longman | Washington Monthly | March 1, 2013

Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand. Read More »

The Utopia of Unique Patient Identifiers

The subject of Unique Patient Identifiers pops up with clockwork regularity in the healthcare discourse. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) titled Has the Time Come for a Unique Patient Identifier for the U.S.? points out that HIPAA initially mandated patient identifiers. Reason prevailed and the requirement was abandoned. The article goes on to list, correctly, all the issues related to duplicates and split records and their dire consequence from financial costs to potential loss of life. Just a few short years ago the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) issued a petition calling for unique patient identifiers citing much of the same issues and making a proposal for a voluntary solution. That effort also failed to get much traction either. While the problems cited are very real, it is not at all clear how a unique identifier would solve the problem, in spite of the very bold claims.

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This Man’s Simple System Could Transform American Medicine

Sarah Fallon | WIRED | October 14, 2014

...Developed by a trio of epidemiologists back in the ’80s, the NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit...It’s unfortunate, then, that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients...

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This New Data Should Make You Pretty Nervous About The Latest Bird Flu

Lily Kuo | The Atlantic Cities | April 25, 2013

Only 4 of the 81 people with confirmed cases of bird flu in China have fully recovered, according to a new study of the outbreak by the New England Journal of Medicine. The report also confirms that human-to-human transmission of H7N9, which could cause a deadly global pandemic, can’t be ruled out. Here’s a summary of the report. Read More »

To Boost Engagement, Remove Barriers To Consumers' Access To Records

Susan D. Hall | Fierce Health IT | February 11, 2014

As healthcare organizations seek to boost consumer engagement, it's important to understand how traditional policies on access to health information might cause roadblocks, according to a practice brief at the Journal of AHIMA.  Policies and practices should be continuously examined and updated to ensure that they do not present impediments to consumer engagement, authors of the brief write.

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VA's $400K History Book Sidetracked By Crisis

Dennis Wagner | AZ Central | January 19, 2015

When the media, investigators and Congress exposed the Department of Veterans Affairs' broken and dishonest health-care system last year, VA officials were forced to postpone publication of a $400,000-plus history book that glowingly portrays the agency's achievements...

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