RAND Corporation

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Mentorship For Publishing African Health Research

Janice S. Pedersen | PloS | July 12, 2012

In the second post of a short series reflecting on last month’s Getting in the Access Loop webinar organised by the Humanitarian Centre, HIFA2015 and PLoS, Janice S. Pedersen from RAND Europe discusses how mentoring capacity for publication might be improved. Read More »

More Changes In Health Care Needed To Fulfill Promise Of Health Information Technology

Press Release | RAND Health, RAND Corporation | January 7, 2013

Despite wide investments nationally in electronic medical records and related tools, the cost-saving promise of health information technology has not been reached because the systems deployed are neither interconnected nor easy to use, according to a new RAND Corporation analysis. Read More »

On the Need for Human-Centered Design in EHRs

Health information technology (HIT) has become the hottest political issue in Washington. The healthcare industry in the United States is facing a crisis as medical facilities have spent hundreds of billions of dollars implementing electronic health record (EHR) systems, yet patients and the physicians and nurses that care for them are seeing few benefits. Congress has been holding hearings focused on detailing the problems and trying to write legislation that will provide a solution to the crisis. The HIT interoperability bill drafted by Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-TX) is one example. These are welcome first steps. However, none of the bills currently before Congress, and none of the hearings, are addressing the two most important issues facing medical providers today. These are lack of EHR usability, and the inability to have a patients’ entire medical record at the point of care.

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Open Health News Continues To Grow-Visitors Cross the 375,000 Mark

We have been very busy lately and did not have time this year to write a recap of major events related to our news web site. Well, a bit late, we start here with a review of our traffic figures. Traffic to the website continues to grow and we are now approaching 20,000 unique visitors per month. As the table shows below, the total number of unique visitors since we launched the site nearly four years ago has surpassed 375,000 and the total number of Page Views has broken the 8 million mark.

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Providers Reluctant To Address EHR, Health IT Patient Safety

Jennifer Bresnick | EHRIntelligence.com | July 16, 2014

Healthcare providers struggle to address patient safety issues created by their EHRs and other health IT infrastructure, says a new report by the RAND Corporation and funded by the ONC...

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RAND Analysts Say Misaligned Incentives Hinder Interoperability

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | January 7, 2012

In 2005, several RAND Corporation researchers predicted that rapid adoption of electronic health records and health IT systems could save the greater U.S. healthcare system about $80 billion annually — not a huge amount of the $2 trillion spent that year, but worth it for the government and providers to invest money, labor and time. Read More »

RAND Corporation study: VA Health System Generally Delivers Higher-Quality Care Than Other Health Providers

Press Release | Rand Corporation | April 26, 2018

The VA health care system performs similar to or better than non-VA systems on most measures of inpatient and outpatient care quality, although there is high variation in quality across individual VA facilities, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Examining a wide array of commonly used measures of health care quality, researchers found that VA hospitals generally provided better quality care than non-VA hospitals and the VA's outpatient services were better quality when compared to commercial HMOs, Medicaid HMOs and Medicare HMOs...“Consistent with previous studies, our analysis found that the VA health care system generally provides care that is higher in quality than what is offered elsewhere in communities across the nation,” said Rebecca Anhang Price, lead author of the study and senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

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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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Slow Death by EMR or: How I Learned to Stop Clicking and Love Google Glass

Here's a dirty little secret that I'll share with you: the clinical usability of current-generation electronic medical record (EMR) systems is nothing short of atrocious. If the Geneva Convention's proscription against torture extended to healthcare information technology (HIT), most vendors would be out of business and behind bars. But you probably already knew that: a November 2013 article in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine (AJEM) found that community emergency physicians spend 44 percent of their time interacting with EMRs and click up to 4,000 times in a 10-hour shift.

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The Last Battle: Efforts To Provide Mental Health Care For War Veterans Falling Short

Greg Barnes and John Ramsey | FayObserver.com | September 26, 2012

The last battle of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is being fought at home. And in 2012, the military and the VA have done more than ever to respond to the anguish of men and women who are haunted by war...But there is little evidence that the tide has turned in the battle. Read More »

The Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology

Juergen Fritsch | Computerworld | February 27, 2013

[...] Realizing that the cost savings and improvements in healthcare delivery are nowhere near what was optimistically predicted in 2005, RAND recently commissioned a new study to take a fresh new look at the state of health information technology.  The new study paints a very different picture... Read More »

Three Possible Measures for Quality Medical Care May Help Cut Deaths from Opioid Addiction by One-Third

Press Release | RAND Corporation | June 27, 2017

Following three possible recommendations in providing medical care to people with an opioid addiction may cut deaths among such patients by as much as one-third, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Analyzing the care given to people treated in the Veterans Affairs health care system, researchers looked at whether receiving recommended medical care was associated with a lower risk of death. They found that deaths were much lower among patients with opioid addiction who were not prescribed opioids or common types of anxiety medications, those who received psychosocial counseling, and patients who had quarterly visits with a physician...

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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 »

What It Will Take To Achieve The As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology

Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones | Health Affairs | January 1, 2013

A team of RAND Corporation researchers projected in 2005 that rapid adoption of health information technology (IT) could save the United States more than $81 billion annually. Read More »

What Will It Take To Successfully Implement Health IT Solutions?

Christina Cavoli | Segue Technologies | January 18, 2013

Incorporating health IT solutions to “fix” a troublesome healthcare system has long been touted as the backbone of healthcare reform. Health IT would not only greatly improve the delivery of care through increased performance, it could also largely pay for itself [...]. Read More »