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Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Big Data Can Save Health Care—But at What Cost to Privacy?
From the opinion: “Although health data are highly sensitive and thus require protection, they are also a public good. The more data that researchers are able to analyze, the better chances they have for detecting patterns that can lead to fewer wasteful (and often painful) procedures and tests, and for finding new causes, treatments, and even cures for diseases. …Ironically,
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State Health Insurance Exchanges Choke On Health IT
Politico: Politics aside, IT could be biggest barrier to 2014 readiness.
By Ken Terry, InformationWeek
May 31, 2012
State health insurance exchanges (HIX) face technological barriers that could prevent many of them from launching in January 2014--on top of the political and legal challenges they face, says a new article in Politico.
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Houston HIE to connect 130 hospitals via 'network of networks'
By Mike Miliard, Managing Editor
Created 05/31/2012
HOUSTON – Greater Houston Healthconnect announced Thursday that it will partner with Medicity to establish a community-wide health information exchange, connecting more than 130 hospitals and some 14,000 physicians in a 20-county region of Southeast Texas.
Officicials say Healthconnect will bridge existing networks of major health systems, together with independent hospitals and providers to improve care quality and lower costs for 7 million area residents.
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Big Data Reality Check
MAY 29, 2012 2:44pm ET
The promise of business gems from big data may be more of a long-range goal as enterprises work through their own issues with BI systems and unstructured content uses, according to a new report from non-profit information management professionals group, AIIM.
The survey, entitled “Big Data – Extracting Value from Digital Landfills” consisted of more than 400 responses to an AIIM member survey conducted in March and April. Less than 10 percent reported that it is already an “essential capability” for business and about 15 percent expect that it will be essential. On the flip side, nearly 15 percent reported they weren’t really aware of what big data is yet and about 20 percent were merely more than curious about its potential. As far as data analysis, reporting and BI across structured data sets, only 4 percent are developing advanced analytics and big data tools, while most still opt for spreadsheets and ad hoc reports (30 percent) and reports in individual business systems (29 percent).
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Written by Beth Walsh
May 29, 2012
New clinical informatics subspecialty is a go
The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) has approved the American Board of Preventive Medicine's application for subspecialty certification in clinical informatics.
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Health IT spending flying high, survey says
By Erin McCann, Associate Editor
Created 05/31/2012
CLEARWATER, FL – Healthcare IT spending hasn’t shown signs of slowing down anytime soon. In fact, a Black Book HIE survey released today projects that industry spending will triple by 2014.
Despite these projections, the majority of U.S. hospitals (80 percent) and physicians (97 percent) remain disconnected from HIE technology. The survey’s numbers suggest, however, that the tides are indeed changing. Although only one in 15 provider organizations indicated they are developing strategies to advance them towards HIEs, industry tech executives sang a different tune, with 84 percent saying they are actively taking measures to move towards HIE adoption.
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NEWS
June 1, 2012
Infoway to become more responsive to health system needs, CEO vows
Canada Health Infoway must rapidly reboot, and do so in substantial fashion, if it’s to justify public outlays beyond the billions already spent on developing a national electronic health infrastructure, according to the crown corporation’s CEO.
After years of defending a strategy that favored massive centralized data systems over meaningful use of electronic health data by physicians and patients, Richard Alvarez, Infoway’s top mandarin, told a blue chip audience in Vancouver, British Columbia on Tuesday that the agency must re-prioritize its activities as Canada’s existing approach has left it lagging dismally behind international counterparts such as Australia and New Zealand in achieving improvements in care through the use of electronic technologies.
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If state health care exchanges survive the Supreme Court challenge to health care reform, the election and state tea party activists, health policy experts are worried they could still be brought down by a much more mundane problem: information technology.
Even states that are solidly committed to pursuing an exchange are facing major logistical challenges in building the computer systems that will be able to handle enrollment when exchanges open for business in 2014.
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Hypertension study ties EHR data quality to training, management
May 31, 2012 | By Susan D. Hall - Contributing Writer
Data quality remains an issue in electronic health records, according to a West Virginia study of hypertension cases that found use of free text was a common cause of indentification errors. The authors looked at barriers to outcomes research, quality improvement and practice redesign, such as the National Committee for Quality Assurance's Patient-Centered Medical Home program.
The West Virginia researchers imported anonymous EHR data from 11 West Virginia primary care centers into an external system, in this case a public-domain patient registry, in an attempt to search for hypertension cases. Through the EHR data--patient diagnoses, demographics, vitals, laboratory results and services--they could look at coding consistency and completeness, according to a report published in Perspectives in Health Information Management.
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EHR training often rushed, overwhelming
May 30, 2012 | By Marla Durben Hirsch
Some of the problems that hospitals and practices are running into with electronic health record adoption stem from the ways that staff are trained on the systems, Andres Jimenez, CEO of EHR training provider ImplementHIT, told Becker's Hospital Review in a recent interview.
For example, many EHR training programs rush to provide advanced training when physicians are not yet ready, overwhelming them and ultimately lowering retention rates.
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Fierce exclusive: 10 steps for thwarting EHR hackers
May 31, 2012 | By Marla Durben Hirsch
It's bad enough that the number of security breaches of patient protected health information appears to be skyrocketing. But it feels downright creepy when the breach is at the hands of a hacker, as was the recent attack by Eastern European hackers that breached almost 800,000 Medicaid recipients in Utah.
And while a lot of hackers are attacking EHRs to steal the information within them for personal gain, many of them do it just for the fun of it, attorney Robert Hudock, with Epstein, Becker Green in Washington, D.C., said in an exclusive interview with FierceEMR. "It's very easy to scan for vulnerability and execute an exploit. People are curious," he said.
Hudock, who is a certified "ethical hacker" as designed by the International Council of e-Commerce Consultants, warns that information security and privacy concerns have become so widespread that providers are increasingly at risk of not being able to defend their EHR and other health IT systems.
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6 tips to mitigate cloud-computing risks
By Michelle McNickle, Web Content Producer
Created 05/30/2012
A recent Healthcare IT News survey found 48 percent of respondents planning to incorporate cloud computing into their health IT endeavors; 33 percent had already taken the plunge. But 19 percent answered with a "no," and according to Rick Kam, president and co-founder of ID Experts, one of their biggest fears could very well be security issues surrounding the cloud.
"Cloud computing poses great risks for healthcare organizations, providers and entities responsible for safeguarding protected health information (PHI)," said Kam. "Healthcare entities are responsible under Federal HITECH and HIPAA regulations for the security of PHI in the cloud, though they often have little or no control where or how this data is moved, processed, or stored."
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Everything You Need to Know About BYOD
MAY 29, 2012 2:08pm ET
Not that long ago, Michael Roca walked into the breakfast restaurant of a hotel he was staying at for his work as senior vice president of compliance at Jefferies & Co.
Sitting near him was a couple with four phones laid out on their table. Two each, one for business communications, one for personal communications.
Those days are ending, as executives, managers and employees all begin relying increasingly on smartphones that blend Web surfing, entertainment, business and communications of all types, as well as tablets and lightweight computing devices with larger screens for consuming books, reports and interactive media. Devices that they purchase for their own reasons. But quickly want to use for both personal and business purposes.
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Hospital CIOs: Health IT change 'too much, too fast'
May 31, 2012 | By Dan Bowman
Meaningful Use. ICD-10. HIPAA 5010. Separately, all of these implementations, along with many others, represent big changes for hospital executives. Combined, however, they represent a big mess, according to a new healthsystemCIO.com survey.
Roughly 74 percent of CIOs surveyed admitted that all of the various changes being asked of hospitals are starting to become overwhelming. "So often I hear the phrase 'Can you make them stop?' one CIO said in responding to the survey. "In this case, mandates, regulations, financial shakedowns and haircuts, quality pressures, MD affiliations, HCAP scores, the list goes on and on. Organizations need to do a better job at setting priorities, as no outfit can do it all."
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Maine HIE to create 'nation's first' statewide medical image archive
May 31, 2012 | By Susan D. Hall - Contributing Writer
Maine's health information exchange HealthInfoNet is planning a five-month pilot to create a statewide medical imaging archive, which it says will be a nationwide first.
The health exchange decided in 2009 not to include images because they average 50 megabytes each. With the state's providers creating 1.8 million medical images a year, the bandwidth strain would make the system unbearably slow. But clinicians keep asking for the images, not just the text report they have been getting.
The pilot will use 200 terabytes of storage for X-rays, CT scans, MRIs and mammograms, and will involve 56 radiology imaging centers, which produce 80 percent of the state's images, Computerworld reports.
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Freedom of 'best-of-breed' HIT systems costly
May 31, 2012 | By Dan Bowman
While best-of-breed IT systems allow hospitals to be more innovative with their technology implementations, it's not all fun and games, according to Lehigh Valley Health Network Chief Medical Information Officer Donald Levick, M.D., who spoke at an event at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia this week.
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Humber confirms Lorenzo go-live
31 May 2012 Chris Thorne
Humber NHS Foundation Trust has confirmed its successful “go-live” with Lorenzo and issued more details about its implementation of the electronic patient record system.
According to a statement issued to eHealth Insider by the trust, more than 600 staff across 50 sites are now using the system, for which it is now the mental health ‘early adopter’, to record clinical activity.
The statement says that local service provider CSC has provided the trust with “a patient administration system with clinical applications for care management, task management, internal referrals, clinical documentation and letters, ward attenders, document scanning, and access plans to monitor waiting times and care pathways.”
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Don't let meaningful use dictate EMR choices, IDC tells small practices
By Mike Miliard, Managing Editor
Created 05/30/2012
FRAMINGHAM, MA – A new report from IDC Health Insights rates the best EMR vendors for small physician practices -- and warns that the short-term incentives of meaningful use shouldn't overshadow those offices' long-term care strategies.
The study, "IDC MarketScape: U.S. Ambulatory EMR/EHR for Small Practices 2012 Vendor Assessment" assesses 11 products from nine vendors aimed at helping small physician practices qualify for meaningful use incentive money. In its report, IDC weighs in on which vendors are well-positioned today through current capabilities – and which are best positioned to gain market share over the next one to four years.
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May 29, 2012
Gottlieb and Kleinke: There's a Medical App for That---Or Not
By SCOTT GOTTLIEB AND J.D. KLEINKE
Even the most ideologically opposed politicians agree: Health care is choking on paperwork, and medicine is prone to errors of handwriting, lost information and guesswork. That's why the promotion of health information technology is one of the only demilitarized zones in Washington—consistently attracting bipartisan support since the Bush administration began funding ways to standardize and computerize health-care records a decade ago.
Despite such broad political support—plus that of health insurers, providers, drug companies and patient groups—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unfortunately has rushed in to play bureaucratic spoiler just as this new engine of innovation was leaving the station.
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Denmark Selects InterSystems HealthShare For Countrywide Health Information Exchange
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—February 2, 2012—InterSystems Corporation, a global leader in software for connected care, today announced that InterSystems HealthShare™ has been chosen to support health information exchange (HIE) throughout Denmark.
The Danish NSI (Nationalt Sundheds-IT), an agency operating under the Ministry of Health, is beginning development of a new service to link healthcare information systems used within Danish regions on a national level. The new HealthShare-based initiative enables the sharing of patient information between healthcare providers and government agencies countrywide.
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Pennsylvania closes in on health IT network
May 27, 2012 12:00 am
By Bill Toland / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Within two years, Pennsylvania should have in place a first-generation, Internet-based communications network that allows for the exchange of patient health data among doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurers and, eventually, the federal government.
It will be -- according to its advocates -- one of the great nonclinical medical advances of our age, carrying with it lofty expectations that it will improve outcomes and save money for the U.S. health care system.
"It's a huge deal," said Martin Ciccocioppo, vice president of research at the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania. It will begin "an amazing evolution for the delivery of health care," said Pam Clarke, vice president of health care finance and managed care at the Delaware Valley Healthcare Council.
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Grow Your Own Health Information Exchange
While many healthcare organizations turn to private vendors to set up HIEs, others get good results by building their own.
By Paul Cerrato, InformationWeek
May 29, 2012
Once upon a time, many health IT stakeholders hoped to develop a massive, public health information exchange (HIE) that would eventually let hospitals and practices share patient data nationwide. That hope is beginning to look more like a pipe dream.
A recent report from Chilmark Research for instance, shows that while the HIE market grew more than 40% in the past year, most of that growth came in privately sponsored, enterprise health information exchanges, rather than in public health information exchanges that seek to connect providers across regions and states. 
Chilmark CEO John Moore offered his take on the growth in private HIEs in a recent InformationWeek Healthcare interview: "Everybody realizes they're going to have to tie their systems together with their affiliates if they're going to have any hope of surviving payment reform."
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X-rays and iPads: The network healthcare evolution
Network technology is changing the nature of healthcare—slowly.
by Sean Gallagher - May 30 2012, 2:00am AUSEST
At the rate technology has changed everything else in our lives, by now we should have the equivalent of tricorders in our smartphones—instant access to our health statistics collected by sensors in our clothes and pulled into our individual health history in the cloud. We should be able to Skype our physician, text our pharmacist, and get both a blood sugar measurement and an MRI at Starbucks while waiting for a grande latte.
Except for the MRI part, all of that is doable today. Thanks to the big stick provided by the Affordable Care Act in the US, some healthcare organizations are pushing more aggressive use of network bandwidth and cloud technology:
- Monitoring patients’ health more proactively with networked devices, ranging from wirelessly networked medicine bottle lids to worn or embedded sensors that report back on vital signs;
- Coordinating care with the help of analytic tools in the cloud and a wealth of individual and collective patient data; and
- Connecting physicians directly with patients over PCs or mobile devices for between-appointment follow-ups.
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6 reasons today's heath IT systems don't integrate well
By Michelle McNickle, Web Content Producer
Created 05/29/2012
Although the healthcare community has been clamoring for integration of its IT systems for decades, the industry is still in a rather elementary stage when it comes to useful and practical systems integration, according to Shahid Shah, software analyst and author of the blog The Health IT Guy.
"Our problem in the industry is not that engineers don’t know how to create the right technology solutions or that somehow we have a big governance problem," he said. "[Although] those are certainly issues in certain settings, the real cross-industry issue is much bigger – our approach to integration is decades old [and] opaque, and [it] rewards closed systems."
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A Status Check on the Government’s HIT Training Programs
MAY 30, 2012 12:04pm ET
After being laid off from a private sector technology job, Linda Gebaroof directed her energies toward starting a career in health I.T. Having worked as licensed practical nurse many years ago, and with an associate's degree in computer science, she figured moving into health care I.T. wasn't much of stretch.
And to increase her marketability, she enrolled in and completed an HIT training program at a nearby community college, a program funded by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology's Community College Consortia program, designed to train more than 10,500 new HIT professionals a year.
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Patient-reported data key to 'big data' success
May 30, 2012 | By Ken Terry
Researchers from technology companies and universities are trying to figure out how to apply analytic tools to a wide range of information to improve healthcare and find new cures for diseases. Most of these "big data" efforts involve the use of clinical records. But an article in the Atlantic says researchers could achieve more by analyzing data from patient surveys and other sources than by scouring electronic medical records.
Author Robert Litan, vice president for research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which recently issued a report on big data, admits that lab and test results might be useful in this kind of research. But other data that could be important--on patients' health behavior, life and job histories, and genomic makeup, for example--is either not included in clinical records or is inaccessible because it is locked up in physician notes, he writes.
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Electronic Records Foster Glucose Control
By Chris Kaiser, Cardiology Editor, MedPage Today
Published: May 29, 2012
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner
PHILADELPHIA -- The use of electronic medical records (EMRs) for insulin order sets can improve glycemic control in hospitalized diabetes patients, researchers said here.
The rate of hypoglycemia pre-EMR subcutaneous insulin order sets was 9.6%, which dropped to 3.8% after the adoption of an EMR, according to Karla M. Arce, MD, from the Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston, Fla., and colleagues.
The difference was significant at P=0.03 (95% CI 0.27 to 0.51), Arce said here at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) meeting.
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E-prescribing sign-up highest among small practices
The nation’s largest e-prescribing network finds solo practices experienced the highest growth in adoption.
Government incentives aimed at e-prescribing and electronic health record use had the intended effect, as they are considered the primary reasons for the great interest in e-prescribing among small practices.
The 2011 “National Progress Report on e-Prescribing and Interoperable Health Care” by Surescripts, the largest e-prescribing network, found that 58% of office-based physicians are using e-prescribing systems and the highest use — and largest growth — has been among small practices. Solo practices saw the most significant growth from 2010 to 2011.
When broken down by practice size, the report found that practices with six to 10 physicians have the highest adoption rate at 55%, up from 44% in 2010, followed by two- to five-physician practices, whose adoption rate of 53% was up from 42% in 2010. From 2010 to 2011, e-prescribing in solo practices rose from 31% to 46%.
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6 reasons physicians need to be on social media
By Michelle McNickle, Web Content Producer
Created 05/21/2012
NEW YORK – Live tweeting, ukulele playing and numerous discussions swirling around social media and healthcare were to had throughout the Connecting Healthcare + Social Media Conference, produced by NYC Health Business Leaders, this past week in New York. During the latter half of the day Thursday, Mike Sevilla, M.D., family physician and blogger at Family Medicine Rocks, took the stage to present not only his own social media story, but to convince other physicians why they, too, need to be on social media.
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Tablet adoption by docs soars
By Bernie Monegain, Editor
Created 05/22/2012
NEW YORK – Physicians' use of devices and digital technology is evolving much faster than anticipated, especially when it comes to tablets, where adoption nearly doubled since 2011, according to a new study from healthcare market research and advisory firm Manhattan Research.
The study surveyed 3,015 U.S. practicing physicians online in Q1 2012 across more than 25 specialties.
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ONC chief pushes for HIE 'rules of the road'
By Mary Mosquera, Contributing Editor
Created 05/29/2012
WASHINGTON – Healthcare providers need health information exchange to be fully automated and easy to do in order to scale up sharing of patient data to improve care, according to Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national coordinator for health information technology.
Some steps for preparing data for exchange are still often almost hand-coded, such as vocabulary mapping, value sets and quality measures, he said.
The development of rules of the road to govern the nationwide health information network (NwHIN) could promote that automation by detailing the policies and technical standards that organizations that want to perform exchange activities would meet to foster trust in their services.
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The Price of I.T. Progress?
APR 30, 2012
Three years ago, independent physicians ruled the roost at Medical Center Health System, a 403-bed community hospital in Odessa, Texas. At that point, the health system employed only half a dozen physicians, mostly primary care docs who doubled as hospitalists. Today, the employed medical staff numbers 30, encompassing both radiology and anesthesiology. And the number is going to keep growing, says Gary Barnes, CIO. "When we're recruiting medical staff, we try to bring in private physicians first, but more and more, they want to be hospital-employed," he says.
The reason? For Barnes, the answer boils down to one simple fact: Running a private group practice, of whatever size, is increasingly a difficult undertaking, one that fewer and fewer physicians are keen on doing. "If you come in as an employed physician, we can take care of the billing and the medical records, and you can practice medicine instead of trying to manage a business and make a profit."
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Cash contests alone won't make EHRs work for specialists
May 29, 2012 | By Ken Terry
A new contest announced by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) offers cash prizes for applications that integrate ophthalmologists' examination devices with their electronic health records. If one or more parties came up with apps that met all of ONC's criteria by Nov. 9, the contest deadline, that could be a step forward for eye doctors. But it would still address only a portion of their health IT needs.
Here's what ONC requires of the winning application: it must warehouse data from many different devices; convert the data from proprietary formats to a single, vendor-neutral format; enable clinicians to manipulate data and images; and interface with existing EHR systems (presumably, just the top dozen or so).
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Video gaming more than just child's play
May 29, 2012 | By Sara Jackson
University of Pittsburgh researchers say video games as a powerful tool for improving patient health, according to a study just published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
It's not a comprehensive endorsement--the study finds there are too few clinical-level studies on the topic, and some drawbacks to video gaming overall--but video games can substantially improve outcomes in physical therapy (69%), psychological therapy (59%), getting patients more active (42%) and pain management (42%), the study found.
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EMIS relaunches EMIS Access
28 May 2012 Rebecca Todd
EMIS is re-launching EMIS Access through patient.co.uk, with an "easy to use" interface for patients who will also be able to log-in without their practice-issued password.
Group chief executive Sean Riddell spoke at the iLinks event in Liverpool last week about work to make the patient access portal more attractive to both GPs and patients.
The news follows a firm commitment in the NHS information strategy, released last week, that all GPs should be offering patients online access to transactional services and their medical record by 2015.
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EHI PC survey: show us the money
GPs leading the government’s commissioning reforms have high hopes for IT; but wonder where the leadership and money is going to come from. Fiona Barr reports.
28 May 2012
Clinical commissioning groups have one big priority and one big problem when it comes to IT and information.
The priority is to enable better information sharing across the health economy. The problem is that they do not know where the funding will come from to enable them to do that. Or who is going to be responsible for the infrastructure, services and systems that will be needed to do it.
Joined up
Last month, EHI Primary Care conducted an exclusive survey of GPs, CCG chairs, board members, IM&T leads, and others involved in commissioning. It found that 82% hope that IT will help them to provide better clinical information to GPs over the next three to five years.
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EHI PC survey reveals funding fears
29 May 2012 Fiona Barr
Uncertainty about future funding for NHS IT and the future direction of NHS informatics are the biggest IT concerns for clinical commissioning groups, according to an exclusive survey by EHI Primary Care.
Nearly a third of those who took part in the poll (29%) said future funding for NHS IT as a whole was their major concern, 19% were worried about uncertainty over the future direction of NHS informatics, and 12% said they were mainly concerned about funding for GP systems.
On respondent said “the NHS must make a decision about where IT will sit along with its resources” and another said their greatest concern was that “responsibility to fund GP IT national initiatives will be passed to local organisations without any additional funding.”
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The Power of Plugged-In Physicians
Philip Betbeze, for HealthLeaders Media , May 25, 2012
Hospital and health system senior executives are continually searching for ways to engage their physician staff. Some are doing it through an employment strategy. Some are creating a variety of economic incentives for physicians to help them achieve the goal of fewer readmissions, meet quality targets, and agree on treatment protocols that fit evidence on cost and quality. They're working to educate physicians on the downstream effects of their decisions on the entire organization.
Those are all valid and important initiatives to attempt in an industry hungry for transparency, cost control, and better quality. But to hear many CEOs speak, it's a tricky business to encourage physician engagement, and they search for the right combination of incentives to get the job done. They fail at their career peril.
I have found that most execs have trouble defining what exactly physician engagement or alignment really looks like.
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http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/TEC-280664/Pill-Mill-Crackdown-Endangers-Telepsych-Program
Pill Mill Crackdown Endangers Telepsych Program
Scott Mace, for HealthLeaders Media , May 29, 2012
It is far too easy in this country to set up and run a pill mill. Recently I attended a session on healthcare fraud and abuse detection where a former regulator noted that in the state of Florida, all that was required to set up an online pharmacy was to prove one was 19 years or older.
Now here come federal lawmakers, trying to solve a problem that may in large part belong to the states. And one such effort, unless amended, uses such broad brush strokes that it threatens to choke off a very good technology-based healthcare program.
Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina is the tertiary hospital serving the 18 counties of western North Carolina. Rural primary and secondary hospitals there are isolated and lack many specialists. Psychiatrists and neurologists are in particularly short supply.
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3 Solutions to Improve EHR Training, Outcomes
May 25, 2012
When hospitals purchase expensive electronic health record systems, they are hoping to benefit from advanced features, which produce cost-savings, increased efficiency and patient care benefits. However, training sessions for complex EHR systems can be overwhelming and time consuming. According to Andres Jimenez, MD, CEO of ImplementHIT, many hospitals may not receive optimal outcomes from EHRs because hospital staff and physicians are not trained effectively. "One of the basic tenets of education is that individuals, especially adult learners, must find training immediately relevant need to be engaged in learning in order to retain information. With physicians, if the information is not relevant, it is not only harder for the individuals to learn, it will often completely disrupt learning, which reduces engagement and any possibility of meaningful learning from that point forward," says Dr. Jimenez. For healthcare, relevance applies to EHR training in both content and pace, at which intermediate and advanced topics are introduced. According to Dr. Jimenez, physicians and hospital staff need to undergo gradual EHR training that is set to their individual pace and tailored to their specialty and proficiency level. Not many EHR training sessions are individualized or specialized, which is causing problems for hospital EHR implementation.
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Dictation Degrades EHR Accuracy
By John Pulley
May 23, 2012
Patient care is “significantly worse” when doctors dictate their notes into electronic health records compared with two other common forms of documenting care, according to a study published online this week by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The findings suggested that doctors “who more intensely interact” with EHRs based on their style of documentation “may pay greater attention to coded fields and clinical decision support and thus may deliver higher quality care,” according to the article abstract.
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Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Integrated Health Systems Lead the Pack on Mobile Health
by Rebecca Vesely, iHealthBeat Contributing Reporter
Rob Carnahan lives in rural Oregon, about 80 miles from the nearest Kaiser Permanente facility. But the 63-year-old checks his personal health records, emails his doctor, receives lab results and makes appointments from out in his fields.
He's even refilled a prescription from atop his tractor.
Carnahan is an avid iPhone user and is on his third generation of the popular smartphone. He accesses the Kaiser Permanente website through the device to keep on top of his health care needs, and he rarely uses a laptop or desktop computer to do so.
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Enjoy!
David.