Emily P. Walker, MedPage Today
“State health departments have made steady progress in implementing electronic systems to track and share data on the prevalence of diseases, but states use varying tracking systems that may not work together as well as they should, according to a report from the CDC.
[ More ]
Acker B et al, Journal of AHIMA
Problem lists facilitate continuity of patient care by providing a comprehensive and accessible list of patient problems in one place. Problem lists used within health records are a list of illnesses, injuries, and other factors that affect the health of an individual patient, usually identifying the time of occurrence or identification and resolution.1 They are an important communication vehicle used throughout the entire healthcare continuum.
[ More ]
Abramson EL et al, Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 37(10)
BACKGROUND
Health policy forces are promoting the adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) with electronic prescribing (e-prescribing). Despite the promise of EHRs with e-prescribing to improve medication safety in ambulatory care settings–where most prescribing occurs and where errors are common–few studies have demonstrated its effectiveness. A study was conducted to assess the effect of an e-prescribing system with clinical decision support, including checks for drug allergies and drug-drug interactions, that was integrated within an EHR on rates of ambulatory prescribing errors.
[ More ]
López L et al, Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 37(10)
BACKGROUND:
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care have been consistently documented in the diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of many common clinical conditions. There has been an acceleration of health information technology (HIT) implementation in the United States, with health care reform legislation including multiple provisions for collecting and using health information to improve and monitor quality and efficiency in health care. Despite an uneven and generally low level of implementation, research has demonstrated that HIT has the potential to improve quality of care and patient safety. If carefully designed and implemented, HIT also has the potential to eliminate disparities.
[ More ]
Linda Davidson, e-Health Insider Acute
“There are now over nine million summary care records (SCRs) available for use in urgent and emergency care in England, the Ascribe User Conference heard this week.
[ More ]
Steelman VM. American Journal of Surgery, 201(2)
BACKGROUND
A retained surgical sponge is a serious medical error that results in negative patient outcomes. Radiofrequency (RF) technology has recently been introduced to evaluate for the presence of a retained sponge. The aim of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the detection of surgical sponges embedded with an RF chip through the torsos of subjects of varying body habitus, including the morbidly obese.
[ More ]
Angela Dunn, Healthcare IT News
“While #mhealth or mobile health is taking the world by storm, Happtique, a mobile application store developed specifically for healthcare professionals, aims to make sense of it all. Happtique, Healthcare-APP-bouTIQUE, provides a growing app catalog of what it calls “hApps” or healthcare applications.
[ More ]
Andis Robeznieks, ModernHealthcare
“Physicians need at least three to five days of training to feel satisfied with their electronic health-record system, and being able to easily use the EHR functions required for meaningful-use incentive bonuses took two weeks of training—but almost half of the doctors responding to a recent survey reported that they received three days or less of EHR training.
[ More ]
Hugh Kelly, Government Health IT
“Compliance with ICD-10 is a significant effort that spans many parts of healthcare organizations. The scope is massive and, perhaps even more daunting is the fact that the healthcare industry does not have experience with equivalent transitions.
[ More ]
Remen VM, Grimsmo A. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 80(11)
Background
Information deficits contribute to medical errors. Hence several efforts to develop electronic communication systems to facilitate a flow of information between health care providers have been attempted, including initiatives to develop regional or national electronic patient summaries.
Objectives
To study information access and information needs in inpatient emergency departments, and how clinicians in these departments handle deficits in available information.
[ More ]
Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“What a surprise that The Australian’s anti-ehealth correspondent, Karen Dearne, didn’t report NEHTA CEO Peter Fleming’s complete dismemberment- at the Senate estimates hearing this week – of her panic-mongering story about the use of tiger teams.
[ More ]
Mark Polly, Portal Solutions Blog
“All these examples are widely different applications of the concept of a portal. However, they all share one particular attribute: aggregation. All the “portals” mentioned above aggregate information from various resources and pull it together so the user can make some sense of it.
[ More ]
Marla Durben Hirsch, FierceEMR
“The Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record incentive program is meant to propel widespread adoption of electronic medical record keeping, largely in an effort to improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs.
[ More ]
Marla Durben Hirsch, FierceEMR
“An estimated 56 million people have viewed their medical data on an electronic health record maintained by their doctor, and another 41 million are interested in doing so, according to a new survey released by Manhattan Research.
[ More ]
Katherine Rourke, EMR and EHR
“If you search health IT sites looking for gossip and kvetching, you’d get the impression that Siemens’ Soarian EMR is buggy, hard to use and a general pain in the tuchus. But some of that gossip goes back a few years, and from what I can see, it’s died down a lot. These days, things may be different indeed.
[ More ]
NexTech EMR
“A fully certified EMR means more than just a few letters (ONC-ATB, CCHIT, etc.) tacked onto the name, but that the software measures up to the highest standards in the industry.
[ More ]
Doug Thompson, iHealtBeat
“When I went in for my first-ever screening colonoscopy, I was worried about complications or the doctor finding cancer. The procedure was routine, my results were good and I was back at work the next morning; however, the process was uncoordinated, inefficient and lacked a customer focus.
[ More ]
Marla Durben Hirsch, FierceEMR
“The National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), the statutory public advisory body to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, has recommended that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) hold off on including metadata standards to Stage 2 of the Meaningful Use incentive program.
[ More ]
florence, Frontline SMS
“When an innovator is struck with a new idea for a technology, his or her first thought isn’t necessarily “How can this be used for a humanitarian, development, or peace-building cause?” Rather, it is more often “How can I sell millions of copies of this in the Apple App Store?” or “How soon will I be able to sell this to a venture capitalist and use the money to buy my I Am Rich app“.
[ More ]
Koen Cobbaert, EMDT
“Your phone rings. It’s the authorities. A doctor has reported an adverse incident, and your software was involved. Confusion reigns: Is the software a medical device? Should it have been CE marked? A forthcoming European document will provide guidance.
[ More ]
