DoctorsLounge
“Incentive payments to health care providers to encourage adoption of the electronic health record (EHR), instituted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), should encourage bidirectional sharing of information between EHR systems and state or regional immunization information systems (IIS), according to research published online Feb. 7 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
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Dombkowski KJ et al, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 42(1)
Background
Children with chronic conditions have an increased risk of complications from influenza and have low influenza vaccination rates.
Purpose
To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of using a statewide immunization information system (IIS) for seasonal influenza vaccine reminders from local health departments (LHDs) targeting children with high-risk conditions.
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Sara Jackson, FierceMobileHealthcare
“University of Edinburgh researchers have combined gaming with autism research in a new app, FindMe, that they say could help autistic children as young as 18 months. Touchscreens, tablets and other mobile technologies already were known to interest autistic children, but researchers say FindMe is the first game to directly engage their specific learning style, and use that engagement to build social skills.
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Burke RV et al, Journal of Pediatric Surgery, 47(1)
PURPOSE
During a disaster, hospitals may be overwhelmed and have an insufficient number of pediatric specialists available to care for injured children. The aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of remotely providing pediatric expertise via a robot to treat pediatric victims.
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News.com.au
“Doctors in Canada are designing a virtual world where they hope to one day treat traumatised children with colourful avatars using toy-like medical gadgets.
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Vest JR et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 11
Background
Children may benefit greatly in terms of safety and care coordination from the information sharing promised by health information exchange (HIE). While information exchange capability is a required feature of the certified electronic health record, we known little regarding how this technology is used in general and for pediatric patients specifically.
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Robert Rowley, EHR Bloggers
“Though recently published, the data in this study were from a decade of observation up through 2008. What we have seen since 2008 has been very significant uptake of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems
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Kennebeck SS et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2011
Implementing electronic health records (EHR) in healthcare settings incurs challenges, none more important than maintaining efficiency and safety during rollout. This report quantifies the impact of offloading low-acuity visits to an alternative care site from the emergency department (ED) during EHR implementation. In addition, the report evaluated the effect of EHR implementation on overall patient length of stay (LOS), time to medical provider, and provider productivity during implementation of the EHR.
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Jennifer Dennard, EMR and EHR
“My recent blog about Sandhills Pediatrics and its successful implementation of an EMR prompted, fortunately, a very intriguing comment from Chip Hart, a Director of Sales and Marketing at Physicians’ Computer Company who also maintains the blog “Confessions of a Pediatric Practice Consultant: True Stories from the land of Pediatric Practice Management.”
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Brian Ahier, Ahier.net
“While parents commonly use the Internet to learn about pediatric health problems, little is known about how often they seek out this information, and how they use it prior to seeking medical care.
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Roger Downey, GlobalMedia
“An abstract presented Friday to the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition in Boston, titled “Disproportionately Increasing Psychiatric Visits to the Pediatric Emergency Deparment Among the Uninsured”, notes that pediatric patients are increasingly receiving psychiatric care in hospital EDs. Telemedicine might be important in this setting, but first let me tell you more about the abstract.
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Live interactive videoconferencing and other technologies offer innovative opportunities for effective delivery of specialized child and adolescent mental health services. In this article, an example of a comprehensive telepsychiatry program is presented to highlight a variety of capacity-building initiatives that are responsive to community needs and cultures; these initiatives are allowing children, youth and caregivers to access otherwise-distant specialist services within their home communities.
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Fraser Coast Chronicle
“Ground breaking telemedical technology in use at Hervey Bay hospital has led to a drop in patient transfers to Brisbane.
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Zurovac D et al, The Lancet, 378(9793)
Background
Health workers’ malaria case-management practices often differ from national guidelines. We assessed whether text-message reminders sent to health workers’ mobile phones could improve and maintain their adherence to treatment guidelines for outpatient paediatric malaria in Kenya.
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Hsiao AL et al, Pediatrics, 127(2)
BACKGROUND
Although e-mail may be an efficient clinician-patient communication tool, standard e-mail is not adequately secure to meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelines. For this reason, firewall-secured electronic messaging systems have been developed for use in health care. Impact and usability of these secure systems have not been broadly assessed.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the impact of a secure electronic messaging system implemented for a pediatric subspecialty clinic.
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Hart T et al, Telemedicine and e-Health, 17(6)
Introduction:
Immunization schedules are complicated and difficult for parents to remember. Parents are willing to receive text message reminders. However, it is unknown whether physicians are willing to implement such a system. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of a text messaging reminder system from the physician’s perspective.
Materials and Methods:
Surveys were distributed in the winter of 2009–2010 by e-mail, facsimile, and telephone interview to 149 family physicians and pediatricians who provide immunizations in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
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Eric Wicklund, Healthcare IT News
“The world’s smallest and most fragile people need all the help they can get.
Two recent reports concerning the use of telemedicine in hospitals or hospital departments catering to children paints a promising picture for the technology’s deployment in NICUs and other areas.
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Juhn Y et al, Primary Care Respiratory Journal, 20(1)
OBJECTIVE
To characterise the relationship between ICD code-based (i.e. physician diagnosis-based) and criteria-based asthma ascertainment.
METHODS
We compared identification of children with asthma between criteria-based medical record review for asthma ascertainment and an ICD-9 code-based approach. We determined the agreement rate and validity index of ICD code-based asthma ascertainment using asthma status by medical record review as a gold standard.
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Kalra D, Fernando B. Primary Care Respiratory Journal, 20(1)
In the linked paper entitled “Characterisation of children’s asthma status by ICD-9 code and criteria-based medical record review”, the authors have observed a discrepancy between the presence of clinical features compatible with the diagnosis of asthma in children’s hospital electronic health records and the tagging of the record with a corresponding classification code.
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Anoshiravani A et al, Journal of Participatory Medicine, 3
This paper describes the development of an innovative health information technology creating a bidirectional link between the electronic medical record (EMR) of an academic children’s hospital and a commercially available, interoperable personal health record (PHR). The goal of the PHR project has been to empower pediatric patients and their families to play a more active role in understanding, accessing, maintaining, and sharing their personal health information to ultimately improve health outcomes.
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