Joseph Goedert, HDM Breaking News
“The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology will create a new database to assess the effectiveness of ONC grants given to establish state health information exchanges, regional extension centers to help physicians adopt electronic health records, and community colleges to establish health I.T. training programs.
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Joel Selanikio, Mobile Message
“In 1995, I was working as a health officer for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One evening found me kneeling on the concrete floor of a small hostel in rural Western Kenya, pocket knife in hand, laptop on the floor in front of me. With the hostel manager’s permission, I was hand-splicing the one telephone landline embedded in the wall to the port on my laptop – in order to connect to the Internet via a phone number in Nairobi.
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Michael Cross, Guardian Professional
“On all the official indicators, Barnsley PCT was doing a grand job, but it was troubled. “The bother was that the population kept dying on us,” its former chief executive, Ailsa Claire, told a King’s Fund conference in London last month.
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Haider AH, Pronovost PJ. Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 37(10)
Racial disparities in health care delivery and patient outcomes exist and persist unabatedly in the health care system in the United States. One potentially modifiable mechanism for disparities attributed to health care is the quality of care provided to minorities. Minorities tend to receive lower-quality health care even when insurance status and income are controlled. Black patients receive less intensive hospital care, for example, receiving fewer cardiac procedures, lung resections for cancer, and kidney and bone marrow transplants.
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Weissman JS, Hasnain-Wynia R. N Engl J Med, 364(24)
Health care reform’s promise will not be realized if it fails to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in care. The first step toward monitoring, identifying, and targeting the underlying causes of disparities is for health care organizations to collect and analyze data that adequately describe their populations. No single entity has the capacity to analyze disparities for the entire country, and one of the largest and most comprehensive sources of utilization — health insurance claims — lacks basic demographic data on the race and ethnic background of enrollees. It is therefore worthwhile to examine the status of data collection and future options.
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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.
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David Catron, The American Spectator
“While armies of attorneys battle the Justice Department over Obamacare’s constitutionality, and politicians hold forth about their strategies for repealing and replacing the unpopular law, bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have been working around the clock to assure that the President’s “signature domestic achievement” becomes a permanent fixture of your life. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her accomplice Donald Berwick have been promulgating regulations as quickly as their minions can get them written.
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Wes Rishel, Gartner
“Some involved in the search for an Entity Level Provider Directory are advocating for an approach that relies on search engines like Google and Bing and a modest approach to standardizing data using microdata while others are arguing for a more structured and rigorous approach based on a highly federated use of LDAP.
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Steve Dickman, Xconomy
“Even if Obamacare is ultimately upheld, it’s hard to imagine that the government alone is capable of unifying and analyzing all this data through the implementation of electronic health records.
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Rosie Lombardi, Technology for Doctors Online
“Doctors still use paper and fax to share data with Public Health authorities, but recent pandemics have underscored the need to automate data collection. To this end, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) ran a pilot during the second wave of the H1N1 pandemic (Oct 2009 to May 2011).
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Houston Neal, Software Advice
“There’s a lot of talk about the risks of storing health information in electronic medical records (EMRs). But, EMRs aren’t the problem. Those consent forms you sign at the doctor’s office… yeah, you should pay attention to the fine print. You may be giving permission to insurance companies, drug makers, and data aggregators to access your health information, regardless of how or where it’s stored.
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Wes Rishel, Gartner
“One of the insights of the PCAST report was the utility of sending the question to the data vs centralizing the data to answer questions. It may take a long time to achieve this by defining a new universal data language and using digital content management to manage consumer privacy preferences, but what happens if we uncouple that the basic “question to the data” notion from the more elaborate vision of the Report?
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CMIO
“Collecting data and linking them to quality measures are vital for targeting efforts at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in care, according to a June 16 perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Emily Badger, Miller-Mccune
“Keeping individual health information private is good thing, but so is aggregating that data to improve care in general. Can those competing good ideas find a happy medium?
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Thomas McMennamin, EHR Bloggers
“Everyone is talking about leveraging health data to improve care and quality and to lower costs. Health care is one of the few industries that is still waiting for the information revolution to hit.
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Helen Phung, EHR Bloggers
“Is the sharing of anonymous, de-identified health information is much different? Identifiable patient data is exquisitely sensitive and is protected as such.
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Hal Amens, EHR Bloggers
“Traditional pharmaceutical research for regulatory approval looks like this:
Test panel -> Test -> Analyze -> Yes or No
This is a limited test to support approval of a new medication based on demonstrated safety and effectiveness. It supports a yes or no by the Food and Drug Administration based on the evidence that can be derived from a relatively small sized sample.
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Chip Means, Healthcare IT News
“There’s wonderful information technology in the World of Health IT exhibit hall, said Microsoft’s Bill Crounse here in Budapest, but it’s what you do with the information that counts.
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Paul Christopher Webster, CMAJ News
“Grandiose nation-wide electronic health record (EHR) systems aimed at aggregating patient data into general summaries may not be feasible, necessary or medically justified, according to a European Commission report.
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John Moore, Chilmark Research
“Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group (HSG), which has straddled the fence with consumer-facing (HealthVault) and corporate-facing (Amalga), is increasingly moving to the corporate side of the fence. Not that surprising considering that the consumer market continues to struggle (Google Health is in virtual mothball state, consumer adoption of HealthVault is nothing to write home about) and that HSG has now moved out of R&D and is now under the business solutions group, Dynamics.
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