Beth Walsh, CMIO
“The migration from paper charts to EMRs offers the opportunity to provide access to patients, consultants and other caregivers. Electronic records also offer potential for greater transparency, improved efficiency and decreased costs.
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Feeley TW et al, Annals of Internal Medicine, 155(12)
Physicians’ notes are one of the oldest tools in medicine and have evolved into today’s electronic medical record. As we move toward greater transparency in health care, one emerging concept is that sharing information among patients, caregivers, and involved clinicians can improve efficiency, decrease redundancy, and decrease cost. The concept of improving health care delivery by sharing the medical record with the patient is not new.
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Greg Freeman HealthLeaders Media
“Personal health records have been a forward-thinking idea for some time now, but the rewards and requirements of achieving meaningful use are putting more pressure on providers to adopt a system that allows easy access for the patient but a reliable conduit of information from the health provider. Of the many models available, how does a provider know which way to go?
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Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“U.S. health care organizations have less than two years to fully adopt International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Edition (ICD-10) codes.
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Reda Chouffani, Meaningful Health Care Informatics Blog
“Due to the recent ARRA stimulus package signed into law, several healthcare organizations have shifted gears in their search for the perfect EHR solution. This excited many of the software vendors in the market place and spurred economic growth in the healthcare IT field.
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Diane Matthews, EMR and EHR
“Rural healthcare providers seem to be facing more obsticles with the following issues regarding EHR: cost, functionality to cost, effective training, implementation, support, IT hardware backend.
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Carolyn M. Clancy, Government Health IT
“Health information technology professionals often are mystified when doctors, nurses and other clinicians don’t embrace their technology. Even taking concerns about start-up costs and interruptions into account, many health IT experts see the cost and quality improvement benefit far exceeding the downside.
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Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Health Populi
“Under a normal statistical curve, between the chronically ill and the “motivated healthy,” is the largest segment of health citizens who are seeking missing information and solutions that could help them lead healthier lives. IBM has called out this information seeking segment, asserting that these people represent a huge unserved cohort of health care consumers.
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EMR Daily News
“The Electronic Prescribing Incentive Program today announced proposals for new flexibilities to help providers phase in the use of electronic prescription technology. This program provides financial incentives, including payment adjustments beginning January 1, 2012, for eligible providers to encourage electronic prescribing.
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Technology for Doctors Online
“Work is under way to ensure that healthcare providers can share electronic health information for Greater Toronto Area (GTA) residents, who represent 47 percent of the province’s population. The ConnectingGTA project will allow 700 service providers to securely share patient health information across the five GTA Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs).
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Cardiovascular Business
“Tsang shared a personal anecdote during his days as the CMO at the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in New York City on the adoption of an EHR. “It wasn’t an easy journey during the go-live period,” he admitted. With 75 providers at the organization whose salaries depended on productivity and who needed 4,000 visits a year, it was tough when their productivity dropped about 25 percent in the first month.
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Paul Roemer, Healthcare IT Strategy
“It just occurred to me that the ONC’s role, the Office of the National Coordinator, is just that—coordination. Who or what is the ONC supposed to be coordinating—among its various functions–the providers? There are the coordinators, and their constituents—the uncoordinated. I know at least one provider who already spent $400 million on its EHR. They didn’t get coordinated. I asked one of their executives who played a major oversight role in the implementation, with whom they worked at the ONC. She was not even familiar with the acronym.
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Shank N et al, Community Mental Health Journal, 2011
Interviews with 32 community behavioral health providers elicited perceived benefits and barriers of using electronic health records. Themes identified were (a) quality of care, (b) privacy and security, and (c) delivery of services. Benefits to quality of care were mentioned by 100% of the providers, and barriers by 59% of providers.
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El Emam K et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 18(3)
Background
Providers have been reluctant to disclose patient data for public-health purposes. Even if patient privacy is ensured, the desire to protect provider confidentiality has been an important driver of this reluctance.
Methods
Six requirements for a surveillance protocol were defined that satisfy the confidentiality needs of providers and ensure utility to public health. The authors developed a secure multi-party computation protocol using the Paillier cryptosystem to allow the disclosure of stratified case counts and denominators to meet these requirements. The authors evaluated the protocol in a simulated environment on its computation performance and ability to detect disease outbreak clusters.
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Healthcare IT News
“A new KLAS report finds that providers are looking for vendors that offer smooth integration between a radiology information system (RIS) and a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). To achieve that integration, some providers are willing to sacrifice functionality.
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Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek Healthcare
“Under the government’s meaningful use guidelines, healthcare organizations must provide a patient with a copy of his or her medical data within 48 hours of their requesting it. To accomplish that, many healthcare organizations are deploying patient portals. And while they’re at it, they’re also building in other features, like appointment scheduling and messaging.
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Sujata Srinivasan, Hartford Business Journal
“Picking the right software is like selecting a mate. First, you look out. Next, you check out. Then, you make the move. Sometimes, you live together happily ever after.
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Patty Enrado, EHRWatch
“InformationWeek surveyed 357 business technology professionals at healthcare provider organizations for its Analytics’ Healthcare IT Priorities Survey. While nearly 60 percent of these healthcare provider organizations still need to either buy or upgrade an EHR system, 52 percent of respondents said they are “very confident” and 31 percent are “somewhat confident” that they will meet the meaningful use requirements to receive incentive funding.
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Kimberly Leonard and Josh Israel, The Center for Public Integrity
“Home care providers in rural areas and other underserved communities may soon be eligible to receive Medicare payments for audio and video home monitoring under a Senate bill reintroduced last week after going nowhere in three recent sessions of Congress.
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Janice Simmons, FierceEMR
“While financial incentives linked to “reasonable, achievable measures” will encourage the use of electronic health records (EHRs) by physicians, “aggressive, burdensome requirements” will not, 39 physician and medical specialty groups stated in a letter to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
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