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Terry Fairbanks will outline advances, challenges to more effectively tuning systems and software for patients and caregivers.
Rockford Health System in Rockford, Illinois is using the Health Level 7 data exchange standard to see both the real-time fetal monitoring strip and the patient’s electronic record on the same computer screen.
In the past, clinicians had a computer-based patient record in one location and a fetal monitor elsewhere. Using the HL7-based GE Healthcare Centricity Perinatal Connect technology enables Rockford to combine and save documentation from both the EHR and the perinatal systems into its Epic patient record.
The most important benefit of the vendor interoperability is increased patient safety, because nurses now can view fetal strips as part of the overall medical record, said Angie Asche-Willoughby, RN, Centricity perinatal system manager at Rockford Health System.
[Also: HL7 and ONC launch challenge seeking C-CDA rendering tools for clinicians]
“While admitting a patient in the computer system, the fetal monitor is on the other side of the bed; but now, I can visualize the fetal strip on my screen as I am doing a patient assessment, so if a baby is having any sort of distress on their monitor, I literally see it,” Asche-Willoughby said. “But the integration also decreases my time working with technology and charting, and thus increases the time I can spend with my patient. It’s so seamless because anything you document goes into Epic."
And that means nurses being able to see both the real-time fetal monitoring strip and the patient’s electronic record on the same computer screen, as opposed to having a computer-based patient record in one location and a fetal monitor elsewhere. Further, the HL7-based Connect technology enables the organization to combine and save documentation from both the EHR and the perinatal systems into the Epic patient record.
The No. 1 benefit of the vendor interoperability is increased patient safety, because nurses now can view fetal strips as part of the overall medical record, said Angie Asche-Willoughby, RN, Centricity perinatal system manager at Rockford Health System.
“While admitting a patient in the computer system, the fetal monitor is on the other side of the bed; but now, I can visualize the fetal strip on my screen as I am doing a patient assessment, so if a baby is having any sort of distress on their monitor, I literally see it,” Asche-Willoughby said. “But the integration also decreases my time working with technology and charting, and thus increases the time I can spend with my patient. It’s so seamless because anything you document goes into Epic.”
In addition to reducing the anxiety for nurses who no longer have to worry about what is going on between two different screens, the interoperability actually can reduce the anxiety of mothers during childbirth, Asche-Willoughby said.
“This set-up gives a nurse more time with her patient, so the patient isn’t thinking that all the nurse is doing is computer work,” she explained. “It provides a patient with a greater sense of comfort because a nurse is not as worried about her documentation. As a nurse, you don’t want a patient feeling like the only thing a nurse is doing is working on a computer; you want your patient to know you are taking care of her.”
The GE Healthcare Centricity Perinatal Connect systems integration module uses the HL7 2.x protocol, with ORU-type message specification exchanges. It can translate between HL7 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5, back and forth. And it can work with any EHR system, GE Healthcare said.
GE Healthcare and Rockford Health System declined to reveal the cost of the interoperability module. However, the vendor said a provider organization can measure return on investment through increased productivity, among other improvements.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Healthcare IT News and HIMSS are accepting topic and speaker proposals for the Pop Health Forum 2016, May 19-20, in Boston.
While population health management is key to bending healthcare’s cost curve and improving the quality of care, achieving those goals is easier said than done. With that in mind, the Pop Health Forum’s goal is to give attendees, 250-plus healthcare providers and payers, solid information on how to improve their population health initiatives.
Click here to submit a proposal and for more information.
Attendees prefer case studies and are eager to learn how their peers are addressing common challenges and pain points. As such, we place a high value on proposals from payer and provider organizations that offer practical, actionable information and real-life solutions.
Proposals should focus on one or more of the forum’s three key areas, the cornerstones of population health: data analytics, care coordination and patient engagement.
The deadline to submit a proposal is 5 p.m., Feb. 12.
Only a few days remain to submit a speaking proposal for the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Privacy & Security Forum in Los Angeles, May 11-12.
The deadline for submitting a proposal is Thursday, Feb. 4 at 5 p.m.
Speaking opportunities are limited to security professionals and experts from healthcare provider and payer organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. Presentations should be practical, actionable, and solutions-based.
Click here for additional information and to submit a proposal.
The two-day Privacy & Security Forum will bring together more than 200 leading providers, payers, researchers and government officials. The forum's goal is to provide healthcare security professionals with tools, solutions, best practices and expert insights into how they can better manage risk and protect their organization’s data assets.
Presentations will address, among others, the following topics: BYOD, cybersecurity, incidence response, cloud security, data-loss prevention, HIPAA compliance, security frameworks, medical device security and third-party management.
Physician adoption of electronic health records rose steadily between 2013 and 2014, with nearly 75 percent of doctors going digital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Health Records Survey.
The CDC’s four key findings based on the survey:
In 2014, 74.1 percent of office-based physicians had a certified electronic health record system, up from 67.5 percent in 2013.
The percentage of physicians who had a certified EHR system ranged from 58.8 percent in Alaska to 88.6 percent in Minnesota.
In 2014, 32.5 percent of office-based physicians with a certified EHR system were electronically sharing patient health information with external providers.
The percentage of physicians with a certified EHR system electronically sharing patient health information with external providers ranged from 17.7 percent in New Jersey to 58.8 percent in North Dakota.
Access the full CDC report here.
MidMichigan Health, a nonprofit health system affiliated with the University of Michigan Health System, is ready to replace a mixed bag of technology with an electronic health record from Epic Systems, which will provide the clinical, administrative and billing software.
The goal: to connect its hospitals, physician practices and outpatient care facilities on one platform for medical records, registration, scheduling and billing. Contract cost: $55 million.
MidMichigan Health executives say they expect to recoup that investment within six years through efficiencies gained. They've named the endeavor the One Person, One Record project.
[See also: 11 Epic stories worth reading again.]
The health system's leaders announced the decision in a January 26 post on the MidMichigan Health website.
The EHR rollout is one of several initiatives the health system is undertaking to put patients and their families at the center of care while enhancing safety and quality, patient experience, employee and provider engagement and financial stability, officials noted.
Project team members have already begun traveling to Wisconsin for Epic training and will begin configuring the system in early 2016. MidMichigan anticipates the system will be fully operational at its hospitals and doctors' offices in April 2017.
A second phase of the project in late 2017 will connect MidMichigan Home Care and other newly owned subsidiaries to the rest of the health system.
"Our current state of multiple vendor systems requires us to maintain a large number of custom interfaces," said Dan Waltz, CIO. "This has simply become unsustainable, both in terms of the cost to maintain those systems and the potential risk and confusion that it introduces."
[See also: Epic scores EHR contract from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, beats Cerner.]
There is more to the project than setting up new technology.
"As part of the process, we will be evaluating all of our workflows, comparing them to industry best practices and making improvements," said Pankaj Jandwani, MD, MidMichigan Health's CMIO, in the news release. "It's an opportunity for us to think differently about how we work and to design our tools and our processes around what patients and their families need.
Jandwani added the changes would also help improve productivity and satisfaction, with tasks and roles "dramatically transformed."
As a result of the project, patients will be able to schedule appointments online and self-check-in from home or at on-site kiosks. The health system will also offer virtual care options such as telemedicine and e-visits, and the ability to view and pay MidMichigan Health bills from one account.
While the development of accurate predictive analytics has the potential to head off debilitating and costly conditions among patients, one veteran of the burgeoning field says it’s important not to rush in without the proper planning.
"The first thing to understand is you need to have the right technical infrastructure components in place and it has to address what you are looking to do with it," said David M. Seo, MD, associate vice president of IT for clinical applications and chief medical informatics officer for the University of Miami Health System.
"But there is a lot people don't think about – like data curation and quality," he said. "Is the data you have good enough to even do predictive analytics? Because if it isn't, that prediction may actually harm you more than it helps. You may go off on a wrong tangent."
Seo and Chitra Raghu, senior program manager and innovations officer for Lockheed Martin Health and Life Sciences, presented will be presenting the U of M system's experience in preparing its predictive analytics platform in "Predictive Analytics Drives Population Health Management" at HIMSS16 on Tuesday.
Beyond the quality of the data itself, Seo said other factors, including the presence or absence of skilled data scientists; a thorough understanding of how to localize predictive models from other health systems; and how to best integrate existing investments in electronic health records with analytics technology, must be carefully considered before pulling the trigger on new platforms.
"There are so many technologies," said Raghu. "You have to find what is the right one that will help hospitals achieve what they are trying to achieve, at the lowest cost."
Seo added even health networks with a dozen or more hospitals are not likely to already have the necessary skill sets in-house. And even a platform that offers great analytics capabilities, for instance, may not be popular with either clinicians or financial executives if the caregivers need to toggle back and forth between an EHR and an analytics platform.
"If I'm looking at a patient in front of me right now, I don't have time to go somewhere else, and when I've gone somewhere else I've already lost the advantage of this massive investment in my EHR,” Seo said. “So it has to be part of your system's ecosystem."
The session "Predictive Analytics Drives Population Health Management" is slated for March 1 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in, Palazzo I at the Sands Expo Convention Center.
Iatric Systems intends to unwrap a set of analytics services to help healthcare providers meet federal mandates at HIMSS16.
The vendor specializing in patient privacy, analytics, EHR optimization and interoperability, said that it will debut a new offering dubbed Analytics On-Demand at the conference, which begins late next month.
“Analytics On-Demand was built to help provider organizations move to value-based care,” said Frank Fortner, president of Iatric Systems. “It comes with prebuilt modules. Initially, these modules will be heavily weighted toward things like quality measure management, meaningful use and the value-based model – all coming together under one program.”
See all of our HIMSS16 previews
Readmission management, population health management – providers are struggling to get good tools around these kinds of things, Fortner said. “For us, this is just a starting point,” he said. “It’s about helping providers transition to value-based care, but not stopping there. Executives will be able to create their own modules in a DIY dashboard style and address many of the hot-button issues in healthcare.”
The rules in healthcare change every year and, as such, provider organizations suddenly find they need to report on new or different measures; as a result, analytics is a challenge, he added.
[Also: Making analytics work for quality improvement?]
“Our goal is to provide a quick, one-stop shop that can handle all this reporting for healthcare executives, as well as bring professional services around these areas,” he said.
While the 26-year-old Iatric Systems will be debuting Analytics On-Demand at HIMSS16, it also will focus its efforts at the annual conference and exhibition on the various core components of its business including interoperability, patient privacy and electronic health records optimization.
Iatric Systems will be in booth 7730.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Patricia Mechael has been appointed executive vice president, Personal Connected Health Alliance at HIMSS, effective April 15, HIMSS President and CEO Steve Lieber announced on Thursday.
Mechael will serve as consultant for HIMSS until her official appointment. She'll facilitate market analysis, business planning processes and guide immediate term goals.
At PCHA, she hopes to advance trends toward self-care technology as a way to address challenges such as chronic illness management and mental health.
[Also: The making of an mHealth maven]
Mechael most recently served as executive director of the mHealth Alliance and as Principal and Policy Lead for HealthEnabled. She also has collaborated with the mHealth Summit for more than seven years. She has 15 years of experience in field building and thought leadership.
At HealthEnabled, she concentrates on global thought leadership and advocacy, research and policy work in Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda, while working with the World Health Organization to create a Global Health Index and State of the World's Digital Health Report.
She was recently awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center fellowship for a study entitled, the Future of Health is Digital that highlighted the use of technology to improve patient outcomes and strengthen the health system.
Twitter: @JessiefDavis
Despite the record number of major healthcare breaches in just the past year, 74 percent of consumers surveyed by the National Cyber Security Alliance said they trust healthcare providers the most with personal information, according to a study released Thursday to mark Data Privacy Day.
The day is an annual international effort launched by the NCSA to create awareness about the importance of securing personal information, both as a consumers and as organizations. This year's theme is "Respecting Privacy, Safeguarding Data and Enabling Trust."
[Also: Flint hospital hit with cyber attack]
"These are the three legs of the stool for the Internet," said NCSA Executive Director Michael Kaiser. "We believe everyone needs to have respect for the information."
The findings in the TRUSTe/NCSA Consumer Privacy Index show that people have a trust-based relationship with their providers, Kaiser said. "I think the expectation is that when they provide personal information, it's protected."
To keep that culture of mutual respect, healthcare providers need to better communicate with patients about how their data is treated, he said.
At the same time, providers have to build a culture of privacy within their organization -- one where privacy and security aren't just occasionally mentioned but frequently talked about.
After all, healthcare providers are stewards of precious information.
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"The data that healthcare providers have is extremely valuable," said Kaiser. "It's valuable to several different kinds of sources in the cybersecurity arena. We've seen this with some of the insurance breaches, where nation states gathered information of citizens through private data."
Kaiser said the best way to protect data is to ask: What data do you have? Where does it go? Who can access it? Where is it? And what are you doing to protect it?
Data Privacy Day began in North America in January 2008. It's an extension of Europe's Data Protection Day, which commemorates the 1981 signing of the first legally binding international treaty to deal with privacy and data protection.
Twitter: @JessiefDavis