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The promise of HIEs to provide insights across the continuum of care that can dramatically alter the health of populations is emerging as among the most significant reasons for exchanging health data.
An update to the Hospital Safety Score that assigns grades "A" through "F" to more than 2,500 hospitals in the United States shows they have made only incremental progress in addressing errors, accidents, injuries and infections that kill or hurt their patients. The Leapfrog Group, a hospital watchdog group, conducts the surveys.
Larry Garber is a believer. The physician and medical director for informatics at Worcester, Mass.-based Reliant Medical Group has seen electronic health records make big, real life changes both financially and clinically, and now he's set out to spread the word.
Continuing the upward trajectory of EHR reimbursements flowing out into the healthcare industry, CMS said on Tuesday morning that the total paid as of March's end is more than $13.7 billion.
The ONC Policy Committee's Privacy and Security team says there's no need for limitations on providers trying to locate patient record for direct treatment, aside from patient choice. The issue does raise some policy questions, though, and the Committee asked for a reformulation of the team's suggestions.
With digitization and interconnected devices come HIPAA compliance costs and a web of security issues. Organizations should thus be devoting extra scrutiny to vendors and designing security architectures from the get-go, one cyber-security analyst suggests.
Ironically, Andrew Watson's first telemedicine procedure was with a rural patient who was a Mennonite. At first, the patient and physician looked at each other warily.
Telemedicine as we know it has been around for almost 50 years. It has moved from humble beginnings as an experimental curiosity delivering rural healthcare to become something on track for mainstream acceptance across the healthcare system.
Frequently, healthcare entities focus on how the EHR will work, rather than what frontline clinicians will do with it, which creates growing user frustration, extended adoption times and increased costs. But with proper planning, an effective paper to pixel transition is possible.
Responding to a feedback request from Senators on Capitol Hill regarding health IT adoption, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives called for a one-year pushback of the Stage 2 meaningful use deadline and defended the efficacy of the federal incentive program.