News
Everyone likes a good competition, particularly with a potential $9 million gold carrot available to the victors. On Jan. 9, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a challenge for software developers to create a new medical scheduling system for VA's nationwide health system.
A new research partnership between Mayo Clinic and Optum - the health IT arm of UnitedHealth - will bring together more than 105 million clinical and claims records for the purpose of improving quality metrics in healthcare.
Whether the compliance deadline delay announced last February by the Department of Health and Human Services stalled progress on ICD-10, or provided an opportunity to hone implementation timelines, all depends on where a particular healthcare organization was prior to that announcement.
This past January, Forrester Research analyst Mike Gaultieri did some soothsaying. "My prediction: TIME magazine will name big data its 2013 person of the year," he wrote.
A recent market forecast on wearable devices and smart glasses, coupled with 2012 venture capital investments in mHealth at nearly $908 million, indicate the market is hot and likely to get hotter.
Insurers looking to compete in the ever-changing healthcare marketplace will continue to focus on technology in 2013 both as a means of improving payment models and partnerships with provider groups and also as the industry looks to make the transition to consumer-focused products it will offer on health insurance exchanges.
When Medicomp chief executive officer David Lareau hears U.S. chief technology officer Todd Park talk about the need to find the right technology to set data free and make it usable, Lareau wants to tell him he has just the thing.
With numerous electronic health record systems continuing to fall short of providers' expectations, a report by Black Book Rankings suggests that 2013 may indeed be the "year of the great EHR vendor switch."
Two Stage 6 hospitals, one in Manhattan and the other in Honolulu - Mount Sinai Medical Center and Hawai'i Pacific Health - are due to pick up their 2012 Enterprise HIMSS Davies Awards of Excellence at the 2013 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in New Orleans, March 3-7.
The idea of unique patient identifiers (UPIs) could very well be reality in the not-so-distant future. Despite the current standstill at the federal level, other efforts to implement UPIs are very much moving forward.