News
After working at this remote patient monitoring game for about 10 years now, we are ready to bring self-care to consumers - couch potatoes, weekend warriors and all of us in between hoping to live a little healthier, lose a few pounds or just feel a little better. Meet Wellocracy.
Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record (EHR) incentive payments are estimated to have reached $9.245 billion to 177,100 physicians and hospitals through November since the program's inception and are anticipated to reach $10 billion by the end of the year (Healthcare IT News went to press before the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) posted final figures in late December).
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. primary care physicians reported using electronic medical records in 2012 - up from 46 percent in 2009, according to findings from the 2012 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey.
An infusion of cash from Partners HealthCare is set to spur a promising 2013 for Healthrageous, whose health self-management technology traces its roots to Partners' Center for Connected Health.
Free the data! Empower the patient! Break down those walls! Collaborate! Innovate!
Telehealth used to be something few people knew about, or understood. Today, it is fast taking its place as a major aspect of healthcare, according to experts at the National eHealth Collaborative's Technology Crossroads Conference in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 27.
No one would have guessed how far and how fast the federal incentive program for the adoption of EHRs would grow. Funding was mandated in 2009 under the HITECH ACT, with an estimated total expenditure anticipated at $20 billion. That payout has already reached $9.2B in the program's second year of a five-year program.
Hospitals can have hundreds of IT systems. Vendors have built proprietary databases. Not everyone follows the same standards. Health systems fear sharing data with competitors. Policymakers have not focused on health information exchange or EHR usability.
Mergers and acquisitions can be hazardous to a company's health, industry experts often warn. In the realm of health IT, this caveat has proved no exception.
As the National Football League playoffs kick-off this month, there will be no shortage of excitement on the gridiron. There will also be one big difference taking place behind the scenes: The NFL will make the switch from paper to electronic health records.