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I'll admit it ... I had never even heard of "predictive analytics" while practicing medicine or even in the decade after leaving clinical practice.
As we move into the next stage of IT enablement for healthcare, hospitals and health insurers will need to help lead the charge on population health and care coordination. The entire focus of healthcare reform has been to expand access and improve care and quality for the population, and ultimately for the individual.
Everyone wants to be heard. And, by all accounts, the providers and healthcare organizations that commented on the proposed rule for meaningful use Stage 2 weren't just wishing upon a star when they sent their carefully crafted comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for consideration.
The Seventh Annual National Health IT Week, held September 10-14, celebrated the need for health information technology in making comprehensive healthcare reform possible, and was a testament to the progress being made.
If renowned nurse, "The Lady with the Lamp," Florence Nightingale were alive today, she would most likely be amazed and pleased. Nightingale (1820-1910) meticulously collected data on healthcare and used it to improve outcomes. She was the founder of several data analysis tools still used today, according to American Nurses Association.
To some today - and perhaps to Nightingale - healthcare IT adoption may be going too slow, but there is achievement worth noting. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently reported it has paid nearly $7 billion in Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record payments since the program's beginning in 2011, with $6.9 billion paid out to 143,800 physicians and hospitals in total program estimates through the end of August.
In July, the totals were $6.6 billion since the program's start, paid to 132,511 eligible providers.
Of course, it's not all roses. Most hospitals and health systems report being well along in completing electronic health record implementation, but many still have doubts about their ability to meet new EHR standards, according to a new poll from KPMG.
Forty-eight percent of hospital and health system business leaders who participated in the survey said they were confident in their organization's level of readiness to meet Stage 1 meaningful use requirements, say KPMG officials. Thirty-nine percent said they were somewhat confident, 3 percent said they were not confident at all, and 10 percent didn't know what their level of readiness was.
With the impending election and fears that the Affordable Care Act may be dismantled should Republicans take power, some are also afraid the frenzy to cut federal spending could blossom into cutbacks on health IT incentives into the future. But for now, HIT incentives are safe through the HITECH Act.
One thing is certain. With or without incentives, healthcare IT will move forward, if simply to catch up with a rapidly advancing tech society, accustomed to new smart phones and computers with new bells and whistles on an ongoing basis.
It may be only the seventh year - a small step - for National Health IT Week, but it is part of a big leap for healthcare consumers.
UPMC on Monday announced a $100 million initiative aimed at mining and analyzing data for more precise care. Lisa Khorey, vice president of enterprise systems and data management at UPMC, explains the various facets of the project.
Federal regulators announced in September that they have dropped plans to write formal regulations, or “rules of the road,” to control the exchange of health information within the nationwide health information network (NwHIN).
The federal government released the final rules for Stage 2 meaningful use on Aug. 23, with federal officials' assurance that the public's voice was heard. But some key players are saying doctors' best interests weren't met.
Chief information officers were scrambling to wade through and make sense of more than 1,000 pages of Stage 2 meaningful use rules yesterday afternoon, with some poring over the details late into the night. Most seem pleased, so far, but say there's lots of work to do.
It's a joke without a punch line: Both Republican and Democratic national party platforms make barely any mention of health IT.
An Aug. 24 decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to delay the ICD-10 compliance date one year has some providers in a haze, where they're left deciphering the often-encrypted implications of the pushback.