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By 2014, about 9 million Hispanics will be covered for the first time as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Based on their unique healthcare challenges and very high use of mobile technologies, mHealth offers tremendous potential to improve access, individual behaviors and patient outcomes.
The upfront investment, development charges and personnel costs associated with traditional electronic health record (EHR) implementations make clear that getting to Stage 1 Meaningful Use is only the beginning of the investment. Additional enhancements required for Stage 2, changes in the regulatory environment, even minor code fixes - all will dramatically increase the overall cost of an already expensive proprietary EHR system.
One of the most interesting and innovative elements of the advancement of health information technology that I’ve encountered, is Blue Button, a web tool patients can use to view and download their personal health information. Blue Button has been in use for two years by the Veterans Health Administration and other healthcare organizations, including Kaiser Permanente, McKesson, Aetna and United Health Group.
List stories are popular fare for Healthcare IT News readers. There’s nothing like the “7 best jobs in healthcare IT” or “10 ways to work with your vendor” articles to gain the reader’s attention in print or online. The most read and “clicked” articles of that genre are the ones that feature the best hospitals – best in IT, best in safety, best in care.
Broadband networks are spurring improved quality and helping lower the cost of care in rural areas by reducing time to access of critical treatment and increasing the resources available to diagnose conditions.
Healthcare professionals who had signed an agreement to receive technical assistance from a Regional Extension Center were more than twice as likely to have been awarded an incentive payment for achieving meaningful use, according to a new GAO report, that slices and dices who received how much, when and where.
The Medicaid expansion was supposed to be the least controversial part of the health reform lawsuit. But since the Supreme Court essentially made broadening its eligibility voluntary for states, not a day goes by without news reports guessing how Medicaid will fare in the future.
The catalog of meaningful tasks - from clinical decision support and care coordination, to quality and safety, patient engagement, and population health - promises to go a long way toward improving care, and the requirements are also apt to stretch hospitals and physicians as they work to achieve Stage 3 meaningful use.
“We’re not award seekers,” said Daniel Nigrin, CIO at Boston Children’s Hospital. Standing among a meager 1.2 percent of hospitals achieving HIMSS Stage 7 Analytics Award, Boston Children’s Hospital has one of the nation’s most sophisticated electronic health records systems, garnering nine ‘Most Wired’ titles from the Hospital and Health Network. Knowing this, it’s hard to believe Nigrin’s assertion, but any visit to the hospital will confirm that it really is all about the patients.
Reavis Eubanks, MD, defies the odds when it comes to giving up his paper charts and adopting an electronic medical record system. First, solo doctors, by many accounts, have a tough time making the transition; there's no IT personnel on staff to guide them and to troubleshoot, and then there's the issue of cos