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When people are "moved into a medical environment from their home, it's very disorienting," says Joshua Jacobs, vice president of Windsor Healthcare, a Norwood, N.J.-based recovery, rehabilitation and nursing facility. "When they're taken out of their routine, it's very easy to lose focus."
It’s not business as usual, but more like rebooting at Allscripts headquarters now that the waves are beginning to settle after what some market analysts described as a “dismal” quarter for the electronic health record company.
The telemedicine and health IT camps need to overcome their traditional way of operating in silos and develop partnerships to make a significant impact on improving the quality of care in the healthcare system.
In the past, surgery simulation was a crude approximation of what doctors really encounter – and they needed to be close to a teaching hospital to even try it. But surgery simulation is finally coming of age, thanks to breakthroughs in mobility, cloud-based software, and 3D imagery.
Over the past two decades, America has experienced a societal revolution led by the Internet and the availability of "big data," – defined by the Wall Street Journal as “the ability to collect, process and interpret massive amounts of information.”
No matter how you feel about the federal incentive program to drive the adoption of healthcare it, the numbers speak for themselves. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced in early May that the federal government had paid out more than $5 billion in meaningful use incentives as of April. This money went to 93,650 physicians – $287 million to Medicare providers and $299 to Medicaid providers.
It’s near the end of May, and any organization that had something to say about the government’s proposed rules for meaningful use of electronic health records, Stage 2, has said it.
While Delaware is moving slowly on health insurance exchanges and other pieces of health reform, it has demonstrated it is an innovator, having established the first operational statewide health information exchange in the country in May 2007.
The changes taking place in U.S. healthcare as a result of rapid healthcare IT adoption leave the nation's health IT chief Farzad Mostashari optimistic – especially about improving quality, he told the audience at a recent meeting of the National Quality Forum as he urged: "Keep our eyes on the prize."
There is room for improving how the government measures whether hospitals and physicians have met the requirements for meaningful use of EHRs to prevent improper payments, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).