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With smart baby scales, a German startup now wants to tackle problems in the postnatal phase - and create more accurate comparative data worldwide.

Prescription monitoring system will alert clinicians to risks for a given patient. 

The health system has identified tens of millions of dollars in potential savings in the area of cost avoidance through intervention.

It starts with understanding obstacles and includes empathy in the experience, David Hoke said at the HIMSS and Cleveland Clinic Patient Experience Summit.

Its new InterQual 2019 technology offers support for "hospital at home" care models, the company says.

Newly-published survey indicates that nearly half of Germans polled believe that the medical care of the future will be digital.

A large-scale EHR implementation in Denmark has faced some resistance from clinical staff; medical doctors found it difficult and time consuming to input data by typing. A pilot project with speech recognition has now shown significant workflow improvements that can potentially reduce resistance to EHR adoption. Anne Werner Løhndorf, department manager for Public & Healthcare Technology in NNIT and Mette Lindelof, a neurology consultant from the Zealand region, will present the findings of the pilot project at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference in Helsinki. The largest IT project in Danish healthcare The Zealand Region and the Copenhagen Capital Region in Denmark have jointly implemented the Healthcare Platform – what is believed to be the largest IT implementation project of Danish healthcare ever. As a result, 44,000 healthcare employees and 2.5 million citizens will be provided with EHRs in the Healthcare Platform. During the last quarter of 2018, the two regions in Denmark have added speech recognition to support data capturing and workflow efficiency in the Healthcare Platform.  The pilot project looked at how speech recognition can provide better user experience for the clinical staff, more efficient workflows at the clinic, higher quality in the documentation and an improved patient interaction.     Twenty-one doctors and two nurses at a neurological department were selected to test speech recognition within the pilot project, which suggests that speech recognition will be able to avert some of the challenges that doctors experience, and at the same time support the collection and use of structured data. US study confirmed EHR optimization with speech recognition A previously conducted multi-year study in the US had come to similar findings as the pilot study in Denmark. The US study, conducted at the Vassar Brothers Medical Center, found that the EHR Net Promoter Score improved by 99 points after using speech recognition compared to previous input modalities. This illustrates the significant increase in user satisfaction with EHRs. Accordingly, 95% of users - primarily doctors, but also nurses and other medical staff - found the introduction of speech recognition for electronic documentation a good idea. Nuance Healthcare to showcase latest speech recognition advancements In Helsinki, delegates of the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference can see the latest speech recognition technology at booth 6D21. Nuance Healthcare, one of the world’s largest and most innovative speech recognition providers for healthcare, will showcase its Dragon Medical solution with artificial intelligence features. "We’ve added Artificial Intelligence to our speech recognition solution. This creates a completely new user experience. Gone are the days of voice profile trainings; Dragon Medical now delivers high recognition accuracy right from the start," says Milko Jovanoski, international marketing director for Nuance Healthcare. "Even more though, deep learning algorithms let it adapt to the user’s active vocabulary by inspecting texts the user has created in the past, both by adding custom words to its active vocabulary and by learning the typical phrases and text patterns the user employs," he added.   For the diary: The Health Anywhere Anytime session will take place on June 12 from 15:15 - 17:15 Nuance Healthcare booth: 6D21 This sponsored article is part of 'The Road to Helsinki' series, which highlights innovative sessions and technologies at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference taking place in Helsinki, 11-13 June 2019. Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Health will provide access to two core national systems - the National Health Index (NHI) and Health Practitioner Index (HPI) – using FHIR interfaces. Group manager digital strategy and investment Darren Douglass said that by improving access to these core data sets as FHIR resources, the Ministry expects to make it easier for healthcare organisations and vendors to use them within their health applications. The staged release of NHI and HPI production FHIR APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) is planned from mid-2020.     “New Zealand has adopted the HL7 FHIR (Health Level 7, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically as a core component of our interoperability architecture and standards, along with SNOMED CT and other health terminology services,” said Douglass. The NHI is a unique identifier assigned to every person in New Zealand and the HPI identifies health professionals. “These two foundational data sets are already widely used across the NZ health sector so it made sense to provide access to these first,” he said.   HL7NZ chair emeritus David Hay is working with the Ministry on the project and says there are big gains to be had by opening up health data to multiple players. Existing players like GP and hospital system suppliers generally already have access, but the interfaces are not that standardised or widely used, he explained. “My vision is that we have an eco-system where smaller specialist systems can be created that nevertheless utilise these core national systems,” said Hay. “This is a critical first step on the road to allowing that and I’m really delighted the Ministry is making this step and putting funding behind getting this working.” Hay is assisting with the design and community engagement as a large part of FHIR is the community of people who can assist with both the design of the interfaces and implementation of them. Initial work has been on the NHI interface with a draft design due to be completed before a HL7 FHIR and SNOMED CT Implementation Workshop in Auckland on June 19, where it will be tested by the community. Hay said by involving the FHIR community in the process, it ensures changes to the design are made early on in the process rather than needing expensive re-working at a later date. Once the necessary security and privacy protections are in place, Hay hopes to see other data sets exposed in the same way, such as prescribing data. “FHIR is emerging internationally as the next generation of interoperability standards,” he said. “New Zealand has the potential of becoming leaders in some of this space because we are relatively small, we have national systems already in place and we’re willing to give things a try.” Douglass said the changes are part of the wider Digital Health Strategic Framework objective of accessible trusted information. Some read-only APIs are planned for earlier release to add and update functionality and guides for testing and implementation will be released in advance of each production release. This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.