Clinical
VisualDx will debut a new version of its clinical decision support system at HIMSS16. The company is growing its image- and graphics-oriented software from supporting skin, eye and oral care decision-making to include more chief medical complaints.
MidMichigan Health, a nonprofit health system affiliated with the University of Michigan Health System, is ready to replace a mixed bag of technology with an electronic health record from Epic Systems, which will provide the clinical, administrative and billing software.
The goal: to connect its hospitals, physician practices and outpatient care facilities on one platform for medical records, registration, scheduling and billing. Contract cost: $55 million.
MidMichigan Health executives say they expect to recoup that investment within six years through efficiencies gained. They've named the endeavor the One Person, One Record project.
[See also: 11 Epic stories worth reading again.]
The health system's leaders announced the decision in a January 26 post on the MidMichigan Health website.
The EHR rollout is one of several initiatives the health system is undertaking to put patients and their families at the center of care while enhancing safety and quality, patient experience, employee and provider engagement and financial stability, officials noted.
Project team members have already begun traveling to Wisconsin for Epic training and will begin configuring the system in early 2016. MidMichigan anticipates the system will be fully operational at its hospitals and doctors' offices in April 2017.
A second phase of the project in late 2017 will connect MidMichigan Home Care and other newly owned subsidiaries to the rest of the health system.
"Our current state of multiple vendor systems requires us to maintain a large number of custom interfaces," said Dan Waltz, CIO. "This has simply become unsustainable, both in terms of the cost to maintain those systems and the potential risk and confusion that it introduces."
[See also: Epic scores EHR contract from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, beats Cerner.]
There is more to the project than setting up new technology.
"As part of the process, we will be evaluating all of our workflows, comparing them to industry best practices and making improvements," said Pankaj Jandwani, MD, MidMichigan Health's CMIO, in the news release. "It's an opportunity for us to think differently about how we work and to design our tools and our processes around what patients and their families need.
Jandwani added the changes would also help improve productivity and satisfaction, with tasks and roles "dramatically transformed."
As a result of the project, patients will be able to schedule appointments online and self-check-in from home or at on-site kiosks. The health system will also offer virtual care options such as telemedicine and e-visits, and the ability to view and pay MidMichigan Health bills from one account.
The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute has approved $70 million for nine new patient-centered research projects.
The new studies will focus on conditions ranging from a type of very early-stage, localized breast cancer to diabetes, chronic lung disease and migraines.
[Also: PCORI adds $142M for big data research]
With these latest awards, PCORI has now approved or awarded more than $1.2 billion for research.
The new studies will compare: active surveillance to traditional treatments, effectiveness of two common medications for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, varying approaches to smoking cessation among adults with mental illness, competing approaches to managing chronic migraines and the use of inhaled corticosteroid versus symptom-based use in treating asthma exacerbations.
PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010. Its mission is to fund research to provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions.
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PCORI also awarded $6.7 million to three members of PCORnet as part of its ongoing work to establish a national patient-centered clinical research network. That money will go toward studying population health policies and interventions for type II diabetes. The agency awarded another $5.2 million to researching the effectiveness of wellness coaches for African Americans with uncontrolled diabetes. And PCORI allocated $3.8 million for a study to determine the optimal dose of aspirin for preventing heart attacks and strokes.
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The new software aims to help researchers, molecular pathologists and clinicians work together more easily to improve care.
More than two-thirds of non-academic health institutions say precision medicine will play an "average, small or non-existent" role in their plans over the next several years, according to a recent Health Catalyst survey. But it's already making big waves in academic medical centers, which are fast adopting new technologies and integrating genomics into their therapies.
Health Level 7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT kicked off a new challenge that aims to alleviate provider frustrations with the usability of HL7's consolidated clinical document architecture standard.
President Barack Obama laid out some aggressive healthcare goals in his final State of the Union address on Tuesday night, including a broader focus on precision medicine and the appointment of Vice President Joe Biden to lead what he called a “moonshot” effort to cure cancer.
Medtronic and IBM applied cognitive analytics to 600 anonymous patient cases using data from Medtronic insulin pumps and glucose monitors.
Patricia Salber, MD, founder and CEO of Health Tech Hatch and host of the popular blog "The Doctor Weighs In," reflects on discussions from the 2015 Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum in Boston.
The Commonwealth Fund has released "Aiming Higher," its 2015 scorecard measuring the performance of health systems state by state.