Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

NorthShore University Health System is easing and, in certain instances, automating clinical workflows within electronic records to pinpoint high-risk patients and gaps in care using predictive modeling.

Pharmacy giant CVS Health announced Thursday it has forged clinical partnerships with another four healthcare systems across the country: John Muir Health in California; University of Chicago Medical Center in Illinois; Novant Health, serving the Winston-Salem area in North Carolina; and University of Michigan Health System.

Jonathan Bush, the high-octane, no-holds-barred co-founder and CEO of athenahealth, became Johnny-on-the-spot on Wednesday. While in San Francisco to attend the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Bush took a few minutes to perform CPR on a man he found lying on the sidewalk. The man appeared to not be breathing, possibly suffering from a heart attack, according to an account of the incident published in Bush's hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe. The incident occurred near the corner of Mission and 1st Street in San Francisco's downtown. According to the Globe, Bush had been to a nearby Walgreens drugstore to buy an ice pack (he recently hurt his knee skiing). He was on his way to a meeting at the J.P. Morgan event when he saw the man lying on the sidewalk, turned him over, saw his face was blue and he seemed to not be breathing. After Bush performed CPR, the man started breathing again. Bush, who has long been critical of inefficiencies in American healthcare, is quoted by the Globe as saying, "It was like the U.S. healthcare system. Everybody was standing there, nobody was helping." Long before he and former U.S. CTO Todd Park started athenahealth, Bush worked as an emergency medical technician in New Orleans. He writes about it in his book, Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care. [See also: Jonathan Bush on where it hurts most.] Bush writes in his book that he was looking for a summer job when a family acquaintance told him that, to save lives, the best thing he could do was to work on an ambulance and get to know a crack trauma unit. That's how Bush ended up that summer working with the trauma unit at Charity Hospital in the Big Easy. He and the crew did save lives, he writes. New Orleans gave him hands-on training in urgent care, "and, just as important, a primer on American society." A spokeswoman for Bush told Healthcare IT News on Thursday that athenahealth could confirm the event in San Francisco happened, but would not comment at this time because Bush and his staff are still working to understand how the man is doing. [See also: Newsmaker interview: Jonathan Bush.]

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. 

Whether meaningful use triggered a desperately-needed onslaught of healthcare digitization or effectively stifled innovation by incentivizing the deployment of kludgy electronic health records software -- or both -- is likely to be a matter of some debate for years to come.

Despite officials this week signaling the end of the meaningful use program, more than 200,000 eligible providers will see a 2 percent cut in their Medicaid payments in 2016 for failing to meet standards in 2014, recent Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data show.

The health system has leveraged IT to make drastic improvements in diabetic patient outcomes and more than doubled the number of HIV and HCV at-risk patient screenings.

Electronic health records are making data more readily accessible to physicians and laying a foundation for the next big step: translating EHR data into actionable information for precision medicine.   "Precision medicine is a great opportunity to start using behavioral health data, like activities and eating patterns," said Nancy McMillan, research leader of advanced analytics at Battelle. McMillan will delve into the use of big data in healthcare at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas, beginning in late February. By combining this type of information with a patient's EHR and genomic data, physicians will ultimately be able to predict health outcomes, she said. See all of our HIMSS16 previews McMillan's presentation, “Enhancing Patient Outcomes with Big Data: Two Case Studies,” will provide a retrospective analysis of how hospital inpatient EHRs can identify patients. Her colleague, David A. Friedenberg , principal research statistician at Battelle, will add to the presentation by discussing his work on a neural bypass system. Friedenberg and McMillian will present the pair of case studies to demonstrate ways institutions can improve population health. Her portion of the presentation will deal specifically with EHR collection and how hospitals can finally put that information to work. "We're about to turn the corner in healthcare," McMillan said. "So much work has been done with the transition to EHRs, and there's going to be greater use with scientific analytics to make this data useful." She said collecting data has been a "big burden" because it's such a major change, which is difficult for any large institution. But she's hopeful there will soon be progress. Her presentation will also provide the processes Battelle has used to transform data into actionable datasets. It's important for health systems to understand data isn't uniform in these systems, and taking into consideration how it's viewed at the ground level will affect how these key agents translate the information, she added. The only way to use EHRs as a prediction tool for precision outcomes, McMilland said, is to validate the data using evidence-based research. Her colleague, Friedenberg, will round out the presentation by discussing his neurolife work. He's found a method to use data from a cortical implant in a paralyzed person to decode imagined movements, bypass the damaged spinal cord injury and stimulate muscles in real-time with a neuromuscular electrical stimulation. The HIMSS16 session “Enhancing Patient Outcomes with Big Data: Two Case Studies,” is scheduled for March 1, 2016, from 4:00-5:00 pm in the Sands Expo Convention Center Palazzo G. Twitter: @JessiefDavis

New regulations aimed at value-based payment models demand a more streamlined regulatory approach, acting administrator tells audience at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

The chief information officer and chief operating officer of Denver Health Medical Center, along with some of its top physicians, left their positions, since CEO Arthur Gonzalez arrived in 2012, ostensibly over disagreements with him over the medical center’s $170 million investment in a new Epic EHR system, The Denver Post reported on January 10.