Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

Partners HealthCare announced on Monday that it has contracted with QPID Health, whose analytics tools will be integrated with Partners’ Epic-based eCare EHR and other legacy systems to help clinicians make more informed care decisions. Over the next two years, QPID will be rolled out across all 10 Partners' hospitals and associated physician organizations. "Partners HealthCare has made a significant investment in our Epic electronic health record," Jim Noga, CIO, Partners HealthCare System, said in a statement. "QPID's software will be fully integrated with Partners eCare and help ensure that we optimize our investment." [See also: 5 benefits of natural language understanding for healthcare.] QPID Health's “clinical reasoning” tools use natural language processing and machine learning to turn data from EHRs into actionable information, helping to streamline quality reporting, clinical registry submissions and utilization management, according to the company. Massachusetts General Hospital, a Partners co-founder, began using QPID software about 10 years ago. The positive return on investment, reduction of unnecessary cancellations, patient safety increases and CMS bonuses and penalty avoidances drove Partners' decision to integrate all systems with QPID, officials said. "Effectively using patient data for quality reporting and optimal patient outcomes is increasingly important as we move towards value-based care," said Timothy Ferris, MD, vice president of population health at Partners said in a statement. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] QPID "will help to ensure appropriate use of high-cost, high-volume surgical procedures," he added. "This agreement will help provide our physicians with the specific patient information that they need to attest to use of evidence-based guidelines. Not only is this the right thing to do for patients, it also reduces costs where we share risk with government and commercial payers," Ferris said. Twitter: @JessiefDavis

To help clinicians understand when palliative care orders might be most appropriate, Ascension Health is participating in an National Institutes of Health-funded study run by University of Pennsylvania researchers to evaluate electronic health record-prompted automation of palliative care consult orders in the acute care setting.

Duke Medicine claims to be the first Epic-based health system to implement the Fast Health Information Resources application programming interface in conjunction with Apple's HealthKit within a live environment. FHIR is an emerging interoperability protocol that was all the rage at HIMSS15 and appears to be even hotter going into HIMSS16 – where Duke’s director of mobile technology strategy Ricky Bloomfield, MD intends to discuss accomplishments and lessons learned during the Monday morning keynote titled “A leap forward in healthcare.” Bloomfield’s talk will touch on recent innovations that help Duke’s physicians and patients connect in meaningful ways. Using HealthKit and FHIR, for instance, “enables us to integrate standards-based apps without significant configuration or effort,” Bloomfield said. [Also at HIMSS16: Biometrics a crucial next step for patient safety] On top of that foundation Duke can “liberate electronic health records data by using standardized application programming interfaces so data can be consumed by innovators.” Duke is among an elite corps of cutting-edge hospital systems already using Apple’s HealthKit in a pilot to integrate with Epic MyChart. Ochsner Health System and Stanford Health are also using HealthKit with Epic. As the physician leading Duke’s HealthKit charge, Bloomfield has seen interest in a range of Duke’s practices areas, most notably endocrinologists, obstetrics and gynecology, even oncologists. Whether at Duke, Ochsner, Stanford or elsewhere, hospitals and other provider organizations must understand the digital needs of their patients and create tools that help both patient and provider fulfill the goals of mobile and connected health: improved care and lower costs. “Connected health is a means to an end — that end is to improve the health of all people, and to do so at lower cost,” Bloomfield said. “The greatest promise of connected health is that it enables and empowers patients to be more involved in their own care, which will hopefully decrease the emphasis on direct contact with healthcare organizations.” For patients with chronic or otherwise severe disease, Bloomfield added, connected health will equip providers to monitor and treat them from afar, reducing the time and financial burden on these patients while keeping them away from other sick patients in a clinical setting. Duke Medicine is out front in the move to improve care through mobile and connected health initiatives. For instance, it is an early adopter of Apple Inc.’s HealthKit software, piloting it with a small number of patients with an eye on integrating it with Duke’s implementation of the Epic MyChart electronic health record. Bloomfield’s keynote session is schedule for Monday, Feb. 29, 2016 at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Galileo 901. HIMSS16 runs from Feb. 29-Mar. 4. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

Mary Beth Mitchell, RN, chief nursing informatics officer at Texas Health Resources, has won the 2015 HIMSS Nursing Informatics Leadership Award, honored for helping make THR a national leader in its use of health information technology. In charge of leading nurse utilization and optimization of electronic health records and other health IT at the sprawling Texas health system, Mitchell has helped spread knowledge about the power of nursing informatics through presentations, books and articles in professional journals. Under her leadership, THR has won both the HIMSS Stage 7 and Davies Awards. This past year at HIMSS15 in Chicago, Mitchell was honored with a 2015 Healthcare IT News H.I.T. Men and Women award. "Mary Beth is an extraordinary leader in the field of nursing informatics," said Joyce Sensmeier, RN, vice president, informatics, HIMSS North America, in a statement. [Also: 10 nurse execs at the top of their game] "As the chair of HIMSS nursing informatics committee, the former co-chair of the HIMSS Nursing Executive Engagement Workgroup, and a member of the Nursing Informatics Symposium Planning Committee, she is a respected thought leader in transforming healthcare and patient care through the use of technology." Mitchell will be honored at the HIMSS16 Awards Gala on, Thursday, March 3 at the 2016 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition. Learn more about HIMSS16 and the Nursing Informatics Symposium. Twitter: @mikemiliardHITN

With 900 care locations and a 1,200-member IT team, Carolinas HealthCare System is sprawling and complex. That’s just how Chief Information Officer Craig Richardville likes it. Complexity creates excitement, Richardville, who was recently named the 2015 CHIME-HIMSS John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year, tells Healthcare IT News. “It’s just so dynamic that it creates the energy.” CHIME and HIMSS give the CIO of the Year Award jointly each year. The groups selected Richardville for the 2015 honor, they said, for “pursuing an aggressive and effective approach to employing technology to help provide better care.” Q: What do you view as your primary mission as CIO? A: To best serve our patients by engaging the optimal use and investment of technology and information for our patients and providers to improve their health and enhance care. Q: What is your proudest achievement? A: First and foremost, my family – watching my three sons grow and develop into fine young men and assets to our community. Professionally, the team – the complete CHS Team coming together to address and develop new and exciting ways of improving our services and connecting to our patients. Q: What has been the biggest challenge you¹ve had to face as CIO? A: Change management – ensuring that we lead the transformation of healthcare delivery. Q: How has your work changed over the years, and what factor has most contributed to the change? A: The biggest change is the addition from an executor of a plan, in with the development of the strategy. There are many ideas in and outside of healthcare that are applicable for us to evaluate and appropriately implement, so being part of the discussion over the last several years has allowed an opening of all minds, mine-included, to what the future possibilities are. Q: How has meaningful use changed the way you work? A: Meaningful use accelerated our plan and provided a discount to automate the clinical record and processes and to build a foundational platform for many other key initiatives to be built upon it, such as interoperability, patient engagement, mobility, virtual care, care management, etc. In that way it was beneficial, but the requirements and timeline and maturity of the service offerings has led to some of the frustration. To ensure we communicate our success and future progress, MU needs to be clearly identified as service and outcome-oriented for ensuring our work clearly puts the patient first. Q: Looking ahead, what challenges do you see coming in health IT? A: Interoperability. True interoperability based upon secure standards is absolutely necessary if we are to achieve the vision all of us share regarding making sure patients have access to their health information, and it’s easily accessible to their providers. Unlocking the data in our systems to share with providers and patients is crucial to creating a seamless health information system. It requires that we agree upon standards and safe transport protocols. It’s absolutely vital though that in order to serve our patients, we provide them and their providers with the health data they need to lead full lives. Also, patient engagement. Providing solutions that are easy, accessible and integrated into people’s lives is a challenge. Healthcare is good at building and deploying very feature-rich and complex software systems. What’s harder though is to deliver that sophistication into solutions that are consumer-grade, easy to use and accessible to consumers. It should be as easy as hailing a car on Uber, ordering a pair of shoes from Zappos, downloading a movie from Amazon or making a dinner reservation on Open Table. These solutions have to be integrated into the lives of people in a way that is not obtrusive but still help them manage and improve their health status. Q: What challenges are unique to Carolinas HealthCare? A: Carolinas HealthCare System has a level of complexity that may be similar to some but different from others. We are a multi-state health system with a large portfolio of combined assets, but also, in various markets, we have regional relationships that are a mixture of managed services, leased services and shared services. This complexity has allowed us to be very similar to other communities in that we have in some cases, like EMR for example, where we have been able to build core competencies around the higher layer services, such as health information exchange, patient engagement, data warehouse and analytics that contain a multi-faceted number of systems, products and solutions as opposed to a single platform like many others. Q: What new technology developments on the horizon have you enthusiastic? A: Mobility – placing the patient to be accountable for their health and wellness by providing the apps and connectivity for them to do so. Virtual care and it’s continued quick advancement and acceptance as a delivery model holding us accountable to the existing standards, yet improving access and lowering cost. Interoperability. FHIR appears to be very promising and we’re looking at ways here at Carolinas HealthCare System to use it to better build and deploy solutions for our patients and providers. Q: Where will health IT be five or 10 years from now? A: I would expect that we will be leading many other industries and that those in financial services, retail, etc., will look at healthcare IT for advancing their companies and industries, similar to how we are modeling some of our services offerings in comparison to them. There is a tremendous amount of talent within healthcare. We have arguably evolved quicker in this transformation that any other industry. With the management of the tight budgets that we hold ourselves to, we will inevitably be the one to lead the industry pack as we continue to help the business develop and deploy solutions that make it easier for patients and clinicians at a competitive price point. One of the things we’ve learned over the last 20 years, particularly here at Carolinas HealthCare System, is we’ve gotten very good at deploying solutions that are on time, on budget and deliver great value. Our teammates have great insight into how things work. We listen to and continue to better understand our patients, and how we can best optimize solutions and deliver value. I am very fortunate to be with a health system with a visionary board, and feel blessed to be part a group of colleagues that thrive upon teamwork and successful execution of our plans. Healthcare IT is not only playing the support role that we always have, but also leading and being a key component of many of our strategic initiatives. Twitter: @HealthITNews

By leveraging the historical data included in the records, healthcare providers can target patients, populations more than ever.

The move comes almost a year after Mayo first announced it would replace its existing electronic health record system with one from Epic.

The money allocated to VistA comes within $6 billion in discretionary spending for projects including cutting its huge backlog of disability claims

Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center, the largest private employer in South Dakota, has reached Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model. By achieving Stage 7, the highest level on the EMRAM scale measuring healthcare organization implementation and use of EHRs, Avera McKennan joins an elite crowd. During the second quarter of 2015, only 3.7 percent of the more than 5,400 U.S. hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database reached Stage 7.  “Our staff have been working diligently to implement a fully integrated electronic medical record across the Avera system,” Dave Kapaska, regional president and CEO of Avera McKennan, said in a statement.  Avera McKennan is an integrated health system composed of more than 330 locations in 100 communities in a five-state region and employs 6,000 staff and physicians.  Calling the health system “an incredibly innovative organization that is truly enabling their broad mission with information technology,” HIMSS Analytics executive vice president John Hoyt pointed to Avera McKennan’s e-health outreach practices, HIE connections spanning 40 states, and cutting-edge use of pharmacogenomics as some of the factors making it a leader in the field. HIMSS Analytics developed the EMR Adoption Model in 2005 as a methodology for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record systems for hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database. The validation process to confirm a hospital has reached Stage 7 includes a site visit by an executive from HIMSS Analytics and former or current chief information officers to ensure an unbiased evaluation of the Stage 7 environments. Avera McKennan will be recognized at the 2016 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, which runs from Feb. 29 to March 4 at the Venetian – Palazzo – Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas. Twitter: @HealthITNews

The Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech, known as MeHI, has awarded more than $1.3 million in grants to 25 behavioral health providers to improve patient care, reduce healthcare costs and ensure appropriate privacy and security protection of behavioral health patient data.