Quality and Safety
Physician adoption of electronic health records rose steadily between 2013 and 2014, with nearly 75 percent of doctors going digital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Health Records Survey.
The CDC’s four key findings based on the survey:
In 2014, 74.1 percent of office-based physicians had a certified electronic health record system, up from 67.5 percent in 2013.
The percentage of physicians who had a certified EHR system ranged from 58.8 percent in Alaska to 88.6 percent in Minnesota.
In 2014, 32.5 percent of office-based physicians with a certified EHR system were electronically sharing patient health information with external providers.
The percentage of physicians with a certified EHR system electronically sharing patient health information with external providers ranged from 17.7 percent in New Jersey to 58.8 percent in North Dakota.
Access the full CDC report here.
While the development of accurate predictive analytics has the potential to head off debilitating and costly conditions among patients, one veteran of the burgeoning field says it’s important not to rush in without the proper planning.
"The first thing to understand is you need to have the right technical infrastructure components in place and it has to address what you are looking to do with it," said David M. Seo, MD, associate vice president of IT for clinical applications and chief medical informatics officer for the University of Miami Health System.
"But there is a lot people don't think about – like data curation and quality," he said. "Is the data you have good enough to even do predictive analytics? Because if it isn't, that prediction may actually harm you more than it helps. You may go off on a wrong tangent."
Seo and Chitra Raghu, senior program manager and innovations officer for Lockheed Martin Health and Life Sciences, presented will be presenting the U of M system's experience in preparing its predictive analytics platform in "Predictive Analytics Drives Population Health Management" at HIMSS16 on Tuesday.
Beyond the quality of the data itself, Seo said other factors, including the presence or absence of skilled data scientists; a thorough understanding of how to localize predictive models from other health systems; and how to best integrate existing investments in electronic health records with analytics technology, must be carefully considered before pulling the trigger on new platforms.
"There are so many technologies," said Raghu. "You have to find what is the right one that will help hospitals achieve what they are trying to achieve, at the lowest cost."
Seo added even health networks with a dozen or more hospitals are not likely to already have the necessary skill sets in-house. And even a platform that offers great analytics capabilities, for instance, may not be popular with either clinicians or financial executives if the caregivers need to toggle back and forth between an EHR and an analytics platform.
"If I'm looking at a patient in front of me right now, I don't have time to go somewhere else, and when I've gone somewhere else I've already lost the advantage of this massive investment in my EHR,” Seo said. “So it has to be part of your system's ecosystem."
The session "Predictive Analytics Drives Population Health Management" is slated for March 1 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in, Palazzo I at the Sands Expo Convention Center.
CHIME on Tuesday, through a partnership with SpaceX-affiliated crowdfunding site HeroX, launched a $1 million patient identification contest in the hope that private industry can fix the safety risks posed by patient matching.
Healthcare IT News and HIMSS are accepting speaking proposals for the Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum, which will be presented June 14-15 in San Francisco.
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.]
MedStar Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., region, is collaborating with Uber to increase access to health appointments.
The Department of Health and Human Services is not doing enough to manage its workforce programs, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the federal government's watchdog agency.
The American Medical Association has invested $15 million to become founding partner of Health2047, a high-tech incubator that will explore innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the nation's 1.1 million physicians and their patients.
When Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, California launched an initiative to boost its Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems scores, the team combined leadership engagement, a comprehensive and ongoing staff education plan, and deployed new bedside technology.
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