Quality and Safety
The Kansas Academy of Family Physicians (KAFP) has launched a patient centered medical home initiative involving eight practices, which will run over the next three years.
Mobile technology has become an must-have tool for Walgreens, which bills itself as the nation's largest drugstore chain. The company now offers mobile applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, featuring text alerts for more than 1 million subscribers and a function that allows patients to scan the bar code of their prescription to send in refills.
The eHealth Initiative (eHI), whose mission is to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare through IT, has announced the industry leaders nominated for the 2011 Board of Directors. The board will be led by the new Chair William F. Jessee, MD, president and CEO of the Medical Group Management Association, and Vice Chair Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.
New research from the National Quality Forum (NQF) supports the use of effective IT tools and promotes clinical decision support. The two reports, Driving Quality: A Model to Measure Electronic Health IT Use and Driving Quality and Performance Measurement: A Foundation for Clinical Decision Support, also delve into ways to measure health IT use.
IBM and Premier healthcare alliance plan to integrate health information from across hospitals and other healthcare sites, creating a model that Premier and IBM executives say will benefit more than 2,400 hospitals and thousands of other healthcare sites.
Seven of the many applicants to the Rural Health Program Awards, funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota (BCBSND), together will receive $375,000 in funding for 2011.
Charles E. Christian, CIO of Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes, Ind. has been named CIO of the Year by CHIME and HIMSS.
The Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Program Registration and Attestation System portal went live on Monday, representing a major step in the health information technology landscape.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Thursday improvements to its Physician Directory tool with the launch of the first phase of its Physician Compare website, which provides consumers with more information about providers including data about quality of care.
More than 200 million mHealth applications are in use today, and that number is expected to increase threefold by 2012, according to a new report from Pyramid Research.