Mike Miliard
When the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released its report "Electronic Health Record Usability: Vendor Practices and Perspectives" this past spring, its first words of warning were that design and ease of use were major sticking points.
EMRs and CPOE are all well and good. But what about one of the lesser discussed areas of healthcare IT? What about on-demand movies and touch-screen computers and whizz-bang video games? When patients are laid up in hospital beds, don't they deserve to have a little fun while these new advancements in information technology are helping to keep them healthy?
"Any time a business decision is client-driven, it's much more likely to be successful," says Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman.
MEDecision has partnered with NaviNet to assist payers in delivering patient clinical summaries to any provider enrolled in the NaviNet Network.
Anthem Blue Cross, alongside two physician-governed medical groups in California, has been selected to participate in an accountable care organization (ACO) pilot project, led by the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
Anyone who's ever languished on hold or plunged into a labyrinth of ever-expanding touchtone message options while trying to get an answer to a simple question about coverage or eligibility will appreciate the new invention from Aetna. Her name is Ann.
The blockbuster merger between Allscripts and Eclipsys announced Wednesday is "a match made in heaven on a PowerPoint slide," says Sean W. Wieland, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. But he anticipates some rough going at the start.
Many vendors, of course, are benefiting from the stimulus, with scores of hospitals scrambling to install EMR and CPOE systems in hopes of drawing a portion of the billions of dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
"I think open source is the right thing to do the same way I believe science is better than alchemy," software pioneer Linus Torvald, who developed the "kernel" that's the basis of the Linux operating system, has said. "Like science, open source allows people to build on a solid base of previous knowledge…. It's just a superior way of working together."
Intuit Inc., the Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, will acquire Medfusion, of Cary, N.C., which makes front-office and back-office software designed to improve patient-to-provider communications. The deal is valued at about $91 million.