EHR
An estimated 50,000 lives were saved, 1.3 million fewer patients escaped harm and healthcare avoided $12 billion in spending. This according to a report released by the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this week.
Your organization can have the most well-crafted privacy and security policies in the world. But if those policies are accompanied by lukewarm emphasis and no accountability, or your staff just downright ignores them, you have a big security problem -- just like the folks at one Ohio-based health system did last week.
The University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, which has already achieved Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics scale, has won the 2014 enterprise Davies Award. With the use of its electronic health record, the health system was able to improve workflow and documentation as well as significantly reduce adverse drug events and hospital acquired infections.
Want ads for health information technology professionals saw a moderate slump in the third quarter, falling 4 percent from Q2. But the numbers weren't all underwhelming, as certain new job titles saw strong growth.
Flu season is coming early this year. That forecast comes from data collected by athenahealth, which has reported early signs of influenza based on patient visit data from its cloud-based network.
Weill Cornell's Keith Hentel, MD, will be the first to tell you: His radiology department intentionally failed to meet Stage 1 of meaningful use. They could have done it. But it would have meant pouring already limited resources into something that "doesn't really move our practice anywhere in the right direction," he said.
Offering a bit of leeway, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has pushed out the deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to attest to meaningful use for the 2014 reporting year, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 31.
With all the talk about patient engagement as a component of both meaningful use and of healthcare quality improvement, it seems to be lacking in one of the most obvious places of all: the hospital room.
As debate swirls about a recent Institute of Medicine report suggesting that electronic health records collect more non-clinical patient data for population health research, a new poll suggest patients are mostly willing to offer access to anonymized health information -- but only to an extent.
CommonWell Health Alliance is marching toward "a new phase" of its vendor-driven interoperability efforts, extending its availability to providers, signing on new corporate members and eyeing new opportunities for nationwide expansion.