EHR
A majority of clinicians at The Mount Sinai Hospital using Epic's Beacon module, an electronic medical record (EMR) system designed specifically for cancer treatment, indicated the system improved patient care quality and safety.
Healthcare's clinical community should view population health as a frontier for deepening understanding about the nature of disease, providing incisive clues about patient demographics, behavior patterns and physiological makeup. Large group samples hold the potential to unlock mysteries that physicians may not even realize exist, says Jonathan Teich, MD, chief medical information officer for Amsterdam-based Elsevier.
Mobile health is one of the more transformative developments in healthcare, according to Patricia Abbott, associate professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, School of Nursing, Division of Nursing Business and Health Systems. "The real winners will be the ones who grab on in the front end, and don't wait," she says.
Standards group Health Level Seven International (HL7) has formed the Clinical Quality Information Work Group. HL7 plans to offer more education to providers and the new work group will offer leadership in the development of standards artifacts and educational content to all stakeholders involved in quality measurement efforts.
The omnibus HIPAA Privacy and Security final rule released by HHS on Jan. 17 answered some questions, provided necessary guidance in certain areas -- but some of the thorniest issues, data breach notification among those, are still cryptic enough that lawyers and privacy officers will still face difficult judgment calls every time a laptop is lost or stolen.
Family physicians are adopting electronic health records at a much faster rate than previous data suggested, according to a new study from the Annals of Family Medicine. The adoption rate could exceed 80 percent by the end of 2013.
Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record payments are estimated to have blasted through $10.3 billion to a total of 180,200 physicians and hospitals through December since the program's inception. December's payments of $1.25 billion were driven by the largest amount of hospital payments for an individual month.
Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth announced Jan. 7 that it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates. It's a match hailed by the executives of both companies, and also by industry analysts, as a smart move. Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush explains his vision for athenahealth and for a connected healthcare system.
athenahealth is expanding its stronghold in the physician market with the announcement today that it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates, a mobile health company known for its point-of-care medical apps for physicians. The acquisition will accelerate athenahealth's vision to build the nation's health information backbone, executives say.
The year 2012 was the year when data showed its muscle, whether in the presidential elections or in demonstrating how deeply entrenched the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records had become.