EHR
Deborah Peel, MD, was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst and worked as a psychiatrist in Austin, Texas, for nearly three decades before becoming a privacy activist, founding the group Patient Privacy Rights in 2006 after being appalled by HIPAA's evolution into what she sees as a weak baseline for privacy and security.
Once considered the leading edge of information technology, computerized physician order entry is now simmering on the back burner of healthcare priorities. While it is not forgotten, attention toward CPOE has been deflected in favor of other concerns, such as meaningful use, interoperability, RAC audits and ICD-10 coding projects. Yet it is a critical piece of meaningful use.
ACOs are an idea whose time has come, according to Gene Lindsey, MD, president and CEO of Newton, Mass.-based Atrius Health.
Free the data! Empower the patient! Break down those walls! Collaborate! Innovate!
Hospitals can have hundreds of IT systems. Vendors have built proprietary databases. Not everyone follows the same standards. Health systems fear sharing data with competitors. Policymakers have not focused on health information exchange or EHR usability.
Mergers and acquisitions can be hazardous to a company's health, industry experts often warn. In the realm of health IT, this caveat has proved no exception.
There are many elements of business intelligence in play within the healthcare IT continuum, but without a specific focus, the initiative is stuck in neutral. In fact, that is where many healthcare providers find themselves with their BI programs, system specialists say - wondering how to proceed and in which direction to move.
No one would have guessed how far and how fast the federal incentive program for the adoption of EHRs would grow. Funding was mandated in 2009 under the HITECH ACT, with an estimated total expenditure anticipated at $20 billion. That payout has already reached $9.2B in the program's second year of a five-year program.
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. primary care physicians reported using electronic medical records in 2012 - up from 46 percent in 2009, according to findings from the 2012 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey.
We love the prospect of a new year ahead - 365 new days. It's just a calendar, of course, a tool for ordering days, setting meetings, making appointments and remembering birthdays. But as we move from the last day of one year to the first day of the next, our Outlook and Google calendars seem so much more than a way to schedule yet more tasks, more appointments, more projects and more deadlines.