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Bending to criticism that requirements were burdensome and complex, the Obama Administration announced late Tuesday it would delay until 2015 a key provision in the healthcare reform law -- the requirement that businesses with more than 50 employees must offer them insurance.
As meaningful use advances, a dilemma has emerged: balancing structured patient data with the narrative data physicians have long collected in the still-important conversations with patients.
The inside story of how a 5-hospital health system leveraged its Epic EHR to arm physicians with clinical decision support technology at the point of care. What ThedaCare learned: EHR vendors should be working in lock step with content vendors.
Healthcare, which has always been based on the doctor-patient interaction, is nearing the end of Stage 1 meaningful use, and as the industry increases its reliance on electronic health records, it faces a new challenge. That conundrum, says Nick van Terheyden, MD, and CMIO at Nuance Communications, is how to reconcile the need for standardized structured data capture with the importance of narrative in patient-doctor interactions.
Many hospitals and health systems are increasingly frustrated with the inaccurate contact information that turns up in Google searches for their facilities. But they're even more annoyed with the unwieldy and often ineffective process required to correct it.
A 16-year-old boy in Bulgaria is helping some of MIT's smartest minds to map the human brain -- by playing an online game. And someday, that work might be used to solve the mysteries of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. He's the top "scorer" in the game, in which participants map connections between retinal neurons to develop a 3-D portrait of a single cell.
Whether Americans see Edward Snowden as a hero or a traitor, the ongoing story of his deliberate leak of classified security information has caused some to sit up and take stock of all matters related to information technology, data and privacy.
As federal officials look to outcomes-based quality measurements, physicians and informaticists say clinical data integration could help the limitations of EHRs in population health management.
Developing an effective framework for driving healthcare quality improvements proves a multifaceted, complex endeavor, and although EHR systems can play a positive role in the task, much of the technology still misses the mark. This was just one of several concerns put before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance June 26.
While 90 percent of healthcare CIOs view IT innovation as critical to success, the more surprising statistic is that fewer than one-fourth consider their existing infrastructure capable of supporting such technological advancement.