News
The continuing saga around the deadline delay for states to decide whether they'll establish their own health insurance exchanges doesn't change the final upshot: All states are anticipated to have an online insurance marketplace, one way or another.
The delays may also make a federal/state partnership model for the exchange more palatable and a way out for unprepared states, at least in the initial years, according to an expert on state healthcare issues.
Disease is too complex to just think your way through it," says Raimond Winslow, director of The Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins. "We can no longer work with what I call purely mental models of how biological systems function in either health or disease."
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.
Telehealth used to be something few people knew about, or understood. Today, it is fast taking its place as a major aspect of healthcare, according to experts at the National eHealth Collaborative's Technology Crossroads Conference in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 27.
Free the data! Empower the patient! Break down those walls! Collaborate! Innovate!
An infusion of cash from Partners HealthCare is set to spur a promising 2013 for Healthrageous, whose health self-management technology traces its roots to Partners' Center for Connected Health.
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.
Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record (EHR) incentive payments are estimated to have reached $9.245 billion to 177,100 physicians and hospitals through November since the program's inception and are anticipated to reach $10 billion by the end of the year (Healthcare IT News went to press before the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) posted final figures in late December).
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.