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Albany Medical Center has set the stage to exchange patient clinical data between its electronic health record and the EHRs of its affiliated physicians. With one large physician practice connected last month, Albany Med has more in the pipeline.
Some sobering news came from across the pond this past year. On September 22, England's Department of Health announced it would finally scrap the country's decade-long, problem-plagued health information technology initiative, the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
“In 2012, meaningful use will soar," said National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari at the Jan. 10 meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee.
Rick Schooler, vice president and CIO of Orlando Health, a seven-hospital health system with a 355-member IT staff, is the 2011 John E. Gall CIO of the Year – an award given by both CHIME and HIMSS. It’s a designation that Schooler finds particularly gratifying.
IT workers hoping to improve their standard of living in 2012 will not likely find relief through annual salary raises, according to a new report from Computer Economics. But, it might be a different story for IT professionals in the healthcare space, where demand is high.
Managing populations – whether an aggregation of patients or a physical community – is a burgeoning field in healthcare as a way to improve care while containing costs. Many of the IT initiatives currently underway are related to population health in one way or another: electronic health records, meaningful use, interoperability, accountable care organizations, disease state management, pay-for-performance and patient-centered medical home all have elements that relate to managing patients in groups.
It's a fact: Remote care monitoring and telehealth "will become much more commonplace going forward," says Barry Burk, vice president, healthcare industry at IBM Canada.
One of the biggest objections to the adoption of an EMR is its usability (or lack thereof), which is no surprise considering the ease of its predecessor: paper. Thankfully, there are a few ways to make your system not only more bearable, but significantly easier to use.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) launched a project not too long ago in which it deployed EMRs to about 300 physician practices throughout eastern Massachusetts, hosting them via a private, cloud-based SaaS model.
A new case study has shown how Mercy healthcare system has reaped the benefits of integrating GS1 Standards, including bar codes, across the medical device supply chain.