News

The economic decline is continuing to pummel hospitals in the form of reduction of reimbursements, rise of uninsured patients and decrease in number of elective procedures for insured patients.

Virtua Health, a four-hospital system in New Jersey, is rolling out technology that pulls data onto one platform to give clinicians timely critical information on their patients.

IBM researchers are testing a 3-D version of an electronic patient record, complete with avatar, at Thy-Mors Hospital in northern Denmark.

Social networking is taking off and experts say hospitals shouldn’t be left behind.

Eastern Maine Medical Center, the recipient of the 2008 Davies Award, is responsible for the care of two-thirds of the 33,414 square miles of the easternmost state, with the Atlantic at one side and Canada at the top.

Surgeons at the Henry Ford Health System, a Detroit-based non-profit healthcare system, used Twitter last month to educate the public on a live robotic surgery.

Around the time my son Jason was heading off to begin college, he sent me a brief text message. The apparent purpose was to summarize some useful insights he’d gleaned in the run-up to this milestone. The message was, “the most important thing is to find the most important thing.”

WHILE MANY FACTORS contribute to quality of care and patient safety, few would argue that the accessibility of clinical information is among the most important. When lacking a clear picture of the patient’s condition – and potential effects of tests or treatments – providers are limited in their abilities to administer effective therapies.

Just as thousands of healthcare IT professionals – techies, policy wonks and luminaries, an actor and an astronaut – sail into The Windy City for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s annual conference this month, there’s a new wind at their back.

So who exactly are these critics questioning the relationship between HIMSS and CCHIT?