Business Intelligence

If you're a hospital CIO, you're probably spending much of your time thinking about EHRs and CPOE and HIE. But there are other systems that are also important – such as HVAC.

The largest urban health simulation and training facility of its kind opened Tuesday at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center.

OptumInsight (formerly Ingenix) and Dallas-based RemitDATA have launched a service that offers physician practices intelligence about health plan claims processing trends, alongside coding and referential tools to increase productivity, reduce denials and prevent delays.

Healthcare in the United States has its own myriad, manifest and much-discussed problems. But they're nothing compared to those afflicting the primitive and limited systems in many other parts of the world.

Healthcare organizations are embracing the need for information transparency to drive clinical transformation, but they are lacking the tools and capabilities to make data available in real-time to make it happen.

As the push toward accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes gathers steam, health IT clearly has huge roles to play in the transition. But one capability is perhaps more crucial than any other: business intelligence (BI).

A two-day summit in Philadelphia that brought physicians, EHR vendors, pharmaceutical executives and the Food and Drug Administration together shed light on the role of EHRs in drug regulatory and marketing issues.

Farzad Mostashari, MD, may be optimistic about the promise of healthcare information technology, but when he spoke April 26 at the Bipartisan Policy Center, he also warned of challenges ahead.

Presidential candidates are beginning to line up in the past month, as more Republicans declared their intentions of running. Several of them have strong ties to health IT.

As it addresses an "explosive growth of medical information," IBM has expanded its Health Analytics Solution Center – with team members working to increase and improve remote EHR connectivity through new "Watson"-like analytics power.