Clinical

Electronic health records are typically touted as providing two primary and vital services: readily accessible patient records and protection against contraindicated medications. But Intermountain Healthcare is benefiting from a growing and transformative versatility in the application of its EHRs.

Patient care teams at Yale-New Haven Hospital, looking for a faster, more efficient and more secure way to communicate with each other in the emergency room, have adopted smartphone applications to speed up workflows.

Analytics functionality has improved measurably in recent years, according to Chilmark Research, but  workflow integration remains a key hurdle.

VisualDx will debut a new version of its clinical decision support system at HIMSS16. The company is growing its image- and graphics-oriented software from supporting skin, eye and oral care decision-making to include more chief medical complaints.

MidMichigan Health, a nonprofit health system affiliated with the University of Michigan Health System, is ready to replace a mixed bag of technology with an electronic health record from Epic Systems, which will provide the clinical, administrative and billing software.

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute has approved $70 million for nine new patient-centered research projects.

The new software aims to help researchers, molecular pathologists and clinicians work together more easily to improve care.

More than two-thirds of non-academic health institutions say precision medicine will play an "average, small or non-existent" role in their plans over the next several years, according to a recent Health Catalyst survey. But it's already making big waves in academic medical centers, which are fast adopting new technologies and integrating genomics into their therapies.

Health Level 7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT kicked off a new challenge that aims to alleviate provider frustrations with the usability of HL7's consolidated clinical document architecture standard. 

President Barack Obama laid out some aggressive healthcare goals in his final State of the Union address on Tuesday night, including a broader focus on precision medicine and the appointment of Vice President Joe Biden to lead what he called a “moonshot” effort to cure cancer.