Decision Support

Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have both recently been revalidated for Stage 7 status on the HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model.

Among many other demonstrations and announcements this year at HIMSS17, IBM Watson Health will be "celebrating and highlighting what we've accomplished" since the AI was launched six years ago, said Kyu Rhee, MD, chief health officer at IBM. "And that's quite a bit."

Children's National Health System will roll out Millennium Revenue Cycle, a Cerner suite of RCM technology that will be integrated with the health system's existing Cerner EHR and scheduling platform.

Seattle-based KenSci has raised $8.5 million in its first round of funding. It plans to use the capital to further develop its data and machine learning platform and expand its operations.

NorthShore University HealthSystem gained Stage 7 revalidation from HIMSS Analytics for its hospitals and associated clinics, again attaining the highest level on both the acute care Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model and outpatient EMRAM.

Rhode Island Quality Institute is using its statewide health information exchange to send real-time notifications for care transitions to and from emergency departments and hospitals. The alerts include direct messaging, EHR notifications and real-time dashboards.

IBM will integrate its cognitive computing platform Watson for Genomics with biotech company Illumina's tumor sequencing technology. Executives announced what they called a "groundbreaking partnership" Jan. 9 at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

Mayo will deploy the Tempus “operating system to battle cancer,” to apply analytics that can be used for improving patients’ quality of life and survival rates. 

The Indiana Biosciences Research Institute has unveiled a new effort to understand how type 2 diabetes varies from patient to patient. With access to data on more than 800,000 diabetics, researchers see it as a big step toward new treatments and improved diagnostic tools.

Precision medicine is promising, but integrating genomics with EHRs and workflow poses challenges. The technology for testing is the easy part. Putting the results into a usable format for clinicians can be more problematic, says Inova's John Deeken, MD.