Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)
Flu season is coming early this year. That forecast comes from data collected by athenahealth, which has reported early signs of influenza based on patient visit data from its cloud-based network.
Weill Cornell's Keith Hentel, MD, will be the first to tell you: His radiology department intentionally failed to meet Stage 1 of meaningful use. They could have done it. But it would have meant pouring already limited resources into something that "doesn't really move our practice anywhere in the right direction," he said.
Offering a bit of leeway, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has pushed out the deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to attest to meaningful use for the 2014 reporting year, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 31.
With all the talk about patient engagement as a component of both meaningful use and of healthcare quality improvement, it seems to be lacking in one of the most obvious places of all: the hospital room.
As debate swirls about a recent Institute of Medicine report suggesting that electronic health records collect more non-clinical patient data for population health research, a new poll suggest patients are mostly willing to offer access to anonymized health information -- but only to an extent.
CommonWell Health Alliance is marching toward "a new phase" of its vendor-driven interoperability efforts, extending its availability to providers, signing on new corporate members and eyeing new opportunities for nationwide expansion.
A report from the Office of Inspector General outlines the top challenges faced by the Department of Health and Human Services in FY 2014. Among them: meaningful use and interoperability. OIG also highlighted several area HHS continues to struggle with heading into 2015, including electronic health records.
In case anyone was still wondering about a leadership vacuum at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Karen DeSalvo, MD, is still national coordinator -- a fact that was in evidence Wednesday at the close of the American Medical Informatics Association's annual conference.
At the American Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium today, developers and backers of public application programming interfaces talked about how the standard could speed interoperability with add-on apps to enterprise EHRs, and help make those bulky systems more nimble.
What are the responsibilities of covered entities when an encrypted laptop or device is stolen, but the passcodes are handed over in the theft as well? A recent robbery reported by Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital may shed some light on these tricky situations.