Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)
Kaiser Permanente has begun hiring health information technology workers for a new IT campus in Greenwood Village, Colo. Approximately 500 IT staff will be hired in the state by 2015, bringing Kaiser Permanente's total IT presence in Colorado to about 700, officials said.
Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth, a provider of cloud-based EMRs, announced recently it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates, a mobile health company known for its point-of-care medical apps. athenahealth will pay about $293 million in cash. It's a match hailed by the executives of both companies, and also by industry analysts, as a smart move for athenahealth.
It takes a rare and altruistic person to truly and deeply care about an issue before it directly affects their life. As a journalist, I would like to believe I care that much about what I report. I am obviously immersed in the subject of healthcare IT and have been for more than six years; I find it fascinating.
A majority of clinicians at The Mount Sinai Hospital using Epic's Beacon module, an electronic medical record (EMR) system designed specifically for cancer treatment, indicated the system improved patient care quality and safety.
Mobile health is one of the more transformative developments in healthcare, according to Patricia Abbott, associate professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, School of Nursing, Division of Nursing Business and Health Systems. "The real winners will be the ones who grab on in the front end, and don't wait," she says.
Standards group Health Level Seven International (HL7) has formed the Clinical Quality Information Work Group. HL7 plans to offer more education to providers and the new work group will offer leadership in the development of standards artifacts and educational content to all stakeholders involved in quality measurement efforts.
The omnibus HIPAA Privacy and Security final rule released by HHS on Jan. 17 answered some questions, provided necessary guidance in certain areas -- but some of the thorniest issues, data breach notification among those, are still cryptic enough that lawyers and privacy officers will still face difficult judgment calls every time a laptop is lost or stolen.
Family physicians are adopting electronic health records at a much faster rate than previous data suggested, according to a new study from the Annals of Family Medicine. The adoption rate could exceed 80 percent by the end of 2013.
Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record payments are estimated to have blasted through $10.3 billion to a total of 180,200 physicians and hospitals through December since the program's inception. December's payments of $1.25 billion were driven by the largest amount of hospital payments for an individual month.
Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth announced Jan. 7 that it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates. It's a match hailed by the executives of both companies, and also by industry analysts, as a smart move. Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush explains his vision for athenahealth and for a connected healthcare system.