Meaningful Use
Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. What about usability when it comes to machines and especially software? Is it unreasonable to expect elegance?
Michael Grunwald, author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, spoke to Healthcare IT News about the making of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and about why health information technology may be the most lasting and transformative pillar of the stimulus bill.
Mike Miliard, Managing Editor for Healthcare IT News, speaks to William Spooner of Sharp HealthCare about meaningful use Stage 2 and the challenging road ahead.
Timothy Bickmore, associate professor at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science, has been working for the past decade in the area of "relational agents." He says these artificially intelligent avatars are poised for a promising future in healthcare.
Boston Children’s Hospital knows a little something about what it takes to be at the top. Consistently recognized for its medical specialties and patient care, it is considered one of the best pediatric hospitals in the world.
An idea can change a lot over eight years and while the intent of interoperability remains essentially the same, its application has split off in various directions since 2004, when the Bush administration called for establishment of electronic health records, universal connectivity between healthcare providers and named David Brailer, MD, as national health information technology coordinator.
The upfront investment, development charges and personnel costs associated with traditional electronic health record (EHR) implementations make clear that getting to Stage 1 Meaningful Use is only the beginning of the investment. Additional enhancements required for Stage 2, changes in the regulatory environment, even minor code fixes - all will dramatically increase the overall cost of an already expensive proprietary EHR system.
Healthcare professionals who had signed an agreement to receive technical assistance from a Regional Extension Center were more than twice as likely to have been awarded an incentive payment for achieving meaningful use, according to a new GAO report, that slices and dices who received how much, when and where.
The catalog of meaningful tasks - from clinical decision support and care coordination, to quality and safety, patient engagement, and population health - promises to go a long way toward improving care, and the requirements are also apt to stretch hospitals and physicians as they work to achieve Stage 3 meaningful use.
Reavis Eubanks, MD, defies the odds when it comes to giving up his paper charts and adopting an electronic medical record system. First, solo doctors, by many accounts, have a tough time making the transition; there's no IT personnel on staff to guide them and to troubleshoot, and then there's the issue of cost.