Quality and Safety

Having established a level of trust and familiarity with electronic health records over the past few years, increasing numbers of U.S. patients are looking for more advanced features, such as access to doctors' notes and test results, according to a new survey from the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Flatiron Health, the oncology analytics company, has partnered with Vector Oncology on a new project that lets cancer clinicians view patient-reported symptoms at the point of care.

Healthcare is serious business. But for a few brief hours on Sunday afternoon, John Ferrara, gamer extraordinaire, showed how it could be turned into a game for the benefit of patients and caregivers anywhere.

An estimated 50,000 lives were saved, 1.3 million fewer patients escaped harm and healthcare avoided $12 billion in spending. This according to a report released by the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this week.

Health insurer WellPoint is the launch partner for an online continuing medical education program emphasizing a global focus to diagnosing diseases, something that might have been helpful in handling recent Ebola cases.

The University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, which has already achieved Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics scale, has won the 2014 enterprise Davies Award. With the use of its electronic health record, the health system was able to improve workflow and documentation as well as significantly reduce adverse drug events and hospital acquired infections.

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.

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.

We often hear about streams of data. Sometimes, the flood can seem like a data deluge. In its new analytics project with EMC Corporation, Partners HealthCare extends the watery metaphor, with a new initiative meant for shared use: the Partners Data Lake.

Without good data, patient-centeredness is just a buzzword. And without a patient-centric focus and proper organization, data can be rather useless. That was the message Sunday from Amy Abernethy, MD, who delivered the opening keynote address at the American Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium.