Quality and Safety

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius seemed to have weathered the maelstrom surrounding the botched rollout of the government's health insurance exchanges back in October and come through the other side where more than 7 million people signed up for health insurance through the exchanges. But on Thursday, after five years at the HHS helm, Sebelius resigned.

To healthcare mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, the dirtiest four-letter word in the realm of digital health is "silo."

EHRs were designed to satisfy specific functions for distinct parts of the care process. Currently, EHRs are all about making sure all the warnings are heeded, and all boxes are checked. It's about bringing the information together to make physicians' jobs easier so they can make faster, more informed patient care decisions.

Boston has long proven itself a mecca for healthcare innovation, a hub of some of the best minds and most prestigious hospitals in the nation. And the 2014 Boston Children's Hospital Innovators' Showcase proved no exception.

Bill Spooner "retired" from his post as leader of Sharp HealthCare's 450-member IT team on Feb. 14. The quotes around "retired" are necessary because he has something in the works -- he won't say what yet. It's something that will keep him working halftime, or maybe more. It's too hard to leave healthcare IT altogether at this promising juncture, he says.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a highly regarded teaching hospital in Boston, but in 2012, the hospital found out it had one of the highest rates of readmissions among Medicare patients in the country. That meant federal fines of more than $1 million -- and a lot of soul searching for the staff, says Dr. Julius Yang, the head of quality for the hospital.

The New York eHealth Collaborative and the Partnership Fund for New York City are calling for applications for a second round of healthcare startups for its New York Digital Health Accelerator, a program designed to make New York a hub for the emerging digital health technology industry.

With apologies to Internet meme-makers everywhere, analytics experts have a message for healthcare providers trying to get their heads around business and clinical intelligence: "Big data, you're doing it wrong."

There are two types of analytics projects: those boundary-pushing advancements that, where they do exist, are mainly the product of big hospitals and academic medical centers, and the humbler, more doable -- but sometimes just as valuable -- insights that can be gleaned by smaller providers.

The American Health Information Management Association is urging controls on the copy-and-paste functionality in electronic health record systems. The use of copy-and-paste should be permitted only when such "strong technology and administrative controls," are in place, the organization wrote in a position statement.