Quality and Safety

The Mount Sinai Health System in New York City will create the Mount Sinai Institute of Technology with $5 million in funding from the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The goal is to radically transform biomedicine through technology-based solutions.

Cerner Corp., one of the top EHR vendors in the country, is teaming up with Claritas Genomics to advance personalized medicine by building tools and connectivity that will better integrate next-generation, sequence-based diagnostic testing into clinical practice.

Eleven hospitals have received the 2013 Hospital Website Transparency Award, which is given by URAC and The Leapfrog Group to recognize organizations that embrace quality measures.

The healthcare industry depends on data, so unplanned data center outages can be a real downer. How much so? Well, in addition to the expected consequences of business and care disruption, there's also the financial cost incurred due to system outages. And it's no small number.

For the second consecutive year, rural hospitals stood out, with 22 hospitals making the Leapfrog Group's 2013 Top Hospitals list -- a 69 percent increase from last year. Rounding out the list are 55 urban hospitals and 13 children's hospitals.

Leveraging the Industrial Internet to better impact patient outcomes, GE Healthcare launched Centricity 360, a cloud service that the company calls "a GE Predictivity solution."

MedStar Health, in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic Innovations, has signed a deal with InnoVital Systems of Beltsville, Md., to license patent rights for a device that potentially could make it easier for patients with severe lung and neuromuscular diseases to breathe.

Richmond, Va., gastroenterologist Michael P. Jones, MD, is not anti-technology. He just does not like electronic medical records in their current form. He's expecting the technology to improve, but for now, he's opted for paper charts.

Epic Systems Corp. will help Oregon Health & Science University set up two laboratory installations of its EpicCare electronic health record on its servers for medical informatics education and research purposes. On the research side, the school will have access to Epic's source code.

If hospital chief information officers and vendor hiring managers think it's tough to find qualified health IT workers now, just wait until technology implementation moves beyond EHR installation, data capture and moderate interoperability to a full-blown effort to transform a broken healthcare industry.