Quality and Safety
ChenMed, a family owned primary care practice, has developed a delivery model focused on care for seniors with complicated healthcare issues, including heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and cancer.
Preventing hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) with UV light has been the recent focus of federal attention. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a two-year study that will measure the effectiveness of using advanced, no-touch environmental UV disinfection technology to reduce infections.
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.
New findings show that communities where hospitals, other healthcare providers and community services work together to coordinate evidence-based hospital discharges and provide better support in the community can see a 6 percent drop in hospitalizations and rehospitalizations per 1,000 beneficiaries in just the first two years.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have teamed up with Optum, the health IT unit of UnitedHealth, to launch a collaborative research and development facility where both clinical and claims data will be shared for the aim of improving patient care, officials announced Tuesday.
Once considered the leading edge of information technology, computerized physician order entry is now simmering on the back burner of healthcare priorities. While it is not forgotten, attention toward CPOE has been deflected in favor of other concerns, such as meaningful use, interoperability, RAC audits and ICD-10 coding projects. Yet it is a critical piece of meaningful use.
An infusion of cash from Partners HealthCare is set to spur a promising 2013 for Healthrageous, whose health self-management technology traces its roots to Partners' Center for Connected Health.
After working at this remote patient monitoring game for about 10 years now, we are ready to bring self-care to consumers - couch potatoes, weekend warriors and all of us in between hoping to live a little healthier, lose a few pounds or just feel a little better. Meet Wellocracy.
Disease is too complex to just think your way through it," says Raimond Winslow, director of The Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins. "We can no longer work with what I call purely mental models of how biological systems function in either health or disease."
The burgeoning and highly complex field of computational medicine is showing promise for the treatment of illnesses such as Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer and more, as technology and troves of data are harnessed to investigate the underpinnings and map the progression of diseases.