Quality and Safety
Xenex Healthcare Services, a provider of ultraviolet (UV) room disinfection, has announced that the Veterans Health Care System in central Texas is using its mercury-free UV light technology to disinfect hospital rooms and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAI).
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT wants to use EHR certification criteria to make it easier for physicians to report patient safety events. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will encourage providers to report adverse events to patient safety organizations, and ONC will propose certification requirements that, where appropriate, EHRs can report safety events in AHRQ's Common Formats.
The National eHealth Collaborative's Health Information Exchange Learning Network has recommendations for tackling some of the most challenging HIE issues.
The National Quality Forum Board of Directors has unanimously named Christine K. Cassel as its new president and chief executive officer. Cassel will begin her position at NQF effective mid-summer 2013, according to an NQF statement made Dec. 17.
One week after unveiling its Patient Engagement Framework, the National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) has launched an online tool meant to help health organizations track their progress on involving patients in their care.
Some 1,500 patients at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) are being notified of a medical data breach involving a resident physician whose employment was terminated in 2010. The incident's validity, however, remains contentious and unclear, as it involves an earlier lawsuit against UAMS, filed by the physician who has cited allegations of gender discrimination.
More and more, health IT is expanding from the clinical into the commercial realm. With patient engagement so crucial to the transformation of care delivery, that's a good thing. But some consumer technologies are better than others.
Seems like everything is "smart" nowadays. Smartphones. Smart TVs. Smart cars. For something to simply exist and perform its intended purpose is no longer enough; now everything must be technologically-advanced enough to all but think for itself.
The first thing one notices, when looking at HIMSS Analytics' tallies of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) adoption in hospitals, is how high they are. Unlike CPOE, e-prescribing or even EHRs, the market penetration for PACS systems is pretty robust.
The Statewide Health Information Network of New York sees itself as a "public utility" as much as an HIE. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, as patients bounce between hospitals (and as other public utilities, such as electricity and transportation, are compromised), it has enabled critical continuity of care.