Quality and Safety
Free-text searches of electronic medical records could be better at identifying patients’ postoperative complications than the currently used billing codes, according to a new study.
The Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday awarded $137 million to 50 states – and Guam – to strengthen prevention efforts and to improve public health. Many of the awards include a health IT component, such as immunization information technologies and registries.
One day after a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck Virginia, two new surveys by the American Red Cross suggest that the uptick seen on sites such as Twitter and Facebook is part of a growing trend of Americans turning to social media in response to emergencies.
Curaspan Health Group unveiled its new DischargeCentral technology on Wednesday. The software-as-a-service application helps streamline patient transitions from one level of care to another.
Even as Oklahoma and Kansas recently said ‘no thanks’ to federal money aimed at helping them with the health information technology platform needed to create health insurance exchanges, the Departments of Health and Human Services and Treasury last week awarded $185M more to drive the creation of the exchanges across the country.
The National Quality Forum Board of Directors has recently approved for endorsement 41 quality measures concerning child health, covering the full spectrum of care from prenatal care to standards designed for adolescents.
GAO is urging the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to beef up its approach to physician quality reporting, recommending CMS be more methodical in order to make the reports more reliable.
Arien Malec, who coordinated the development of the Direct Project exchange protocols, is leaving the government's Office of the National Coordinator to return to the private sector.
Rep. Renee Ellmers sent a letter Thursday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in which she requested that HHS consider a study of health IT's benefits and cost effectiveness, with a focus on gauging medical error rates.
A Los Angeles-based entrepreneur is looking to take basic charting and clinical functions out of the EMR and offer a simple clinical software package to nonprofits working around the globe.