Quality and Safety
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded grants to 44 healthcare organizations to improve access to healthcare in rural areas.
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology has announced that EHR technology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston has been certified as a complete EHR under CCHIT's new EHR Alternative Certification for Hospitals (EACH), an ONC-ATCB certification program for installed hospital EHR technology.
As hospitals and health systems across the country grapple with achieving meaningful use of electronic medical records, Accenture is the latest to offer a survey on how they are doing. This one is a survey of CIOs from health systems with advanced use of EMRs, and one of the key findings is that most health systems underestimate the time and cost of implementation.
Mobility is a "vital" sign that should be regularly checked in adults over the age of sixty, and according to two health and exercise science professors at Wake Forest University, the iPad is just the tool for the job.
The Kansas Academy of Family Physicians (KAFP) has launched a patient centered medical home initiative involving eight practices, which will run over the next three years.
Mobile technology has become an must-have tool for Walgreens, which bills itself as the nation's largest drugstore chain. The company now offers mobile applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, featuring text alerts for more than 1 million subscribers and a function that allows patients to scan the bar code of their prescription to send in refills.
The eHealth Initiative (eHI), whose mission is to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare through IT, has announced the industry leaders nominated for the 2011 Board of Directors. The board will be led by the new Chair William F. Jessee, MD, president and CEO of the Medical Group Management Association, and Vice Chair Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.
New research from the National Quality Forum (NQF) supports the use of effective IT tools and promotes clinical decision support. The two reports, Driving Quality: A Model to Measure Electronic Health IT Use and Driving Quality and Performance Measurement: A Foundation for Clinical Decision Support, also delve into ways to measure health IT use.
IBM and Premier healthcare alliance plan to integrate health information from across hospitals and other healthcare sites, creating a model that Premier and IBM executives say will benefit more than 2,400 hospitals and thousands of other healthcare sites.
Seven of the many applicants to the Rural Health Program Awards, funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota (BCBSND), together will receive $375,000 in funding for 2011.