Quality and Safety
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.
Charles E. Christian, CIO of Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes, Ind. has been named CIO of the Year by CHIME and HIMSS.
The Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Program Registration and Attestation System portal went live on Monday, representing a major step in the health information technology landscape.
"This year, significant strides were made in health information technology," David Blumenthal, MD, the national health IT coordinator, wrote in his blog detailing health IT achievements for 2010.
Good Samaritan Medical Center and West Boca Medical Center are the first two hospitals in South Florida to use radio frequency (RF) detection technology in their operating rooms to prevent and detect foreign items inadvertently left inside a patient during surgery.
Six technologies, whose impact has been measured by hospitals, can improve workflow and communication for nurses while boosting patient care, according to analysts.
The Alaska eHealth Network, Alaska's statewide health information exchange, has tapped Santa Monica, Calif.-based Orion Health as its primary technology provider, with the purchase Orion's HIE solution. AeHN will deploy the technology as a hosted, software-as-a-service model.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is establishing several "communities of practice" to help its Beacon program establish clinical decision support technologies, care transitions programs, and pharmacy solutions and tools in healthcare improvement projects.