The key to effective health information technology in a small, office-based medical practice is to properly install the newly purchased electronic health-record system, according to a new report from KLAS Enterprises.
KLAS's review of 27 vendors' products found that unhappiness with an EHR vendor's installation effort leads to practices switching to another vendor. It also found that such flipping is on the rise. KLAS did not quantify, in aggregate, the percentage of practices committed to changing systems.
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HHS is searching for the best idea for a system that captures essential data from durable medical equipment, such as loss of power, GPS location and privacy-protected user information during emergencies.
Thousands of people in the U.S. rely on electrically powered durable medical equipment to meet their medical needs at home and often have to find help in shelters or emergency rooms during extended power outages, according to HHS.
The department's office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, or ASPR, kicked off the Ideation Challenge, a contest to find ideas for determining the location and the status of durable medical equipment—such as oxygen concentrators and portable ventilators—to help users in emergencies. The system should also gather the power level and battery life of the equipment and the time and date. HHS envisions a network that's accessible to all those who use durable medical equipment in their homes and sends data securely to other secure information systems.
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The American College of Physicians released a Web-based clinical decision support tool for internal medicine physicians known as ACP Smart Medicine.
Accessible from desktops, smartphones and tablets, the online tool includes 500 modules with evidence-based content and recommendations for a variety of conditions and diseases.
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There are more than 200 mobile healthcare applications co-branded with healthcare organizations available on the two main online app marketplaces, Google Play and the Apple App Store, a new research report shows.
“The box we had around this was the hospital's name—it had to be clearly designated as an app from them,” said Brian Dolan, managing editor and co-founder of MobiHealthNews.com, a website that covers the burgeoning mobile health app space. “It was built for them or built by them and it had to be for patients. We wanted this to be about patient engagement.”
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The American College of Physicians is nervous about where HHS is headed with the criteria for meaningful use of electronic health records.
The organization wrote a letter to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology addressing “what has been released for Stage 2 and what we have been told to expect for Stage 3” in the federal EHR meaningful-use program.
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Hoven
“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of private practice medicine have been greatly exaggerated,” Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, president of the American Medical Association, said in a news release touting the findings of a recent survey that indicates how the trend toward hospital employment of physicians may be overstated.
According to the AMA's new Physician Practice Benchmark Survey, 53.2% of physicians were self-employed in 2012, 41.8% were employed and 5% were independent contractors.
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The Delaware Regional Extension Center is batting better than a thousand.
It is the first of the 62 health information technology extension centers funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to meet its target of helping 1,000 healthcare providers across the finishing line as “meaningful users” of electronic health-record systems under the federal EHR incentive payment program.
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The Chicago-based health information technology business accelerator, Healthbox, is seeking applicants for its second group of local companies looking for mentoring, funding, and, most importantly, some help getting their feet in the door with healthcare providers and payers.
The application process is open through Sept. 29.
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Every day when a patient goes to the drug store, within the course of a few questions and a few key strokes, a clerk or pharmacist can match that patient to the right electronic prescription and insurance records in their computer system.
It's accomplished with probabilistic matching, relying on five key data elements—the patient's first and last names, date of birth, address and sex. The same basic technique is used throughout the country to match patient-care summaries and full electronic health records in queries by providers to health information exchanges.
The systems used today can, when properly implemented, “achieve extraordinarily high” rates of accurate matching, said Lee Stevens, policy director for the state health information exchange program within HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
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The potential blessings of smartphones and tablets carry with them the potential curse of health information insecurity, but there is no ducking the challenges of both, according to a multi-industry survey of IT leaders.
Nine out of 10 of the 1,200 IT professionals surveyed across eight industries, including healthcare, expect the growing use of personal mobile devices to have a major impact on their organizations, while 92% indicate they've already encountered challenges in their organizations due to the devices, according to new report, “Mobility at Work,” by technology seller CDW, of Vernon Hills, Ill.
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A large hospital consortium and two health systems have launched a "big data" pilot project to automatically extract claims and clinical data from their information technology systems.
UHC, the Chicago-based University HealthSystem Consortium of 118 academic medical centers and nearly 300 affiliated hospitals, is collaborating with NYU Langone Medical Center in New York and the Cleveland Clinic on the project.
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