It's not easy to start a movement, but a new group of physicians and healthcare researchers are hoping to do so. They are looking to the Institute of Medicine to bolster their efforts to reduce diagnosis errors that lead to delayed or inappropriate treatments.
“It's affecting hundreds of thousands of people a year, but it gets very little attention from healthcare organizations and physicians in general,” said Dr. Mark Graber, founder and president of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. “We haven't encountered any pushback, it's more just apathy.”
Read more »
While the patient-centered medical home has been touted as the foundation for a better coordinated and more efficient healthcare system, experts now say medical home practices need to be connected to other parts of the healthcare system. To this end, the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative has released a report listing 10 “essential” health information technology tools needed to make these population health connections.
Read more »
The College of Health Information Management Executives' 2013 Fall CIO Forum wrapped up Friday in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a spate of announcements and award presentations.
CHIME used the forum to ballyhoo the cutting-edge work of two healthcare organizations and two health information technology developers. It presented Sutter Health, Sacramento, Calif., with its Innovator of the Year Award for equipping its clinical workforce with 1,000 mobile tablets for use in home health and hospice locations across northern California.
Read more »
Many people visiting the federal government's health insurance marketplace in 36 states complained that they couldn't window-shop for health plans without creating an account.
But visitors to the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov site now can bypass the temperamental application interface and compare plans anonymously, as some of the state-run exchanges previously made possible. HHS added the feature Thursday, following 10 days marked by system outages and lengthy wait times.
Read more »
Online reviews posted by customers have cast physicians under the same criticisms normally reserved for restaurants, and it turns out a majority of doctors pay close attention to those appraisals.
About 85% of physicians proactively monitor online reviews about themselves, according to a survey conducted by ZocDoc, the online physician appointment hub. ZocDoc received answers in July from 360 physicians.
Read more »
The government shutdown isn't stopping Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meetings scheduled this month, according to drug and device manufacturers.
Some analysts warned that the shutdown could limit the FDA's panel discussions, postpone meetings and ultimately delay product launches and spook investors.
Read more »
Three winners will split more than $3 million in prize money offered by the Veterans Affairs Department to upgrade the scheduling software module of its VistA electronic health-record system.
The $1,825,000 first-prize winner is a consortium of MedRed, a Washington, D.C.-based software development company; BT Americas, an IT services company based in El Segundo, Calif.; and the VistA Expertise Network, a programmer's network based in Seattle. Its entry, Health eTime, has been under development since last fall solely for the contest, said Krishna Dave, contract manager for MedRed. Whether the software will become part of VistA, and whether it will be proprietary or free and open source has yet to be determined, Dave said. “We are waiting for some guidance from the VA on what the next steps are, whether there will be procurement,” she said.
Read more »
The federal government's jobs report last month left many eager to find out if the next report would again show weak gains or even losses in hospital employment in spite of durable growth in the healthcare sector at large.
But anyone who keeps close tabs on healthcare employment woke up this morning—the first Friday of October—without the monthly fix of federal jobs data thanks to the government shutdown in Washington.
Read more »
There has been a lot of complaining lately about the lack of interoperability in healthcare information technology and how the inability of computers to communicate with each other impedes organizing population health-improvement systems. But two Southern California organizations that just announced a deal to open a string of primary-care health centers said interoperability concerns will not stand in the way.
Southern California's MemorialCare Health System and UC Irvine Health announced the collaboration Oct. 2. Although the hospitals and medical groups of the two systems use a mix of products that includes Allscripts, NextGen Healthcare as well as both Epic's hospital and ambulatory systems, organization executives say interfaces can be created to let them all talk to each other.
Read more »
The advent of recovery auditing in Medicare has led to a sharp increase in administrative appeals by hospitals, creating administrative logjams but not necessarily leading to victories for providers complaining about denied payments.
Between 2008 and 2012, the number of administrative appeals annually involving inpatient hospital care skyrocketed from 46,000 to 284,000, according to a report out today from HHS' Office of the Inspector General.
Read more »
The advent of recovery auditing in Medicare has led to a sharp increase in administrative appeals by hospitals, creating administrative logjams but not necessarily leading to victories for providers complaining about denied payments.
Between 2008 and 2012, the number of administrative appeals annually involving inpatient hospital care skyrocketed from 46,000 to 284,000, according to a report out today from HHS' Office of the Inspector General.
Read more »
