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.”
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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.
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Mostashari
Health information technology leaders have a lot on their plates today and more to come—implementing systems to match the federal IT incentive payment program upgrades, satisfying auditors roaming the land, meeting privacy constraints and preparing for the switch to a huge set of updated diagnostic and procedural codes.
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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.
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If Congress manages to get the government restarted and avert the debt ceiling crisis, lawmakers may have just enough time to renew their
10-year tradition of "kicking the can" on finding a replacement for the Medicare sustainable growth-rate payment formula.
During a "Washington Update" session, Jeb Shepard and Jennifer Gasperini of the Medical Group Management Association's government affairs staff told attendees at the association's annual conference in San Diego how legislative and regulatory action and inaction may affect the medical practices they run.
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Stephen Nuckolls, CEO of Coastal Carolina Health Care, New Bern, N.C., shared some lessons at the Medical Group Management Association annual conference yesterday from his organization's experience in running a Medicare accountable care organization.
He said that when his organization was forming its 50-provider accountable care organization, hiring a consultant was money well-spent, but outsourcing the staff of its after-hours call center was not. The consultant offered concrete steps to advance the ACO goal of keeping people out of the hospital and emergency department. But the employees of the contracted call center company worked against that goal.
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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.
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The annual Health 2.0 Conference is wrapping up in Santa Clara, Calif., today, and with it come several launches worth noting.
One is the start of a $100,000 developer's challenge, seeking cloud-based, “innovative health applications that will revolutionize the way physicians and hospitals educate patients,” according to the contest sponsors.
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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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Wachter
At the sixth International Conference on Diagnostic Error in Medicine on Wednesday, Dr. Robert Wachter gave a quick history of patient safety and quality improvement but noted that activity to reduce diagnostic errors was noticeably absent from the movement's timeline.
“There's still not a lot of action promoting this agenda,” said Wachter, professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He made the remark after describing events that took place after the Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human,” its report on medical errors, in 1999.
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Wachter
At the sixth International Conference on Diagnostic Error in Medicine on Wednesday, Dr. Robert Wachter gave a quick history of patient safety and quality improvement but noted that activity to reduce diagnostic errors was noticeably absent from the movement's timeline.
“There's still not a lot of action promoting this agenda,” said Wachter, professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He made the remark after describing events that took place after the Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human,” its report on medical errors, in 1999.
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