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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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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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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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.
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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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A scheduled House committee hearing on the Food and Drug Administration's progress toward implementing a federal law requiring it to develop a regulatory strategy for health information technology was postponed Thursday, as the government shutdown continued into its third day.
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, was scheduled to testify before the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Food and Drug Administration Safety Innovation Act.
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Planned Parenthood of the Heartland filed a lawsuit in federal court Sept. 30 asking a judge to grant a stay against a rule from the Iowa Board of Medicine that would restrict abortion access in the state.
On Aug. 30, members of the state board voted to adopt rules that would ban
telemedicine delivery for medical abortion and require that patients receive a physical examination before and after the administration of an abortion-inducing drug. The medical board asserts that the telemedicine practices “are inconsistent with the protocols approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the manufacturer of the drugs” because they don't include an in-person meeting with a physician.
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A Medicare test of accountable care in Wisconsin slowed cost growth last year for about 20,000 seniors. That's good news, of course, to economists and policymakers. But for hospitals, the news was not all good because most payers continue to reimburse on a fee-for-service basis rewarding more admissions and more volume of services.
An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that for hospitals that participate in Medicare accountable care programs, such as ThedaCare in Appleton, Wis., competing financial incentives can make their ACO efforts counterproductive.
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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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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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