The American Hospital Association (AHA) has sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., urging that Congress maintain the level of insurance coverage offered in the House version of healthcare reform when it reconciles the competing Senate and House healthcare reform bills.
The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society believes there is much more to applaud than criticize concerning the release of interim final rules on meaningful use and qualified EHRs from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). However, the American Hospital Association noted that while health IT holds “great promise in improving care, widespread efforts toward adoption will be hindered unless key provisions in these rules are addressed.”
As U.S. healthcare costs inflate, factors such as insurance status, demographics and increased patient health risk must be investigated when defining ways to realign healthcare spending, according to a report released by the American Hospital Association this week.
According to a study published online Oct. 26 in Health Affairs, EHR adoption by hospitals that serve a large population of poor patients should be a major policy goal of health reform measures.
Health IT is taking a central role in the current healthcare debate, according to a report published by the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, George Washington University Medical Center and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The American Hospital Association (AHA), through its subsidiary AHA Solutions, has endorsed Extension’s HealthID, a secure smart card that holds individual patient data for use by hospitals.
After playing a major role in elevating health IT into a leadership issue in the United States, the National Alliance for Health Information Technology (NAHIT) will cease operation on Sept. 30.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) has released a statement supporting healthcare reform, but noted that it was "deeply disappointed and concerned to see the Obama Administration propose cuts of more than $220 billion to hospitals, especially during these tough economic times."
Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., has introduced the Quality FIRST Act (H.R. 1776), a bill to provide for a program of quality measurement and reporting and for the use of performance-based payment within Medicare for inpatient services.
The economy is taking its toll on the patients and communities that hospitals serve, resulting in nine in 10 hospitals having to make cutbacks to address these concerns, according to a survey from the American Hospital Association (AHA).
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Although the consensus is that EHRs have the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of U.S. healthcare providers, less than 2 percent of acute-care hospitals have implemented a comprehensive EHR; further, less than 8 percent have a basic EHR in place, according to a study published online March 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine that is scheduled for publication in the April 16 print edition.
Before economic turmoil hit, hospitals had shown important progress in healthcare IT adoption, and for now, many of the initiatives are funded and moving forward, according to an online survey published by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the National Alliance for Health IT (NAHIT) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) Solutions.
Relatively few U.S. hospitals—between 2 and 12 percent—use EHRs, according to a hospital IT adoption survey, conducted in conjunction with the American Hospital Association (AHA).
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
The state of Maine currently has the largest operating statewide exchange in the country in relation to population. Although Devore Culver, Executive Director of Maine’s HealthInfoNet, expects that distinction to change in the months ahead, the state’s HIE is entering the final months of its demonstration phase, and is slated to move in to its full statewide implementation in the second half of 2010. Culver, who is former CIO of Eastern Maine Health Care, recently spoke with CMIO about the progress HealthInfoNet has made.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.
