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People who live in healthier counties tend to have higher education levels, are more likely to be employed, have access to more healthcare providers and have more access to healthier foods, parks and recreational facilities, according to a report on the rank of overall health of every county in the U.S. from the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).
From reducing medical errors, increasing the quality of care and promoting wellness to improving efficiency and reducing costs, a new survey from Gallup on the behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that a majority of healthcare opinion leaders believe nurses should have more influence on health systems and services.
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.
Almost 75 percent of physicians were accepting all or most new Medicare patients and the vast majority of physicians had managed care contracts in 2008, according to findings released Sept. 3 from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) 2008 Health Tracking Physician Survey.
As policymakers consider ways to cut health costs as a part of healthcare reform, a new survey of U.S. physician practices finds that physicians are spending, on average, the equivalent of three work weeks annually on administrative tasks required by health plans, according to a study published online May 14 in Health Affairs.
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.
Progress on Connecting for Health, a £12 billion ($19.3 billion U.S.) program designed to give doctors instant access to patients' records across the country, has stalled, raising questions about whether the civil IT project in England will ever be finished.
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While many U.S. physicians identify language or cultural barriers as obstacles to providing high-quality patient care, physicians' efforts to overcome communication barriers are modest and uneven, according to a report released by the Center for Studying Health System Change.
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.
A survey, published in the Sept. 14 online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that 62.9 percent of physicians nationwide support proposals to expand healthcare coverage that include both public and private insurance options—where people under the age of 65 would have the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans. About 27 percent supported offering private options only.
A qualitative study conducted by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston revealed that patients want full access to all of their medical records; are willing to make some privacy concessions in the interest of making their medical records completely transparent; and expect that computers may one day substitute for face-to-face doctor visits.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has issued a call for proposals to assess and test the potential of ‘observations of daily living' to help patients and physicians better manage chronic illnesses, with a total of up to $2.4 million available to as many as five grantee teams for 24-month demonstration projects. Grants may total up to $480,000 each.
The HIPAA Privacy Rule does not adequately protect the privacy of personal health information and hinders important health research discoveries, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM); which has also called on Congress to develop a new approach to protecting personal health information for research.
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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.
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.