|
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) annual release of state-by-state health quality data has been expanded to include new data on health insurance. The additional data are intended to provide information on healthcare quality categorized by source of payment, including private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid and those without insurance.
The Center for Technology and Aging will provide grants to five healthcare organizations to test the efficacy and quality of remote home monitoring to improve chronic disease management and post-acute care.
“The challenges that organizations face today with regard to clinical analytics are only going to be amplified in the future, as is evident in the later stages of meaningful use criteria,” according to a report from Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Analytics.
The use of secure patient-physician email in context of a comprehensive EHR is associated with the improved care for patients with diabetes and hypertension, according to Kaiser Permanente research published in the July issue of Health Affairs.
Written by Kaitlyn Dmyterko
IT-enabled medication management strategies tap computerized provider order entry (CPOE), bar-coded electronic medication administration records and clinical decision support modules in electronic health records to reduce medication errors. They have their work cut out for them: The Institute of Medicine estimates that 1.5 million preventable medication errors occur in the U.S. every year, costing some $8 billion.
The investment and focus in health IT innovation will assist the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s (PPACA) goals and could produce large return-of-investments, according to the venture capital firm Psilos Group's “2010 Outlook on Helathcare Economics & Innovation” report.
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have selected 15 pilot communities for wide-scale use of health IT through the Beacon Community program, with awards totaling $220 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Written by Jeff Byers
The California Medical Association (CMA) has announced its withdrawal from a Blue Shield of California initiative to rate physician performance due to the program's “serious and disturbing flaws in how data are collected on physicians that result in gross inaccuracies." And, in recent interviews, Blue Shield defended its program, while CMA reiterated its resistance to the payor's method of ranking state physicians.
The assessment of U.S. 50-top hospitals, annually ranked by U.S. News & World Report, are based on subjective interpretations, rather than quality. These subjective reputations have very little association to objective quality measures among the top 50 hospitals, according to a recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
According to the 2009 National Healthcare Quality Report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Department of Health and Human Services, the quality of healthcare is improving, but slowly, especially in the areas of preventive care and chronic disease management.
|
In comparing health IT within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to the standards in the private sector, researchers from the Center for IT Leadership in Charlestown, Mass., determined that the VA spent proportionately more on IT than the private healthcare sector spent, but it achieved higher levels of IT adoption and quality of care.
AgaMatrix, maker of blood glucose-monitoring products, and pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis have entered into a partnership to co-develop, supply and commercialize diabetes management technologies.
Written by Gina Narcisi
Clinical data repositories are allowing facilities to improve patient care and move toward an integrated and interoperable health IT environment. The HITECH Act has spurred a need for CDR development in both academic and large-scale healthcare settings, and health IT professionals are getting the technology in place with an eye toward the features that are important to a well-designed CDR.
Written by Gina Narcisi
QATLANTA - Originally piloted two years ago as the Improving Continuous Cardiac Care IC3 registry, the recently rebranded PINNACLE registry is the first and only ambulatory registry for cardiovascular conditions in this country, noted William Oetgen, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University, at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual conference on March 16.
In order for telemedicine case management to be more widely adopted, less expensive technology is needed to lower implementation costs, according to a recent study from The Journal of Medical Informatics Association.
ATLANTA—InterSystems participated in a demonstration that simulated state-to-state health information exchange (HIE) for the duration of the HIMSS10 conference this week.
The use of at-home medical devices to connect doctors and patients via the internet can help patients and their physicians work more efficiently together to manage chronic conditions, according to research at Cleveland Clinic.
Written by Jeff Byers
Patient monitoring technology is evolving to deliver far more than digital vital signs. Today’s physiological monitoring systems provide immediacy, accuracy and ease of access with an added dimension of both intelligence—to predict, monitor and analyze patient events over time—and flexibility to monitor patients from other areas in the unit and even the patient’s home.
Medtronic has reported positive financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010, which ended Jan. 29.
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).
|
RSS 
“We’re beginning a revolution the way information is collected, managed, used and purposed for patients in the U.S. healthcare system,” said David Blumenthal, MD, chair of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, in opening remarks at an audioconference training session on meaningful use and EHR certification last week.
In Part 1 of our closer look at the final rules for meaningful use and EHR certification standards, CMIO’s Jeff Byers spoke with David Blumenthal, MD, chair of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. In Part 2, CMIOs weigh in with mixed reviews.
The framework for meaningful use is “something that had to be done and has been started intelligently,” John P. Glaser, PhD, vice president and CIO of Partners HealthCare System told CMIO. However, the challenges of becoming meaningful users and optimizing health information exchange will require unprecedented levels of communication within organizations and among healthcare systems, he said.
The contractual obligations in the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on modifications to the HIPAA privacy, security and enforcement rules under the HITECH Act for business associates and downstream entities are game changers, according to Amy S. Leopard, JD, from Walter and Haverfield, during a webinar sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
Standardizing performance measures, with the help of health IT, will make it possible to collect the right data at the right time to support performance measurement, clinical decision support, clinical research and quality improvement, said Janet M. Corrigan, PhD, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum (NQF) during a webinar hosted by the forum on June 17.