Here are a few I came across last week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
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NHS to log private healthcare data to address gaps in care records
The NHS will begin recording data from the private healthcare sector for the first time, in an attempt to bridge gaps in patient health records and improve the quality of available information.
28 June 2018
An initiative has been launched by NHS Digital and the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) that will see performance data, published by private hospitals, integrated into NHS systems.
Called the Acute Data Alignment Programme (ADAPt), the initiative aims, in part, to address cases in which an individual may have received care privately and therefore has treatment information missing from their NHS health record.
The programme is being jointly led by NHS Digital and PHIN, in partnership with the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, NHS Improvement, and the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
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HealthSteps wins AMA-Google’s Interoperability and Innovation Challenge
Published June 29 2018, 6:49am EDT
A mobile platform designed to help keep patients on track with their care plans is the winner of the Health Care Interoperability and Innovation Challenge, an American Medical Association-led effort with sponsorship from Google.
HealthSteps was among eight finalists that pitched their ideas on Thursday in front of a live audience and panel of judges at Google’s office in Cambridge, Mass., with the Gainesville, Fla.-based company selected as the winner and receiving $25,000 in Google Cloud credits.
The aim of the challenge was to evaluate solutions that use patient-generated data in meaningful ways to improve clinical outcomes, streamline physician workflows and reduce costs.
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Next-gen health IT consulting: Moving into post-EHR era
Consultants weigh in on what hospitals should expect from them as healthcare moves beyond digitization and into the age of consumerism.
By Bill Siwicki
June 28, 2018 01:11 PM
Healthcare information technology is evolving in many ways, and quickly so. That means health IT consulting has to change with the times, to evolve alongside the technology consultants help healthcare provider organizations master.
Consultants from top firms across the health IT consulting spectrum have various ideas on what firms must do next to successfully aid provider organizations with technology. Call them next-generation health IT consulting goals.
For example, health IT consultants must move beyond prediction, said Jeff Geppert, a senior research leader at Battelle, an independent research, consulting and development organization that applies science, technology and engineering to challenges in various industries, including healthcare.
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Robots May Soon Join Ranks of Alzheimer's Caregivers
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, June 28, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Robots work on assembly lines and assist doctors in the operating room. They manage inventory in warehouses and vacuum floors in homes.
And one day soon, they could help care for Alzheimer's patients.
Several teams of scientists from around the world are investigating ways in which robots might help manage the daily living tasks of people with Alzheimer's disease.
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AI, radar may help diabetics monitor sugar without drawing blood
By Allen Cone | June 28, 2018 at 1:05 PM
June 28 (UPI) -- Researchers have developed a way for people with diabetes to detect blood sugar levels without drawing blood.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo combined radar and artificial intelligence technologies to detect changes in glucose levels several times a day, but without requiring finger pricks. The system is outlined in a study published this month in the International Journal of Mobile Human-Computer Interaction.
"We want to sense blood inside the body without actually having to sample any fluid," George Shaker, an engineering professor at Waterloo, said in a press release. "Our hope is this can be realized as a smartwatch to monitor glucose continuously."
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Microsoft Healthcare is a new effort to push doctors to the cloud
Microsoft wants to be a big part of the cloud and AI healthcare race
By
Microsoft has been working on health-related initiatives for years, but the company is now bringing its efforts together into a new Microsoft Healthcare team. This doesn’t mean you’ll be visiting a Microsoft Store anytime soon for human virus scans, instead it’s a bigger effort to create cloud-based patient profiles, push doctors to the cloud, and eventually have artificial intelligence analyzing data.
The software maker has hired two industry veterans to help out: Jim Weinstein and Joshua Mandel. Weinstein is the former CEO of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system and joins Microsoft as the VP of Microsoft Healthcare, and will work with healthcare organizations to move systems to the cloud. Mandel joins as Microsoft Healthcare chief architect, after completing a nearly two-year stint at Google as an executive for the company’s Verily venture (formerly Google Life Sciences). Mandel will be working closely with the open standards community to create an open cloud architecture for all healthcare providers.
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Exploring the strategic benefits of a move to the cloud
Healthcare IT managers are making the move to the cloud one step at a time, evaluating the success of each migrated application before preparing the next move.
By Gus Venditto
June 27, 2018 12:56 PM
Healthcare organizations traditionally are cautious in their approach to new technologies. With good reason, of course. Healthcare IT supports a mission that leaves no room for error. And as cloud computing has emerged in recent years as a cost-effective alternative to expensive data warehouses, healthcare was not an early adopter.
But recent research shows that an increasing number of hospitals and private practices are migrating databases, applications, and services (such as disaster recovery) to the cloud, with no slowdown in sight.
In a HIMSS Analytics survey of healthcare IT executives taken in January 2017, 65 percent of respondents said their healthcare organizations currently utilize the cloud or cloud services. “Much of the usage leans toward clinical application and data hosting, data recovery and backup, and the hosting of operational applications,” HIMSS Analytics reported.
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VA sets 1st Cerner go-live for 2020
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs plans to be fully functional on its new Cerner EHR at three test sites in the Pacific Northwest by March 2020, officials said in a hearing before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs June 26.
The overhaul will follow a wave model, with the first go-lives slated at Washington VA facilities in Spokane, Seattle and American Lake this July. Implementation is set for October.
VA finalized its contract with Cerner May 17, awarding the EHR vendor $10 billion over the next 10 years to put the VA on the same records system as the U.S. Defense Department. The goal is to take lessons learned from DOD's early implementations to avoid similar mishaps and complications. DOD began its transition to Cerner in February 2017 and has been criticized for numerous problems, including the management and documentation of patient care, poor system usability, insufficient training and inadequate help desk support.
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Cybercriminals Target Hospitals with SamSam Ransomware Attacks
Cybercriminals increased their SamSam ransomware attacks against the healthcare sector in the first quarter of 2018, with numerous cases reported of hospitals paying the ransom to regain access to their systems.
By Fred Donovan
June 27, 2018 - Cybercriminals increased their SamSam (aka SAMSA) ransomware attacks against the healthcare sector in the first quarter of 2018, with numerous cases reported of hospitals paying the ransom to regain access to their systems, according to McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2018.
Earlier in the year, HHS warned about an increase in SamSam ransomware attacks targeting healthcare and government organizations.
The SamSam ransomware seeks out insecure remote desktop protocol (RDP) connections as well as vulnerable JBoss systems to carry out its infections.
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HIE collaboration brings more data to physicians at the point of care
Published June 28 2018, 5:01pm EDT
SacValley Medshare, a health information exchange serving the North Central Valley of California, is bulking up its data repository so it can provide physicians with a richer set of patient information at the point of care.
The HIE is working with vendor Collective Medical, which collects health insurance and other data from emergency rooms, including patient-specific care guidelines and plans, utilization patterns and pain management histories. Collective Medical also pulls in and stores details that hospitals generally don’t have, such as a specific patient being anxious or combative, or having a history of opioid use.
Under their pact, Collective Medical will provide its data to SacValley Medshare in real-time, which the HIE could then immediately feed to the hospitals in its network.
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HIT Think 5 ways smaller healthcare organizations can bolster security
By David Wagner
Published June 28 2018, 5:10pm EDT
The mergers and acquisition market is heating up in healthcare, both in the number and size of deals. As of late September 2017, there had been at least 561 hospital mergers since 2010, and four of the biggest last year involved entities with revenue of more than $1 billion. As the healthcare landscape continues to transform, M&A is likely to become a common occurrence and a ubiquitous strategy for smaller organizations.
As these provider organizations increasingly pursue buyout offers, they must begin thinking about their actual value to a larger company. When two companies merge, their strengths and weaknesses get married. If those weaknesses are too large or too unpredictable, the marriage often falls apart.
The due diligence process to determine those weaknesses is already exhaustive. But now that cyber crime has risen to the top of the threat landscape, evaluators are making it a prime focus. If a potential acquisition has weak security measures, a lax security culture or a demonstrated history of security failures, it’s now considered a significant liability.
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This AI Can Provide Health Advice That Is as Good as a Real Doctor's
By Aristos GeorgiouOn 6/27/18 at 5:21 PM
A new artificial intelligence platform has demonstrated its ability to provide health advice that is as good as a human doctor’s, according to research published on the preprint server arXiv.org.
The technology, which has been developed by British company Babylon Health, takes the form of a mobile phone app, or website, that patients interact with via a chat service. (A voice-controlled version will also be available soon.)
The AI system has been put through rigorous testing that took place in collaboration with the U.K.'s Royal College of Physicians, as well as researchers from Stanford University and the Yale New Haven Health System.
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AI tools improve diagnostic accuracy to match that of docs
Published June 28 2018, 5:00pm EDT
Babylon Healthcare Services, a new mobile medical consultation service, says its artificial intelligence software, in tests, can assess common conditions more accurately than human doctors.
London-based Babylon’s AI correctly answered 81 percent of diagnostic questions designed to mimic those trainee doctors must answer as part of the Royal College of General Practitioner’s exam that must be passed to become a qualified GP doctor in the U.K. The exam is graded on a curve, but over the past five years, the average score trainees needed to pass was 72 percent.
Babylon demonstrated this technology publicly for the first time in a live test at an event at London’s Royal College of Physicians on Wednesday.
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Special Report: Radiology Information Systems
With the shortage of radiologists showing no signs of abating – and the demand for scans increasing year on year – attention understandably continues to fall on how technology might help. Can radiology information systems be the key to better management of workload? And will artificial intelligence make a difference? Kim Thomas reports.
Last year, the Royal College of Radiologists revealed figures showing an “increasingly desperate situation in UK radiology”. A shortage of radiologists – one in 10 radiologist posts were vacant in 2016 – was said to make late hospital diagnoses and delayed scan results a “very real likelihood for patients”. In the same year, the NHS paid £88m to third parties for out-of-hours reporting of X-rays and scans.
As the number of scans taken every year continues to increase, the difficulty in meeting demand is worsening. Tackling the shortage of radiologists is a long-term project, but in the shorter term technology has the potential to help in two main ways: by sharing the reporting workload across NHS trusts, and perhaps by using artificial intelligence to automate some of the work currently performed by clinicians. Radiology information systems are integral to making those changes.
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CMS creates Chief Health Informatics Officer position to lead interoperability push
The CHIO will support health IT management and technology innovation policy within the agency, while coordinating those efforts among staff.
June 26, 2018 01:27 PM
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services posted a new leadership position, Chief Health Informatics Officer, which will lead the agency’s interoperability efforts and health IT strategy.
Posted late last week, the CHIO will focus on improving interoperability and innovation for CMS. According to the job posting, the executive will also develop CMS’ IT strategy, work with outside partners and act as a liaison between the agency and the private sector.
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Next-gen interoperability: AI, blockchain, FHIR and open source analytics
Healthcare has struggled with data sharing for a long time but, even still, experts said the future will be robust as emerging technologies and standards become more common.
By Bill Siwicki
June 27, 2018 09:35 AM
Interoperability is the ultimate goal of healthcare information systems. Software and cloud-based services need to be able to talk to one another, to exchange clinical and administrative data to enable complete access to a patient’s record and help clinicians deliver the best possible care.
But health IT vendors and healthcare provider organizations still have a long way to go when it comes to attaining interoperability. In the years ahead, though, progress will be made and there will be various next-generation tactics and techniques that help advance this goal.
For one, artificial intelligence will assist interaction with data to push interoperability forward, said Jitin Asnanni, executive director of the CommonWell Health Alliance, a trade association of health IT companies working to create nationwide access to data.
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Healthcare Internet Crimes Cost Victims $925,849 Last Year
Healthcare internet crimes cost victims $925,849 last year, according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s 2017 Internet Crime Report.
By Fred Donovan
June 26, 2018 - Healthcare internet crimes cost victims $925,849 last year, according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) 2017 Internet Crime Report.
The report includes stats on internet crime complaints received by the center during 1997. The center defines a healthcare-related crime as a “scheme attempting to defraud private or government health care programs, usually involving health care providers, companies, or individuals.”
“Schemes may include offers for fake insurance cards, health insurance marketplace assistance, stolen health information, or may involve medications, supplements, weight loss products, or diversion/pill mill practices. These scams are often initiated through spam email, Internet advertisements, links in forums or social media, and fraudulent websites,” the report explained.
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Lawmakers cite VA leadership holes in EHR implementation with first go-live scheduled for 2020
by Evan Sweeney
Jun 27, 2018 6:00am
Representatives on the House Committee on Veterans Affairs grilled senior officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs about a lack of leadership that could derail the agency’s ability to execute on a massive medical records modernization project with several positions still unfilled.
Currently, the VA is operating without permanent appointments to three positions critical to the implementation of Cerner’s EHR platform, a 10-year, $16 billion project: The deputy secretary, the undersecretary for health and the chief information officer have yet to be confirmed.
Robert Wilkie, tapped to replace former Secretary David Shulkin, will undergo confirmation hearings on Wednesday.
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HIT Think Why the recent MD Anderson fine raises prospects for encrypting all information
Published June 27 2018, 5:44pm EDT
On June 18, the Office for Civil Rights released a decision and memorandum from an Administrative Law Judge after a dispute over HIPAA fines imposed against The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The decision draws a clear line in the sand that encryption—despite being an addressable element under the Security Rule—cannot be avoided.
Here’s the history—OCR investigated MD Anderson after it submitted three separate breach notifications. One notification concerned a stolen laptop, and the other two involved stolen thumb drives. In each instance, the device was not encrypted. As described in the decision, MD Anderson for years identified the risk associated with unencrypted data on laptops, portable devices and other devices. At many points in time, MD Anderson had set internal policies that encryption was the most appropriate means of addressing the risk posed by such devices.
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Patient matching will lead to interoperability, Pew says
In a letter to CMS, Pew says patient matching unlocks critical information, but identification is often elusive and better standards are needed.
June 26, 2018 10:30 AM
The Pew Charitable Trusts is urging the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to tackle interoperability, patient identification and limited use of standards to describe clinical information.
In a June 25 letter, Pew asserted the proposed changes to Medicare payment programs that promote interoperability would make it possible for patients and clinicians to access critical health data when and where they need it to inform care decisions.
Pew is commenting on the 2019 Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System, or HIPPS, a proposed rule that replaces the Meaningful Use Program with a new set of interoperability-focused measures, including several provisions designed to advance data exchange.
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Next-gen clinical communication: Real-time location, context-aware and mobile
Here are the features and functionality clinical communication tool vendors think will emerge next.
By Bill Siwicki
June 26, 2018 08:35 AM
Communication technology has evolved quickly in the last few years, and this has enabled new trends in healthcare delivery. While this is the case throughout the industry, it is especially true in hospitals and health systems where a significant amount of time and energy have been invested into providing improved communication and data sharing among clinicians.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma recently stated that “one of the most common complaints from patients and providers is the inefficiency of EHRs to effectively coordinate care for their patients.” And this is where effective clinical communication technology can help.
In the Spyglass Consulting Group’s healthcare study, “Trends in Clinical Communications and Collaboration 2018,” researchers found that 90 percent of hospitals surveyed are making significant enterprise-wide investments in smartphones and secure mobile communications platforms to drive clinical transformation and address the mission- and patient-critical communications requirements of clinical and non-clinical mobile workers within the hospital and across the care continuum.
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Florida Hospital building state-of-the-art command center
June 25, 2018
In an effort to run more efficiently, reduce patient wait times and improve quality of care, Florida Hospital is building a 10,000-square-foot mission control center for its nine hospitals in Central Florida.
“It takes paper-based processes of today and makes them transparent and live, so we can see where the patients are, where our capacity and expertise are while keeping the patient at the center of our thinking,” said Eric Stevens, a senior executive at Florida Hospital.
With an initial investment of $15 million, the health system is working with GE Healthcare to build the center in its Orlando campus where a Wall of Analytics will display real-time data to bed coordinators, the patient transfer team, the care management team, staffing and other teams that are brought together from different corners of the hospital under one roof.
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Medtronic announces commercially availability of AI-powered diabetes management app
MDBR Staff Writer Published 25 June 2018
Medtronic, along with its technology partner IBM Watson Health, has announced commercially availability of artificial intelligence (AI) powered Sugar.IQ diabetes management app.
The Sugar.IQ smart diabetes assistant is a first-of-its-kind intelligent app, which will help simplify and improve daily diabetes management.
According to Medtronic, around 30.3 million Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes, with 1.5 million new cases being diagnosed each year.
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Jun 25, 2018 @ 06:25 AM 962
Password123456? Has The Password Had Its Day?
609 years and 11 months. That’s how long the password generator website Random-ize tells me it would take hackers to brute force their way through my most important password. This timescale is reassuring - but those of us who work in technology are likely to have been on top of password complexity for many years. Incredibly, many jaw-droppingly woeful passwords are still popular, for example: ‘qwerty’, ‘123456’ and indeed ‘password’. According to SplashData’s most recent annual top 100 chart of the World’s Worst Passwords, the majority of the top ten can be cracked in less than one second.
Like them or loathe them, passwords are an essential factor for so many of the tasks that shape our daily lives: from checking our bank balances to signing in to a Netflix account or unlocking our mobile phones. According to a 2017 study by Digital Guardian, 70% of people have more than ten password-protected accounts online, and 30% have “too many to count.” However, we are repeatedly advised that we should have different passwords for every login. Hands up if you clicked the ‘forgotten password’ option at least once in the last month. With my current tally of 276 passwords (and rising), it is safe to say that recently adopting a password manager has been a life-changing experience for me.
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Poor Data Sharing Leads to Delays in Care, Global Survey Finds
June 25, 2018
by Rajiv Leventhal
Healthcare providers are struggling to use the patient data that is available to them to deliver a better standard of care, and over half of consumers in a recent survey said they have experienced delays in care due to poor data sharing between healthcare professionals.
The “Consumer Connectivity Insights 2018” survey from MuleSoft, a San Francisco-based provider of a platform for building application networks, included more than 8,000 consumers globally to analyze whether organizations are meeting customer expectations for a connected, personalized experience across industries and geographies.
One key finding was that poor data utilization is impacting patient care. Digging deeper, the results showed:
- Half of consumers (51 percent) say they, or someone they know, have experienced a delay in care due to information not being shared between healthcare professionals.
- Less than half (42 percent) of consumers believe that healthcare providers make effective use of all the data (e.g. from wearable tech and health apps) available to them to deliver a better standard of care.
- The research revealed that consumers in the U.S. (54 percent) and Singapore (62 percent) were most positive when it came to healthcare providers making effective use of the data available to them. In contrast, U.K. consumers (26 percent) were by far the least positive.
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House passes opioid bill to expand telehealth, e-prescribing
Published June 26 2018, 7:03am EDT
The House of Representatives on Friday passed legislation that would expand access to treatment via telehealth in the Medicare program and require electronic prescribing for controlled substances within Medicare’s prescription drug program—with certain exceptions.
The Substance Use-Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment (SUPPORT) for Patients and Communities Act (H.R. 6), sponsored by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), now moves on to the Senate for consideration.
The House passage of the bill was applauded by Health IT Now, a coalition of patient groups, provider organizations, employers and payers, which launched the Opioid Safety Alliance in January—along with IBM, Intermountain Healthcare, McKesson, Oracle and Walgreens—to advance a health IT-centric policy agenda to combat the problem of opioids.
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Prospects for GE’s spun-off health unit said to be strong
Published June 26 2018, 6:00pm EDT
GE officials presented a bright future for GE Healthcare when they announced on Tuesday that the medical equipment unit will be spun off in a major corporate restructuring.
The health business, which last year reported more than $19 billion in revenues and posted 5 percent revenue growth and 9 percent segment profit growth, provides medical imaging, monitoring, bio-manufacturing and cell therapy technology to hospitals as well as laboratory supplies to biotech firms.
Under the corporate restructuring, Kieran Murphy—president and CEO of GE Healthcare—will continue to lead the business unit once it becomes a separate entity.
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Medical informaticists urge CMS to think boldly to improve care
Published June 26 2018, 3:37pm EDT
The American Medical Informatics Association has proposed a radical change to the way CMS measures how well providers are using health IT to improve patient care.
In a comment letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, AMIA recommended that the agency replace existing EHR measurement-reporting requirements with an activities-based approach that would allow hospitals to demonstrate how they are using health IT to improve care for “their specific patient populations and priorities.”
AMIA was responding to CMS’ proposed FY2019 Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System rule, which the agency released in April.
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Next-gen population health: mHealth, social determinants, prescriptive analytics
Experts share insights about where pop health technology and tools are headed in the immediate future.
By Bill Siwicki
June 25, 2018 08:45 AM
Population health is increasingly viewed as a key to the successful delivery of healthcare in the future, especially as more hospitals and health systems fall under value-based care contracts.
Fortunately for provider organizations, there already are plenty of population health information systems on the market to help them navigate the challenges of managing the health of a population and not just an individual. And the next generation of population health IT will have more features and functions to help ensure success with pop health efforts.
Mobile technology is leading the race to better population health, said Paul Cerrato, an independent writer who has collaborated on three healthcare books with Beth Israel Deaconess System CIO John Halamka.
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How Phoenix Children's structured its EHRs to be disease specific to improve care, drive savings
An automated system within its EHR enables clinicians to capture 99 percent of notes in a structured format, as opposed to free-text, virtually eliminating the need for transcription and making EHR content more searchable.
By Bill Siwicki
June 25, 2018 10:31 AM
By optimizing its EHR's advanced clinical documentation technology for treating rheumatoid arthritis patients, Phoenix Children’s enhanced care and physician productivity while also saving about $1 million dollars.
Documentation for Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis is challenging because of the complexity of this chronic relapsing disease that causes disabling joint inflammation and potential for permanent joint damage and deformity, said Vinay Vaidya, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer at Phoenix Children’s Hospital.
“When we were rolling out our ambulatory EHR four years ago, we made a focused effort to design our templates to be disease-specific,” Vaidya explained. “We ensured that the key disease measures were captured at the outset, so that this data would be easily accessible for analytics, decision support and chronic disease management.”
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GDPR Compliance Process for Health Care Providers
Confidentiality is a key aspect of health care provision, and health professionals must take extraordinary care in order to protect their patient’s privacy.
GDPR introduces significantly stricter general rules for personal data processing in comparison to the previous ones and its extraterritorial application for non-EU data controllers in cases which we previously wrote about. The strictest data processing rules relate to personal data concerning health, i.e. related to physical or mental health of a natural person, including the provision of health services, which reveal information about one’s health status.
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10 insider tricks to keep hackers and scammers from stealing from you
With cybercrime so rampant, you need to be proactive about protecting yourself.
Cybercriminals are out in full force looking for ways to steal your data. It’s worth money to them. That’s why we’ve seen a massive uptick in the number of data breaches over the past few years.
Unfortunately, most folks don’t know they’ve been hacked until it’s too late. So you don’t fall into that category, do one thing right now. Click here to see if your email address has been hacked or stolen.
With cybercrime so rampant, you need to be proactive about protecting yourself. To help you out, here are some things I do to keep hackers and scammers at bay.
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AHA ‘strongly opposes’ interoperability as a Medicare requirement
by Evan Sweeney
Jun 25, 2018 3:37pm
The American Hospital Association (AHA) has come out against a policy floated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to make interoperability a requirement to bill Medicare and Medicaid.
In a proposed hospital payment rule issued in April, CMS included a request for information regarding a revision to hospital Conditions of Participation (CoP) and Medicaid Conditions for Coverage (CfC) that would require hospitals to share data electronically with other hospitals, community providers and patients “if possible.”
In comments (PDF) submitted to CMS, the AHA said it “strongly opposes creating additional CoPs/CfCs to promote interoperability of health information.”
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HIT Think Why HIT executives are worried about business continuity
By Tom Saine
Published June 25 2018, 5:52pm EDT
The mid-year outlook for cyberattacks, phishing and breaches continues to look grim. Recent reports litter the headlines, such as the ransomware attack impacting 85,000 patients in California, or the misconfigured FTP server exposing data of 205,000 patients. This disturbing trend plaguing the healthcare industry, remains a top-of-mind concern for hospital and health system executives. In fact, 67 percent of CISOs believe a cybersecurity attack will happen to their organization in 2018, according to a recent report conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Opus.
The threat is real and healthcare leaders know it. But they’re not hiding their heads in the sand; hospitals are putting the technology, resources, and plans in place to meet today’s growing number of threats by establishing business continuity plans and defining policies for IT disaster recovery.
In a Spok survey of CHIME CIOs conducted in early 2018, healthcare leaders were asked how confident they are their organization could recover from a disaster scenario. The results show seven in 10 CIOs are only “somewhat” or “not very” confident their hospital could recover from a disaster (5 percent have no confidence at all). It appears business continuity plans might be keeping healthcare leaders up at night.
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Amazon-Berkshire-JPMorgan health venture takes aim at middlemen
By Zachary Tracer
- Bloomberg
Published June 25 2018, 10:34am EDT
(Bloomberg) -- The health venture established by Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will take aim at intermediaries in the health-care system as a part of a broad effort to reduce wasteful spending, the venture’s newly named chief executive officer said.
The still-unnamed business will initially seek to develop ways to improve care for the more than 1 million individuals who get health insurance from the three firms. Over time, the venture will make those innovations available freely to other companies, meaning that if it’s successful, its effects could be felt more broadly among the more than 150 million people in the U.S. who get their health insurance through work.
“My job for them is to figure out ways that we’re going to drive better outcomes, better satisfaction with care and better cost efficiency with new models that can be incubated for all,” Atul Gawande, the Harvard surgeon and journalist who was named last week to run the initiative, said Saturday at an Aspen Institute event.
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* Sri Lanka to introduce an e-Health card for all
Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 08:10 pm SL Time, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
June 23, Colombo: The Minister of Healthcare, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine Dr. Rajitha Senaratne says an electronic health card containing all the health information of the patient will be introduced for all soon.
The Minister addressing an event held to launch the Hospital Information Management System at the Castle Street Women's Hospital in Borella yesterday (22) said the e-Health project was initiated due to the shortage of drugs in hospitals.
He said there were shortages of about 44-79 types of drugs daily and therefore, a software was introduced to handle the shortages. Using this software the hospital director is able to get the medicine from any hospital and this system will be extended to peripheral hospitals as well.
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Enjoy!
David.
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