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The news of the cabinet reshuffle broke last night after Boris Johnson resigned as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and David Davis resigned as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
Speaking on Twitter, Hunt said it was a ‘massive wrench’ for him to leave health.
The new US-based joint venture will use sleep apnea knowledge from San Diego-based ResMed and Verily’s data analytics technologies in its pursuits, the companies said, and will operate as a separate venture from both ResMed and Verily.
“The vast majority of people with sleep apnea don’t realize they have it, and therefore don’t seek accessible, effective treatment to mitigate its effects and long-term health risks. The combined industry expertise, scalable infrastructure, and data analytics capabilities of ResMed and Verily can unlock meaningful ways to identify these individuals and support their journey to improved sleep, health and quality of life,” ResMed chief medical officer Dr. Carlos Nunez said in a prepared statement.
The survey of nearly 650 healthcare consumers – 40 percent of whom self-identified as a younger healthcare consumer – found that the digital consumer experience is of high priority. Ninety-two percent of respondents said improving consumer experience should be a top priority for healthcare organizations, up from 71 percent of respondents who said the same in last year’s consumer survey.
Patients largely have high expectations for the health IT offerings from their providers, the survey revealed.
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HIT Think The 3 most common mistakes in buying HIT applications
Published July 13 2018, 5:34pm EDT
In 2017, I began working on KLAS’ Decision Insights project, which uses evaluations to track hundreds of buying decisions in the HIT market. It’s taught me more than just market-share data—it’s a chance to not just study the who, what and when of a buying decision, but also the why and the how.
These details, taken straight from providers’ mouths, have helped KLAS see what makes for a smooth and satisfying sales experience—and what makes for a rocky and frustrating one. So perhaps the easiest way to create a positive outcome may be to prevent the most common missteps in making purchasing decisions. Toward that end, here’s list of three of the biggest mistakes made in buying decisions, as well as a few ways that vendors and provider decision makers can avoid making these mistakes.
Mistake 1: Failing to set clear and realistic expectations
Vendor: Share your roadmap, get specific about capabilities, don’t overpromise and follow through. Provider decision makers: Study the road map, ask specific questions about capabilities, get current customers’ feedback.
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Mobile and Modern Working – Advisory Series, July 2018
By Maja Dragovic – Digital Health
With increasing emphasis being placed on community healthcare, efficient ways of working are imperative in order to meet the increasing demand. Using mobile technology is viewed as one way in which this can be achieved. Though progress has been made, there is still further to go. Maja Dragovic reports.
In a recent survey conducted by the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI), over 500 community nurses have
expressed their views on the use of IT in their area and most found it was used effectively when it was working. Most also viewed the ability, provided by the modern technology, to access and share patient information amongst health professionals as invaluable.
“Our system allows us instant access to our consultants and clinical colleagues ‘at the touch of a button'”, said one of the respondents in the survey.
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University of Iowa Healthcare rolls out first autonomous AI diagnostic system cleared by the FDA
The artificial intelligence tool detects diabetic retinopathy in medical images, which can help prevent blindness in diabetes patients.
July 12, 2018 01:44 PM
The University of Iowa Healthcare has become the first healthcare organization to implement IDx-DR, the first autonomous artificial intelligence diagnostic system cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The AI system, from vendor IDx, can detect diabetic retinopathy via medical imaging.
IDx is an AI diagnostics company focused on developing algorithms that detect diabetic retinopathy in adults, 22 years of age or older, diagnosed with diabetes who have not been previously diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy.
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AI Is Transforming Healthcare as We Know It. Here's a Look at the Future -- and the Opportunities for Entrepreneurs.
Artificial intelligence companies are taking on the health industry with big results for consumers. Here are the pros, cons and potential business opportunities.
Hayden Field
Entrepreneur Staff
July 11
Try to conceptualize all the medical knowledge in the world. How many books would it fill? How many topics would it cover? How many years would it take to learn in its entirety?
Now, imagine it doubling.
In 1950, researchers predicted it would take
about 50 years for all available medical knowledge to double. But in 2020, estimates peg it at just 73 days.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI). It’s not humanly possible for medical professionals to keep up with the influx of constant new information about health conditions, treatments and medical technology. That’s why the healthcare industry is a real growth opportunity for AI and machine learning -- and the companies creating smart tools. Healthcare’s artificial intelligence market should increase elevenfold between 2014 and 2021, according to research from Accenture -- that’s
$600 million to $6.6 billion .
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How Health Care Is Moving Toward Blockchain
To be sure, fixing health care is a process that's sure to be lengthy and to involve many factions within the business, science and political worlds. Still, even as debates have raged about large-scale issues with the industry, technological advances have helped to increase efficiency in small but important ways: New software allows for the safer, faster transmission and storage of health records by providers, for instance.
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Insider Health Data Security Threats Bigger Concern than External
Many healthcare professionals are more concerned about insider threats to health data security than external breaches, according to a survey by HIMSS on behalf of SailPoint.
July 11, 2018 - Many healthcare professionals are more concerned about insider threats to health data security than external breaches, according to a survey by HIMSS on behalf of SailPoint.
There is an acute level of concern about the threats posed by insiders. On a scale of 1 to 10, the mean score for the level of concern of respondents was 8.2.
Among respondents who implemented or managed cybersecurity solutions for their organization, 43 percent said that insider threats were of greater concern than external threats. Another 35 percent were equally concerned about insider threats and external threats to data security, according to the survey of 101 healthcare professionals, a copy of which was provided to HealthITSecurity.com
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VCU Health employee inappropriately accesses 4.7K patients' EHRs
Written by Julie Spitzer | July 11, 2018 | Print | Email
Richmond-based Virginia Commonwealth University Health System is
alerting 4,700 individuals to a potential compromise of their or their child's EHR data.
Hospital officials discovered a "unusual pattern of accessing electronic health information" May 9, according to a VCU Health press release. An investigation revealed an employee had accessed information about thousands of patients and the services they received at VCU Health without a legitimate reason to do so. The health system has since terminated the employee.
VCU Health said the employee accessed the data throughout his or her employment between Jan. 3, 2003 and May 10, 2018, but that the information was accessed without malicious intent. Hospital officials do not believe any data has been or will be misused.
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HIT Think How digital transformation is driving change in clinical trials
Published July 12 2018, 4:50pm EDT
In 2012, clinical trials seemed to be struggling. A detailed look of clinical investigations found that out of the studies examined, only 25.1 percent met or exceeded their stated recruitment goals.
While it’s important to note that recruitment failure does not necessarily mean that these studies failed overall, it’s still a concerning statistic. But it’s also one that new technology is starting to change.
Identifying and attracting the participation of qualified patients for a research study is critical to effective recruitment, feasibility determination and the design of the study itself. The problem is that the percentage of a patient population that meets the criteria is often limited and, depending on the nature of the study, can be extremely small. This means qualified participants for a study could be inundated with too many requests, and the study authors could have difficulty obtaining a well-rounded and comprehensive cohort upon which to conduct their research.
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Over time, EHR use improves quality outcomes: 6 things to know
Written by Julie Spitzer | July 10, 2018 | Print | Email
Federal regulations have mandated hospitals adopt the EHR — and nearly all hospitals
have — but determining whether EHR use has actually led to better patient outcomes is a challenge; however, a new study published in
Health Affairs found a way to quantify that relationship.
A team of researchers led by UC San Francisco's Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, an associate professor in the department of medicine, analyzed various sources of data from 2008 to 2013 to identify the ties between EHR adoption and 30-day mortality rates at 3,249 hospitals. Specifically, the researchers reviewed Medicare hospital claims and data from the 2014 American Hospital Association Annual Survey Database, including responses to its Information Technology Supplement between 2008 and 2013.
Here are six things to know:
1. Baseline EHR adoption correlated with a 0.11 percent higher mortality rate per function.
2. As these baseline functions matured overtime, it was associated with a 0.09 percent lower mortality rate per function per year.
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IBM security study: Mega data breaches cost $40 million to $350 million
The average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million, according to a
study by IBM Security and Ponemon Institute . But the cost of “mega breaches,” where 1 million to 50 million records are lost, can run from $40 million to $350 million.
IBM Security and Ponemon conducted interviews with nearly 500 companies that experienced data breaches, and they collected information on hundreds of cost factors surrounding a breach, including technical investigations and recovery, notifications, legal and regulatory requirements, cost of lost business, and loss of reputation.
Overall, the study found that hidden costs in data breaches — such as lost business, negative impact on reputation and employee time spent on recovery — are difficult and expensive to manage. For example, the study found that a third of the cost of “mega breaches” (over 1 million lost records) were derived from lost business.
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FDA looks to leverage EHR data to better evaluate medical products
Published July 11 2018, 7:21am EDT
The Food and Drug Administration wants to take advantage of the real-world data available from electronic health records to more fully evaluate medical products in the post-market setting, according to FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD.
The agency is seeking $100 million in its Fiscal Year 2019 budget request to build a system that would include electronic records from about 10 million individuals, supplementing the FDA’s active post-market monitoring systems—the National Evaluation System for health Technology (NEST) for medical devices and Sentinel system for drugs and biologics—which depend largely on the secondary use of claims data.
“Previously, our investments in post-market data have mostly focused on the development of systems to consolidate and analyze information derived from healthcare payer claims,” writes Gottlieb in a July 10 blog post. However, he notes that claims data has inherent limitations.
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Governance strategies essential to turn data into actionable information
Published July 10 2018, 4:47pm EDT
While artificial intelligence and machine learning seem to hog the headlines this year, where many organizations are placing a lot of their focus is on data governance programs.
There is “a renewed emphasis on data governance and a clamor to clean up the incoherence between build and user communities around information-related projects,” says William McKnight, president at McKnight Consulting Group.
“Companies are realizing the only way to achieve enterprise data governance is to grow it step-by-step with application-by-application governance, and eventually try to gain synergy from the overlap,” McKnight says.
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AI use in cancer treatment is in the early stages
Published July 11 2018, 5:40pm EDT
Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving healthcare delivery through automation and machine learning that leads to better care paths and streamlined process efficiencies. But to date, the industry has promised much but delivered little, even as users have high expectations that demand detailed diagnostics and evidence of consistent results.
A panel of institutional, consulting and industry life science specialists discussed the state of AI in cancer treatment during the MedCity Converge conference in Philadelphia. Their observations, while positive in outlook, dealt more with traditional challenges of automation and data integration, and mostly not ready-for-market niche solutions.
"The current use case for artificial intelligence and machine learning is automate data processing so we can identify similar patients and gather some best practices and guideposts for treatment," says Ayan Bjattacharya of Deloitte Consulting. "Then, we look at how to optimize the whole process with AI to break silos of data."
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Consumers ready to accept interactions with AI
Published July 11 2018, 5:25pm EDT
Consumers report they are ready to accept broader use of artificial intelligence in many industries, including healthcare, according to a new report from Capgemini.
The consulting firm contacted more than 10,000 consumers, 500 companies and representatives of multiple international industries, including healthcare, in conducting its research. Its results indicated that about 75 percent of the consumers it surveyed report they have interacted with AI in some form, and almost 70 percent said they were satisfied with the interactions.
Further, two-thirds want artificial intelligence to be more human-like, which could generate goodwill for companies or organizations and drive a greater propensity to spend. That’s because half of respondents view delegating tasks to an electronic personal assistant as exciting and believe doing so will enhance their quality of life.
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HIT Think 5 security strategies that can increase vulnerability
Published July 11 2018, 5:42pm EDT
According to Verizon’s recent Data Breach Investigations Report, 2018 has already seen 53,000 cybersecurity incidents and more than 2,215 confirmed breaches—and we’re just halfway through the year.
Healthcare organizations were hit hard by incidents in 2017, and the pace appears to be continuing in 2018, data show. Last year, there were 477 healthcare breaches reported to the Department of Health and Human Services or the media, according to Protenus, a cybersecurity software company that tracks breaches.
In this environment, it’s no surprise that data breaches are an acknowledged reality, and organizations are investing heavily in technology and resources to combat the ever-growing threat. However, in their urgency to address security vulnerabilities, many organizations are making critical mistakes—the results of which can mirror data breaches in their lasting, negative impact on operations.
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Technology in healthcare is moving from mainframes to iPhones
July 10, 2018
New technologies are often first manifested in behemoth machines that may take up entire rooms, only to be miniaturized as the technology matures. We have witnessed this shift over the last 70 years in computers, and an analogous trend is now underway in healthcare.
Startups across the world are transforming capabilities that were once relegated to specialty labs with large, expensive capital equipment and highly trained technicians. For example, in the early 2000s, Celera Genomics used nearly
300 DNA sequencers and
7,000 processors , and cost nearly
$100 million to complete the sequence of one human genome. Today, an entire human genome can be run on a desktop machine for less than $1,000. Beyond DNA sequencing, new companies focusing on everything from flu to strokes are moving the technology, revenue and data from a few centralized companies to the doctors and patients that need it the most.
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Machine learning predicts 1-year mortality using EHR data
Published July 10 2018, 7:20am EDT
University of Minnesota researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm using electronic health record data to improve care delivery for seriously ill patients by accurately predicting the risk of 1-year mortality.
The random forest (RF) model, which estimates the risk of death within a year of the last day of hospitalization, leverages commonly obtained EHR data such as vital signs, complete blood count, basic and complete metabolic panel, demographic information, as well as ICD codes.
Nishant Sahni, MD, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, sees the model as a potential clinical decision support tool for improving end-of-life planning.
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Precision medicine: We know there's a market, but who are the top vendors?
A baker's dozen technology companies are grabbing a spot as top-of-mind among hospital decision-makers, new research finds.
July 10, 2018 03:43 PM
As hospitals and health systems try to feel their way around exciting but daunting new era of genomics and precision medicine, there's no shortage of technology vendors, some of them newly-minted startups, offering to help healthcare providers gather the necessary data and put it to work delivering targeted patient care.
As such, many hospitals interested into getting a precision medicine program up and running "find it confusing to determine which of the hundreds of vendors in the market will be most helpful," according to the new KLAS
Precision Medicine Vendor Validations 2018 report.
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AI crucial to value-based care, but security challenges and time constraints remain
In order to be successful with MSSP or other value-based programs, providers need real-time data to improve outcomes and costs, according to healthcare attorney Pam Hepp.
July 10, 2018
As the healthcare industry continues its shift into value-based care, many are looking for new ways to replace traditional care models and improve care quality. While there’s no consensus on the right strategy to make better use of the stores of data, AI may hold the key to creating a more predictive care model.
In fact, Accountable Care Organizations can only find success in the Medicare Shared Savings Program and other value-based programs with access to real-time clinical, outcomes, quality and financial data, explained Pam Hepp, shareholder of law firm Buchanan, Ingersoll and Rooney.
That access will help improve outcomes, control costs and “in effect change practice patterns,” said Hepp. “Up-to-date, comprehensive information about the providers’ own patients must be analyzed to identify care gaps and coordinate and manage care.”
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Trump's Chinese tariffs threaten to cost medical device makers $138 million a year, MITA says
The medical imaging group is asking for medical devices and components to be exempt from the president’s tariffs on Chinese imports.
July 09, 2018 03:49 PM
President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports will cost American medical device makers more than $138 million this year, the
Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance estimates . As a result, the group is calling for a “timely and robust exemption process.”
MRIs, pacemakers, sonograms and other medical devices were all included in the list of items subject to the 25 percent tariffs that went into effect on June 6.
The tariffs could cause some vendors to downsize and cut research and development budgets, according to a recent MITA survey. And the impacted companies would also reduce their U.S.-based employment over the next few years to counteract the recently enacted China Section 301 tariffs.
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Hybrid of online support, therapy helps maintain weight loss
July 09, 2018
Keeping weight off after a successful diet has traditionally posed a difficult challenge for dieters, but researchers in Oulu Finland have just published a study in the
Journal of Internal Medicine that highlighted how a hybrid web-based intervention could help for the long run.
The study's authors found that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) counseling combined with an online health behavior change support system (HBCSS) helped subjects lose and maintain their weight. More specifically, when participants underwent CBT with the online HBCSS, they lost 4.1 percent of their body weight after 12 months of the intervention, and 3.4 percent of their body weight from baseline at a 24-month follow up, according to the study. Participants who just had the online HBCSS were also able to keep off some of that weight over time, seeing an average decrease of 1.6 percent their body weight over 24 months.
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Pediatric Telemedicine Stems Utilization, Points to Cost Savings
Nemours study provides look at usage and impact of 24/7 telemedicine for pediatrics; redirects nearly 28% of patients from ED.
Direct-to-consumer pediatric telemedicine significantly reduces ED and urgent care utilization, along with the associated costs, according to a peer-reviewed study conducted by Nemours Children's Health System and published by Telemedicine and e-Health Journal
Cost and Utilization Highlights
Without the telemedicine service, 27.9% of parents would have visited the ED; a projected savings to the Florida healthcare system of approximately $113.9 million based on comparative data from the Florida ER Utilization Report. Another 36.6% of parents would have gone to an urgent care center; researchers did not calculate the potential financial impact of this measure.
Only 6% of the parents stated they would have done nothing if the telemedicine service was not available.
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EHR error rates vary widely across systems, JAMIA study finds
Author Rebecca Pifer
Published July 9, 2018
Dive Brief:
· The amount of time it takes for providers to complete EHR tasks varies widely across health IT systems, and so does the error rate and amount of work required, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
· The study collected keystroke, mouse click and video data from two different EHR vendors, Epic and Cerner, across four healthcare systems. Between 12 and 15 emergency medicine physicians participated from each site, completing six EHR ordering scenarios: two diagnostic imaging, two laboratory and two medication tasks.
· Error rates varied by task but reached as high as 50%. For certain tasks, there was an eightfold difference in clicks and a ninefold difference in time.
Dive Insight:
The gaping variability across EHR vendors, tasks and healthcare systems highlights the need for improved standardization across and the patient.
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AHA: FDA must solidify guidance on legacy devices to strengthen cybersecurity
Written by Jessica Kim Cohen | July 09, 2018
The American Hospital Association
penned a letter to the House May 31 detailing how the FDA can help keep medical devices, including legacy devices, secure.
The AHA's letter,
released June 28 as part of U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee's portfolio of responses to a recent request for information, argued "legacy devices remain a key vulnerability for hospitals and health systems." Health systems tend to have thousands of devices from different manufacturers on their networks, which complicate the institutions' security management.
"Given their useful lifespans, many legacy devices were not built with cybersecurity in mind and may use outdated or insecure software, hardware and protocols, leaving them vulnerable to attack," the letter reads.
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Governance strategies essential to turn data into actionable information
Published July 10 2018, 4:47pm EDT
While artificial intelligence and machine learning seem to hog the headlines this year, where many organizations are placing a lot of their focus is on data governance programs.
There is “a renewed emphasis on data governance and a clamor to clean up the incoherence between build and user communities around information-related projects,” says William McKnight, president at McKnight Consulting Group.
“Companies are realizing the only way to achieve enterprise data governance is to grow it step-by-step with application-by-application governance, and eventually try to gain synergy from the overlap,” McKnight says.
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Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford automates medication management to reduce adverse drug events
It has seen a 21 percent decrease in missed doses, a 66 percent reduction in wasted doses and zero reportable adverse events in the past 11 months.
July 06, 2018 01:11 PM
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford initiated various safety interventions for medication administration. Moving from a daily medication cart fill – once every 24 hours – to multiple fills per day – every 2 to 3 hours – and implementing a barcode verification system for all medication dispensing has resulted in a 21 percent decrease in missed doses, a 66 percent reduction in wasted doses and one of the lowest medication error rates according to incident reporting in the Solutions for Patient Safety Collaborative.
"Medication errors in hospitals can occur at any point during the medication use process and may result from the actions of physicians, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, nurses, other hospital personnel or even the patient," said Melanie Chan, assistant director of pharmacy services at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. "In California, hospital pharmacies are required by law to have a 'Medication Error Reduction Plan' that must be reviewed and updated annually, and technology implementation must be part of the plan.”
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Deep trust issues remain with AI, even as it becomes more widespread in clinical settings
A new Intel survey shows that health systems expect artificial intelligence to improve care delivery, but worry that patients and physicians are nervous about the technology.
July 06, 2018 03:25 PM
Health system decision-makers see artificial intelligence as a new fact of life, even if many are skeptical and even fearful of what it could mean for safe care delivery, a new
survey from Intel shows.
Intel and Convergys Analytics asked 200 healthcare leaders in the U.S. about their thoughts on AI as it continues to evolve, impact process and transform decision-making in hospitals, predicting readmissions and flagging potential safety issues.
Most think machine learning has big potential to drive quality improvements and save money through increased efficiency, but many also harbor worries that it could also pose risks to patient safety.
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Cleveland Clinic Offers Patients Mobile Health Data Access
Patients will now have mobile access to their personal health data through their iPhones and computers.
July 06, 2018 - Cleveland Clinic
will offer patients mobile access to their personal health data through Health Records on iPhone, as well as through the MyChart application.
Both Health Records and MyChart offer patients a complete view of their health records, including allergies, immunizations, lab results, and medications.
The applications also utilize HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) to allow data to transfer from medical records to mobile devices.
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IT Solutions for Easier EHRs Save Physicians Time, Burnout
These solutions improve EHR user interface with easier login identification, voice recognition
FRIDAY, July 6, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Yale Medicine is effectively targeting electronic health record (EHR) use and functionality as a way to improve physician job satisfaction and reduce burnout, according to an article published in the American Medical Association's AMA Wire .
EHR inefficiencies were making physicians unhappy and adding extra work hours, including bringing home work at night and on weekends. A series of discussions with leadership led to implementation of information technology (IT) solutions that would address physician burnout and improve the user experience with EHRs.
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Cybersecurity upgrades eyed for 740,000 St. Jude-made defibrillators
Abbott advises patients to get updates at next scheduled doctor visit.
July 6, 2018 — 10:14pm
Hundreds of thousands of implantable heart defibrillators made by Minnesota’s St. Jude Medical are getting cybersecurity software updates, while older versions of the devices may have their wireless communication systems disabled because they can’t accept the update.
A series of 11 recent recall notices said that roughly 740,000 implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resychronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds) made by St. Jude Medical are eligible to receive new firmware that provides “an additional layer of protection against unauthorized device access.”
Many implanted medical devices, including defibrillators, have wireless communications features that can remotely monitor patient health and device status. Such communication systems could theoretically be hijacked by malicious computer hackers in ways that could harm patient health, though such an attack has never been documented.
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Secure Healthcare Data Sharing Not a Priority for Some Workers
Some healthcare workers don’t follow best practices for secure healthcare data sharing, according to a survey of 1,000 US workers by Igloo Software.
July 06, 2018 - Some healthcare workers don’t follow best practices for secure healthcare data sharing, according to a
survey of 1,000 US workers by Igloo Software.
Thirty percent of healthcare workers use non-approved apps in the workplace because they are easier to use, the survey found.
Around half of healthcare workers surveyed are only somewhat confident that information stored on their organization’s intranet is secure.
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How an Ohio health system says it cut opioid prescriptions for acute pain by 62%
Jul 5, 2018 6:00am
An electronic medical record system is being credited with helping a public health system in Ohio reduce its opioid prescriptions for acute pain by more than 60% in the last 18 months.
Officials from Cleveland-based MetroHealth System said they also cut opioid prescriptions by 25% for chronic pain. In all, they estimate they cut opioid prescriptions by 3 million pills.
How'd they do it? Officials pointed to the alerts they set up in the EMR system.
In particular, those alerts for prescribers were set up to flag patients who may be at risk for addiction to guide them toward alternative drugs and lower doses. They also had an alert to add a prescription for the antidote drug Naloxone when prescribing opioids. That alert led to a 5,000% increase in Naloxone prescribing in the past three months.
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Sponsored
Advancing healthcare innovation and tackling care waste with new technologies
Jul 9, 2018 8:00am
Despite its sizeable cost, the U.S. healthcare system has been ranking among the least effective in the modern global economy for many years. The industry wastes an estimated $1 trillion each year, with billions spent on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs and fraud.
In a digital, data-driven world where efficiencies are gained with new technologies across all manners of industry, healthcare has been slow to gain advantages from technological advancements. Similar to other industries that have embraced digital transformation and redefined their model at scale, it is clear that targeted use of technology could help reduce the waste inherent to the U.S. healthcare system and create greater value for patients and the government in better allocating each dollar spent towards qualitative, long-term positive outcomes. Roughly $2 billion is invested annually into new initiatives in scheduling, medication tracking, chronic disease monitoring and other fields. Far less, however, is spent ensuring that these new initiatives can scale and survive past their initial two to three years of operation, addressing a crucial infrastructure challenge: access to and distribution of standardized, executable, scalable health data.
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July 9, 2018
Errors Common When Speech Recognition Software Is Used to Document Patient Visits
By Amy Orciari Herman
Speech recognition software, used increasingly to document clinical encounters in electronic health records, yields errors in 7% of dictated words, suggests a study in JAMA Network Open .
The analysis included roughly 220 documents (e.g., office notes) that were dictated using one speech recognition system at two U.S. healthcare organizations. Researchers transcribed each original recording to use as the reference standard, and then examined errors in the notes at three stages:
·
·
·
The error rate was 7 per 100 words in the notes created by the speech recognition software, falling to below 1 per 100 after transcriptionist review and physician sign-off. In terms of clinically significant errors, 64% of the speech-recognition notes had such errors, which fell to 8% after review and sign-off.
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Enjoy!
David.
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