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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How can we make interoperability happen?
It’s
a question which has plagued the NHS for many a year: how can we make
interoperability happen? For Peter Anderson, the answer is through a
mixture of top-down focus and regional action.
DHI Admin, 25 April, 2019
As
a participant in bodies like the Professional Record Standards Body
(PRSB) and INTEROPen, I’m trying to play my part in making
interoperability a reality in the NHS. Matt Hancock’s energetic drive
for nationally specified open standards – and the secretary of state’s
promise that vendors who don’t play ball won’t work with the NHS – is
definitely taking us in the right direction, and I say more power to
him.
But
even if we had all the necessary standards today, it could take years
to build on them. New software components must be written, and existing
systems upgraded.
That’s
why I think that, as well as top-down focus, we need renewed regional
effort to get record sharing moving. That means CCIOs and CIOs in NHS
trusts accepting and working with current standards and today’s systems.
Applying commonsense, proven – yet often neglected – IT project
delivery capability and being open minded about what is added to
integration toolkits will help give clinical users the information they
need.
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London ambulance staff to be given real-time access to patient data
London Ambulance Service staff will be able to access patient data while on the move without the need for a smartcard or N3.
Andrea Downey, 23 April 2019
The
NHS Identity Service pilot will give medics access to information about
a patient in their care, without the patient having to answer difficult
questions when they are in pain.
Developed
by NHS Digital, it will use Camden Ambulance Station as its initial
base, with around 60 medics having access to patients summary care
records (SCRs) on secure iPads.
SCRs
include information about a patient’s medical history including
long-term conditions; prescriptions and medication; allergies; and other
specific needs.
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‘Biggest obstacle’ in digitising healthcare is privacy, Wachter warns
One
of the “biggest obstacles” we face in the move to digitise healthcare
is public concern about privacy, Dr Robert Wachter has warned.
Andrea Downey, 26 April, 2019
The
NHS “failed epically” to digitise 15 years ago, he said, but the
cash-strapped health service is now making better progress, though there
are still remaining challenges.
Writing for Wired UK
Dr Wachter added the move to digitise healthcare was “essential” but it
will be “incredibly hard” to take advantage of the digital revolution
if data can’t be shared.
“Privacy
campaigners have expressed concern over partnerships such as the recent
UK tie-in between the NHS and DeepMind, that gave the latter access to
the (partially anonymised) records of 1.6 million patients,” he wrote.
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Study: AI used to diagnose rare genetic diseases in children in record timing
A new study published in Science Translational Medicine
describes the work of researchers at San Diego's Rady Children's
Institute for Genomic Medicine to rapidly diagnose genetic diseases
using whole-genome sequencing.
The
new method is powered by automated machine learning and clinical
natural language processing and is able to deliver genetic test results
to physicians in neonatal and pediatric intensive care units
significantly faster than manual and other genome sequencing methods.
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Transforming Brain Signals Into Speech Sounds
— Novel brain-computer interface produces naturally-sounding synthetic speech
by Judy George , Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today April 24, 2019
A
novel brain-computer interface, with sensors implanted temporarily into
individuals whose skulls had been opened for other purposes, translated
neural activity into intelligible speech sounds, researchers reported.
The
system, which decoded neural signals for the jaw, larynx, lip, and
tongue movements involved in speaking, showed it's possible to create a
synthesized version of a person's voice that is controlled by brain
activity, reported Edward Chang, MD, of the University of California San
Francisco (UCSF), and co-authors in Nature.
The
advancement could have a profound effect one day for people who cannot
speak. "It's been a long-standing goal of our lab to create technologies
to restore communication for patients with severe speech disability
either from neurological conditions, such as stroke or other forms of
paralysis, or conditions that result in the inability to speak," Chang
said in a press conference.
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April 25, 2019 / 2:25 AM
Health apps may not disclose sharing your personal information
(Reuters
Health) - While nine out of 10 phone apps for depression and smoking
cessation assessed in a recent study were found to be sharing user data
with third parties, only two out of three disclosed they were doing so.
Much
of that data, including linkable identifiers, was shared with Google
and Facebook, among others, but barely half of apps sharing data with
those two giant companies told users about it, researchers report in
JAMA Network Open.
“If
you download a mental health or smoking cessation app, there’s a high
chance it will share marketing, advertising or usage tracking data with
either Facebook or Google,” said the study’s lead author Kit Huckvale, a
postdoctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute in Randwick,
Australia. “Unfortunately, in many cases, there’s no way to tell that
this is happening and you can’t rely on the privacy policy to tell you.”
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Report: Clinical decision support tools may help improve antimicrobial stewardship programs
– 24 April, 2019
Adding clinical decision support tools to the EHR can help improve
interventions efficiency and metrics tracking required by antimicrobial
stewardship standards, according to a report published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
In
the paper, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America
recommends using CDS tools and the EHR to enhance antimicrobial use,
which includes antibiotics and other medications that prevent and treat
diseases and infections caused by microorganisms.
"While
existing systems may present challenges, when used optimally,
informatics can create readily available tools for local and national
reporting, help guide appropriate antimicrobial prescribing that
improves selection, dosing and duration of therapy, and serve as an
educational reference for trainees and providers," Kristi Kuper, PharmD,
senior clinical manager for infectious diseases in the Center for
Pharmacy Practice Excellence at Vizient and lead author of the paper,
said in a news release.
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What is the role of data and technology in reimagining healthcare?
Examples from Scotland, Finland, Sweden and Brazil were showcased at a recent event in Helsinki.
April 23, 2019 03:43 AM
Editor's note:
This story was reported in Helsinki, Finland on a trip paid for by
Microsoft, which covered airfare and lodging for reporters. Healthcare
IT News made no promises to Microsoft about the content or quantity of
coverage. Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
There
is no doubt that healthcare systems around the world are undergoing a
period of transformation, according to HIMSS chief clinical officer Dr
Charles Alessi. Rising expectations of patients, as consumers, shifts in
health trends, ageing, and workforce shortages are only a few of the
key factors behind the urgent need for change.
“But
the question is not if healthcare is changing, it’s at what pace
healthcare is changing,” Dr Alessi said at a recent event organised by
Microsoft, taking place ahead of the June HIMSS & Health 2.0 European conference in Helsinki, Finland.
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eHealth Barometer 2019 results: What the Swiss think
From
spring 2020, the electronic health record will be available in
Switzerland. In the eHealth Barometer 2019, the country has already
asked its citizens their views on the new digital health services.
By Anna Engberg
April 17, 2019 03:19 AM
With
the latest population survey in the context of the eHealth Barometer
2019, new insights into the acceptance and dissemination of digital
health services in the Swiss society were gathered.
Since
2009, the eHealth Barometer has regularly polled Swiss residents, as
well as representative health professionals from seven areas, on the
state of digitalisation in healthcare, and provides insight into
personal attitudes, current usage and needs in the electronic health
record, eHealth and digital healthcare services in general.
More
than 1,800 health professionals, including doctors, pharmacists,
caregivers and others, as well as 1200 Swiss citizens were questioned by
telephone.
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Croatia joins ePrescription exchange pioneers
Croatia has become the fifth country ready for the cross-border exchange of ePrescriptions with other EU member states.
By Piers Ford
April 23, 2019 04:32 AM
SUMMARY
Croatia
has become the fifth country ready for the cross-border exchange of
ePrescriptions with other EU member states. From this summer, Croatian
patients will be able to collect medication prescribed in their home
country while travelling in Finland, Estonia, Luxembourg and Czechia.
In
January, Finland and Estonia became the first live participants in the
eHealth Network policy, which aims to have 22 member states
participating by 2021. Luxembourg and Czechia have since been declared
‘ready’ by the eHealth Network, and they were joined by Croatia
following a positive vote of the eHealth Member State Expert Group
(eHMSEG) on 11 March. Portugal, Malta, Cyprus and Greece are expected to
follow by the end of the year.
Participating countries will also be able to exchange patient summaries as the scheme develops during the coming months.
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Study: Data standardization improves patient matching
Published April 26 2019, 7:18am EDT
Standardizing
address information and last names could help to link patient health
records by as much as 8 percent in the United States.
Such
relatively simple standardization efforts could result in more than 2
billion additional records matched to patients, research suggests.
That’s the finding of a study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association,
from researchers at the Regenstrief Institute, Indiana University
Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IU–Purdue University
Indianapolis, IU School of Medicine and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Annual Change Healthcare report assesses state of healthcare
Published April 26 2019, 6:05pm EDT
Change Healthcare has released its ninth annual Industry Pulse Survey assessing the state of the industry.
Research
for the report came from 185 healthcare leaders at high levels in their
organizations, including providers, insurers, vendors and Change
Healthcare customers, all of whom collaborate via the HealthCare
Executive Group. The report is important, says Ferris Taylor, who
oversees the executive group. “If traditional stakeholders aren’t able
to transform healthcare, outside parties will.”
The
report offers snapshots of issues such as market trends, population
health, value-based care, consumer engagement, data analytics, risk
sharing, social determinants and cybersecurity.
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44% of data breaches are at the hands of vendors
– 24 April, 2019
Although data breaches are rare, almost half – 44 percent – are caused by third-party vendors, according to an esentire survey.
Of
the data breaches that happened from a vendor, only 15 percent of firms
affected reported that the vendor informed them when a breach happened.
The
survey was sent out to 600 information technology and security
decision-makers, asking about their top concerns around supply chain and
policies or procedures used to mitigate identified vendor risks.
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Hospital EHR, add-ons help reduce costly, unnecessary GI testing
Published April 24 2019, 7:27am EDT
An
alert and “hard stop” programmed into an electronic health records
system at an academic medical center resulted in a significant reduction
in inappropriate gastrointestinal panel testing and cost savings.
Researchers
at the University of Nebraska Medical Center hard-wired criteria into
the hospital’s EHR to provide clinicians with a best-practice alert and a
hard stop that prevented them from ordering a gastrointestinal pathogen
panel (GIPP)—a costly test that detects common disease-causing
organisms—more than once per admission or in patients hospitalized for
more than 72 hours.
As
a result of the EHR’s best-practice alert and hard stop, the hospital
was able to reduce inappropriate testing by 46 percent and saved as much
$168,000 over 15 months, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
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HIT Think Why it’s time to hire a medical device security officer
Published April 25 2019, 5:24pm EDT
Healthcare,
compared with many other industries, is slow to adopt organizational
change around new tools and technologies. This rings particularly true
in the creation of new professional roles to revised adaptive
organization frameworks.
Medical
device security enforcement is a great example of this. Until recently,
healthcare leaders prioritized digitizing their collateral, including
patient data and health records, without a leading focus on security and
data privacy. This classic case of running before walking is affirmed
by the Ponemon Institute’s benchmark study
on healthcare data security, which revealed 89 percent of healthcare
organizations had patient data lost or stolen in the past two years.
Recently
though, healthcare has started taking a page out of financial services’
book—another industry where data protection and regulatory scrutiny are
paramount—by appointing chief information security officers (CISOs) who
can measure a healthcare organization’s security posture and inform all
relevant stakeholders.
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How FHIR 4 will drive interoperability progress in healthcare
Experts
from across health IT, including members of the HL7 board and advisory
council, say the new standard can do big things for data exchange, but
it's not a cure-all.
By Bill Siwicki
April 25, 2019 01:10 PM
On
January 2, Health Level Seven debuted the new version of its
interoperability specification. Many CIOs and technologists in
healthcare have been awaiting the fourth iteration of the Fast
Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard – FHIR 4, for short –
because future changes now will be backward compatible.
“Applications
that implement the normative parts of R4 no longer risk being
non-conformant to the standard,” said FHIR Product Director Grahame
Grieve on the FHIR blog.
Grieve
also said that, in addition to the base platform, several key pieces of
FHIR also now are normative, including the RESTful API, the XML and
JSON formats, the terminology layer, the conformance framework and its
Patient and Observation resources.
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Are Workplace Wellness Programs a Privacy Problem?
What you must know about these perks and your personal information
By Sally Wadyka
April 22, 2019
Workplace wellness programs—promoted as a way to foster healthy behavior and encourage preventive care—are having a moment.
Last
year, 82 percent of larger companies (those with 200 employees or more)
and 53 percent of smaller ones offered some type of wellness program,
according to the Kaiser Foundation’s annual survey of workplace
benefits. By some estimates, workplace wellness is an $8 billion
industry.
And having access to a wellness program at work—one that may help you lose weight, get in shape, quit smoking,
or otherwise improve your health—sounds like a welcome benefit.
Especially if it comes with financial enticements, such as gift cards,
merchandise like fitness trackers, cash, contributions to health-related
savings accounts, or a discount on your health insurance. The 2016
Kaiser workplace benefits survey found that 42 percent of large firms
with wellness programs offered employees a financial enticement to
participate in or complete the program.
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Google Searches For Ways To Put Artificial Intelligence To Use In Health Care
April 22, 20192:42 PM ET
One
of the biggest corporations on the planet is taking a serious interest
in the intersection of artificial intelligence and health.
Google and its sister companies, parts of the holding company Alphabet,
are making a huge investment in the field, with potentially big
implications for everyone who interacts with Google — which is more than
a billion of us.
The
push into AI and health is a natural evolution for a company that has
developed algorithms that reach deep into our lives through the Web.
"The
fundamental underlying technologies of machine learning and artificial
intelligence are applicable to all manner of tasks," says Greg Corrado,
a neuroscientist at Google. That's true, he says, "whether those are
tasks in your daily life, like getting directions or sorting through
email, or the kinds of tasks that doctors, nurses, clinicians and
patients face every day."
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Current Health's AI wearable for keeping chronically ill patients out of the hospital gets FDA clearance
Apr 24, 2019 12:26pm
A
wearable device that uses artificial intelligence to remotely track and
analyze multiple vital signs while worn by patients at home has been
cleared by the Food and Drug Administration.
The AI-powered
wearable remote patient monitoring device from Edinburgh,
Scotland-based Current Health received Class II clearance from the FDA
for post-acute care, marking the first time that an end-to-end,
real-time, passive RPM wearable and platform has received clearance from
the agency, officials from the company said.
The
device, an upper-arm wearable, is already used in hospitals and
measures a patient’s respiration, pulse, oxygen saturation, temperature
and movement. According to the company, the device delivers continuous
“ICU-level accuracy” with analytics to derive actionable insights to
enable clinicians to monitor patients’ health and intervene earlier if
the data signal an emerging problem.
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23 Apr 2019
Cyber Readiness Worsens as Attacks Soar
Phil Muncaster UK / EMEA News Reporter , Infosecurity Magazine
The
number of organizations in Europe and the US that have been hit by a
cyber-attack over the past year has soared to over three-fifths (61%),
according to a new report from Hiscox.
The global insurer today released the results of its Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2019, which
is compiled from interviews with over 5300 cybersecurity professionals
in the US, UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
It
revealed a sharp increase in the number of firms suffering an attack,
up from 45% in the 2018 report. In the UK, the figure rose from 40% to
55%.
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AI tool diagnoses veterans with PTSD by analyzing speech
Published April 24 2019, 7:42am EDT
A
statistical machine learning technique has been shown to be 89 percent
accurate in distinguishing between the voices of veterans with
post-traumatic stress disorder and those without PTSD.
Researchers
at the NYU School of Medicine—in collaboration with SRI
International—have developed an artificial intelligence tool that is
able to link patterns of specific voice features with PTSD, a medical
diagnosis defining symptoms that last at least a month after
experiencing a traumatic event.
“The
classifier assigns higher probabilities of PTSD to those with features
indicating speech that is slower, more monotonous, and less change in
tonality and activation,” finds a study published this week in the journal Depression and Anxiety.
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Healthcare workers still a weak link in cyber defense plans
Published April 24 2019, 5:23pm EDT
Hackers
are increasingly focusing attention on the people working at healthcare
organizations, not worrying about the technical defenses that
providers, payers and others have erected.
“Attackers
are adept at exploiting our natural curiosity, desire to be helpful,
love of a good bargain and our time constraints,” according to new
report from Proofpoint, a security awareness training firm that based
results on the five questions it asked 7,000 working adult technology
users.
Overall,
users were not familiar with common information security terms such as
phishing, smishing and vishing, and neither are end users very worried
about cyberattacks—many rely on IT personnel to automatically discover
and fix accidental downloads of malicious software.
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HIT Think Why the risk surrounding medical device security is still high
By John Nye
Published April 24 2019, 5:49pm EDT
It’s
no secret that every network, be it healthcare or not, is almost
guaranteed to have insecure and often unknown devices attached to it.
We
have all been conditioned to want the latest technology, and we want it
to work immediately with little to no effort. In an effort to keep up
with this exceedingly popular consumer demand, device makers do
everything they can to make their “things” instantaneously work when you
turn them on or plug them in. This is shockingly true and consistent,
whether it’s a $15 smart light bulb or a multi-million dollar MRI
machine.
The
major issue with this approach is that it makes security an
afterthought at best, leaving security gaps that attackers can exploit
at will. To compound the problem, there are constantly more “things”
being added and connected to the Internet. As of mid-2018, there were
more than 17 billion devices, 7 billion of those IoT devices, connected to the Internet. This is expected to be 10 billion in 2020 and 22 billion just five years after that.
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FTC charges Surescripts with monopolizing e-prescription market
Agency alleges the company kept customers from using other platforms.
By Tom Sullivan
April 24, 2019 02:46 PM
The
U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday announced that it is
charging Surescripts with illegal monopolization of the market for
e-prescriptions.
WHY IT MATTERS
“The
FTC alleges that Surescripts intentionally set out to keep
e-prescription routing and eligibility customers on both sides of each
market from using additional platforms (a practice known as multihoming)
using anticompetitive exclusivity agreements, threats, and other
exclusionary tactics,” the FTC explained in a statement.
“Among other things, the FTC alleges that Surescripts took steps to
increase the costs of routing and eligibility multihoming through
loyalty and exclusivity contracts.”
FTC
said it aims to achieve three things with the lawsuit: to undo
Surescripts competitive methods and prevent them from happening again in
the future, to restore competition in the marketplace and to provide
“monetary redress to consumers.”
ON THE RECORD
“For
the past decade, Surescripts has used a series of anticompetitive
contracts throughout the e-prescribing industry to eliminate competition
and keep out competitors,” said Bureau of Competition Director Bruce
Hoffman. “Surescripts’s illegal contracts denied customers and,
ultimately, patients, the benefits of competition – including lower
prices, increased output, thriving innovation, higher quality, and more
customer choice. Through this litigation, we hope to eliminate the
anticompetitive conduct, open the relevant markets to competition, and
redress the harm that Surescripts’s conduct has caused.”
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Tim Cook on Apple’s values, regulation, excessive phone use, health, and more
In an interview at the Time 100 Summit, Apple’s CEO spoke broadly about a wide range of issues
Jason Cross (Macworld.com)24 April, 2019 07:39
Tim Cook is not one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2019. Nonetheless, as a three-time honoree of that list, he was invited to be interviewed by Nancy Gibbs at the Time 100 Summit.
As expected, Cook didn’t reveal any details about new products,
software, or services. Instead, the questions posed and answers given
were broad, touching on Cook’s and Apple’s values and how technology
fits into the world we live in.
Here’s some of what he said about a variety of issues. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
On Apple’s values
“I’ve
always deeply felt that people should have values, a corporation is
nothing more than a collection of people, and therefore by extension a
corporation should have values.
“We’ve always had a set of things that were really important to us and that we felt said something about us. Part of that is how we treat the environment, part of that is evangelizing and advocating for high-quality public education, and privacy—before anybody was talking about privacy. This has been at the depths of who we are as a company.
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“We’ve always had a set of things that were really important to us and that we felt said something about us. Part of that is how we treat the environment, part of that is evangelizing and advocating for high-quality public education, and privacy—before anybody was talking about privacy. This has been at the depths of who we are as a company.
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Telehealth, EHR optimization & more: See the breakdown of most-important trends in healthcare
– 22 April, 2019
Definitive Healthcare released
its 2019 Annual Healthcare Trends Survey, which asked healthcare
leaders across biotech, financial services, staffing, life sciences,
information technology and consulting sectors to determine the
most-important trends in the industry.
Most
leaders (25.2 percent) indicated industry consolidation is the most
important trend. In 2018, there were 803 mergers and acquisitions and
585 affiliation and partnership announcements. This is only expected to
increase in 2019, Definitive Healthcare reports.
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Who Gets Targeted Most in Cyberattack Campaigns
Attackers are changing both their tactics and targets in an attempt to remain criminally successful, Proofpoint's study found.
A low-level, non-executive title is no defense against spear-phishing campaigns, a new report has found.
Attackers
are finding success with old tactics used against new targets:
R&D and engineering staff tend to be more frequently targeted
than employees in other departments, and individual engineers and
developers are targeted at a higher rate than executives, according to
Proofpoint's quarterly analysis of highly targeted cyberattacks.
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HIT Think Healthcare plays catch-up on adopting disruptive technologies
By Nathan Sykes
Published April 23 2019, 5:34pm EDT
Big
data has been making waves across the entire business sector and almost
entirely transforming the way things operate. Construction and
development, information security, retail, entertainment and e-commerce
have all been changed irrevocably by big data, management and cloud
computing technologies. However, healthcare has been slow to adopt these
innovative solutions.
That's
been changing slowly but surely during the last couple of years. Big
data is definitely picking up speed in the medical field, and it's a
maturation that’s happening as a result of today’s landscape.
Healthcare
leaders and executives understand the need to make smarter, more
informed decisions about the way they treat patients and customers. Big
data and data management solutions will provide the necessary tools to
make that happen and can also improve the efficiency, output and
accuracy of nearly all medical operations.
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Vanderbilt's AI-powered EHR voice assistant saves time for caregivers
The
VEVA tool has helped improve caregiver productivity and efficiency –
and providers appreciate that it reduces the number of clicks per query.
By Bill Siwicki
April 23, 2019 03:14 PM
Vanderbilt
University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the
largest academic medical centers in the Southeast, serving the primary
and specialty healthcare needs for patients throughout Tennessee and the
mid-south.
THE PROBLEM
Like
many other healthcare organizations, Vanderbilt's caregivers have felt
the administrative burden of clinical documentation and labor-intensive
healthcare technologies. Caregivers found that the day-to-day practice
of medicine was challenged by IT workflows that got in the way of,
rather than improving, patient care.
Querying
and entering patient information via keyboard and mouse, for example,
proved to be an inefficient use of the caregivers' expertise and was
taking them away from engaging with their patients at the bedside.
PROPOSAL
In
2011, when Apple debuted Siri, and in 2016, when the Amazon Echo became
prolific, it also became clear that advances in artificial intelligence
and natural language processing had matured to the point where
communicating naturally with technology was no longer science-fiction,
said Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, core design advisor at Vanderbilt University
and assistant professor of biomedical informatics and pediatric
endocrinology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
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The UK’s latest list of most hacked passwords is as bad as you’d think
Names,
soccer players, musicians and fictional characters make up some of the
worst passwords of the year, according to the U.K. government’s National
Cyber Security Center.
But nothing beats “123456” as the worst password of all.
It’s
no shock to any seasoned security pro. For years, the six-digit
password has been donned the worst password of all, given its wide
usage. Trailing behind the worst password is — surprise, surprise —
“123456789”.
The
NCSC said more than 30 million victims use those two passwords alone,
according to its latest breach analysis based off data pulled from Pwned
Passwords, a website run by security researcher Troy Hunt, who also
runs breach notification Have I Been Pwned.
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HHS moves forward with plans to transform data exchange
Published April 22 2019, 7:31am EDT
The
second draft of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement is
intended to enable widespread data exchange, working as a set of
principles between health industry participants.
On
Friday, HHS through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health
IT issued a second draft of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common
Agreement (TEFCA), among other steps to promote easier exchange of
health information. It’s now seeking comments on the draft.
“The
seamless, interoperable exchange of health information is a key piece
of building a health system that empowers patients and providers and
delivers better care at a lower cost,” says HHS Secretary Alex Azar.
“The 21st Century Cures Act took an important step toward this goal by
promoting a national framework and common agreement for the trusted
exchange of health information. We appreciate the comments and input
from stakeholders so far, and we look forward to continued engagement.”
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Open-source tool ensures quality of digital pathology images
Published April 22 2019, 4:53pm EDT
Researchers
have devised an approach for coping with the lack of reliable standards
for the preparation and digitization of tissue slides used to diagnose
patients.
Poor
quality slides can result because of air bubbles and smears or during
the digitization process, when blurriness and brightness issues can
arise. However, manual review of these slides can be time-consuming and
labor-intensive, as well as subject to intra- and inter-reader
variability.
To
ensure the quality of digital images for diagnostic and research
purposes, researchers have developed an open-source tool that leverages
different measurements and classifiers, which automatically flag
corrupted images—while keeping those that are valuable for making
diagnoses.
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Social determinants of health: getting a better picture
April 22, 2019 11:52 AM
Analytics are helping providers better understand and provide care for their patient populations.
How
often in past 12 months have you gone without a meal? How often do you
need a ride to a medical appointment? These are the sorts of questions
that might not seem relevant to a patient's check-up, and they are never
easy for physicians ask. But more and more providers understand their
importance.
Factors
such as food security, access to transportation and even the
availability of sidewalks, all are considered critical social
determinants of health. These insights can help identify people whose
environment or life circumstances may have an upstream effect on their
health – and point the way toward improvements in their care. A patient
who doesn’t have a car or access to public transportation misses follow
up appointments could be offered a rideshare ride, for example.
But
when a health system takes on new patients, how can they identify those
who may need additional assistance or are most at risk? And how best
use limited resources to serve those who need it most?
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Interoperability was 'a huge fight' 20 years ago
A
quick look back at the competing specs for clinical coding and data
exchange gives a glimpse of the some of the challenges still ongoing
today.
By Tom Sullivan
April 22, 2019 09:20 AM
If
it seems like health data interoperability is a mess now, consider what
it was like two decades ago. Dr. Mark Roche, who was there to witness
it, explains in this video what was happening then and contrasts that to
our current state of interoperability.
"It was a huge fight," Roche, who is a partner at Avanti iHealth, told HIMSS TV.
That’s
mostly because of so many competing standards. There were
specifications for data exchange, and different specs for clinical
coding systems and, to make it even harder, they were at various levels
of maturity.
Today,
"it is tremendously different because we have made certain standards
freely available to the public. That makes it easy to use, easy to
adopt."
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First-Year Docs Spend Work Days Glued to EHR Systems
A fraction of internal medicine interns' time is spent in face-to-face interactions with patients, and even then they're multitasking.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Interns
spent the most time performing indirect patient care, taking up an
average of 15.9 hours of a 24-hour period—almost five times more hours
than the next most common activity, direct patient care, which accounted
for three hours of the day.
· Education was the third-highest category of intern time, attributed to 1.8 hours.
First-year
physicians spend 87% of their work day away from patients, half of
which is spent futzing with electronic health records.
Most of the remaining 13% of face time with patients is spent multitasking, according to a new study from Penn Medicine and Johns Hopkins University.
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Weekly News Recap
- IBM halts sales of Watson for Drug Discovery due to low demand
- Healthcare data integration vendor Redox raises $33 million
- The New York Times profiles the Butterfly IQ device that transforms a smartphone into an ultrasound scanner
- Provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr acquires competitor IntelliSoft
- InterSystems adds a provider directory to the newly renamed HealthShare Unified Care Record
- Vermont HIE struggles with opt-in vs. opt-out participation
- The number of India-based doctors who support their US counterparts as remote scribes is rapidly increasing
- China’s WeDoctor provides government-required health checks to villages as a way to collect patient data to train their AI-powered systems
- Babylon Health ramps up staffing and spending
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Enjoy!
David.
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