Here are a few I have come across this week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and a paragraph or two. For the full article click on the link above title of the article.
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http://www.rwjf.org/pioneer/product.jsp?id=49989
Feature: The Power and Potential of Personal Health Records
Chapter 1: Personal Health Records 101
Published: January 2010
What are Personal Health Records? There are many different meanings associated with the term “Personal Health Record.” The many flavors of “PHR” run the gamut from gadgets that track vital signs to Web-based platforms that store health information like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. Even the term “PHR” is disputed—experts in the field have used other labels to describe PHRs, including personal health platform (PHP), personal health application (PHA), and personally-controlled health record system (PCHRS). For the purposes of this Web feature, a “personal health record” is a platform that gathers patient data from multiple sources and hosts a suite of applications that use those data to help patients understand and improve their health. This is a complex concept—one that this Web feature seeks to unpack and illuminate.
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NWT implements interoperable Electronic Health Record
January 22, 2010 (Yellowknife, NWT) – Residents of the Northwest Territories and the health professionals who care for them will soon benefit from electronic access to medical information such as lab results as the territory rolls out the first release of the interoperable Electronic Health Record project, Minister of Health and Social Services Sandy Lee announced today.
Release 1 of the interoperable Electronic Health Record (iEHR), the HealthNet Viewer, is in the process of rolling out to initial authorized groups of healthcare professionals at clinics and health centres across the NWT. By March, most of the territory’s health professionals will have instant access to the medical information of their patients such as lab results, discharge summaries and diagnostic imaging reports. Quick access to this information enables more efficient access to care, more informed care decisions and results in better patient care.
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http://www.ihealthbeat.org/features/2010/meaningful-use-rules-cap-yearend-health-it-activity.aspx
Thursday, January 21, 2010
'Meaningful Use' Rules Cap Year-End Health IT Activity
With one day to spare, the federal government made its deadline for issuing long-awaited rules that will govern the distribution of more than $44 billion in Medicare and Medicaid incentives to hospitals and health care professionals demonstrating "meaningful use" of certified electronic health records.
Due by the end of 2009 as stipulated by the federal stimulus package, the meaningful use rules released Dec. 30 might have been the most anticipated development of year's end, but it wasn't the only one. The government continues to move ahead with the implementation of various provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This update summarizes significant developments over the past two months.
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Leading CIOs question timetable, specificity of meaningful use proposal
January 21, 2010 — 2:27pm ET | By Neil Versel
Uber-CIO Dr. John Halamka, of CareGroup Healthcare System in Boston, is known for his workaholic tendencies, mostly in the name of improving healthcare through information technology. After talking to peers from around the country, he has concluded that HHS either has to be more specific with its standards for meaningful use, reduce the scope of the requirements or give providers more time to comply.
"Many have said that the quality reporting requirement is 'too much, too soon,'" Halamka writes on his blog. "The patient engagement requirements also are 'too much, too soon.' Vendors have commented that they do not understand how to send reminders to patients per their preference. Providing 80 percent of patients with a clinical summary of office visits or care transitions will require significant retooling of software and incremental staffing," he adds.
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Here's yet another reason to be skeptical about PHRs
January 21, 2010 — 3:02pm ET | By Neil Versel
Regular readers know about my skepticism toward personal health records. You're probably also aware that I have been critical of media coverage touting Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault as the clear industry leaders in this category. They're not. They're simply early-stage products from two huge, recognizable companies. I don't know if anyone has any hard numbers on usage, or if they're just embarrassed to admit that PHRs haven't caught on with the public yet.
Remember the incident last spring with "ePatient Dave" deBronkart? The cancer survivor discovered some inaccurate data in his Google Health record, which had been populated with billing claims from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Really inaccurate data. Like information that his kidney cancer had spread to either his lungs or spine. And that he had an aortic aneurysm. Serious stuff, and all of it false.
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Hospitals asked to report problems with e-health records
Some software is producing improper medication dosages, Grassley says
Lucas Mearian
January 21, 2010 (Computerworld) The ranking member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee this week asked 31 hospitals and health-care systems to provide feedback on problems with computer systems associated with the government's efforts to incent the rollout of electronic health records (EHR).
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), asked in a Jan. 19 letter, that the health facilities, which include some of the nation's largest, to inform him of any "issues or concerns that have been raised by your health care providers" over the past two years.
"Given the taxpayer investment and the investment of the health care system overall in the information technology industry, the more Congress and others overseeing implementation of this program dig into the problems and work to get them sorted out now, the better," Grassley said in a statement today.
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Grassley Takes Aim at Hospitals' Problems with Health IT Implementation
John Commins, for HealthLeaders Media, January 21, 2010
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has asked 31 of the nation's largest hospitals and health systems to detail their problems implementing the $19 billion federal HIT program that was launched last year.
Grassley said that his 11-question survey is a response to complaints he's heard from providers about administrative complications, formatting and usability issues, errors, and interoperability roadblocks.
"Given the taxpayer investment and the investment of the healthcare system overall in the information technology industry, the more Congress and others overseeing implementation of this program dig into the problems and work to get them sorted out now, the better," Grassley said in a media release.
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http://govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=72988
VA contracts start ball rolling on e-lifetime record
By Mary Mosquera
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The Veterans Affairs last week made a set of contract announcements that gets the ball rolling on its joint venture with the Defense Department to build a lifetime electronic benefits and health record for military service members and their families.
The contracts set up management services for the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) project as well as solicit firms to evaluate communities where the VLER could be tested.
President Obama last year identified the VLER, which would carry all administrative and medical information of military service members from the day they enter service throughout their lives as veterans, as a priority for the administration.
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http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/boston-based-group-employs-it-strength-haiti
Boston-based group employs IT strength in Haiti
January 19, 2010 | Bernie Monegain, Editor
BOSTON – Information technology is playing a pivotal role in the work on the ground in earthquake-ravaged Haiti as Boston-based Partners in Health tends to the sick and the maimed.
Partners in Health (PIH) was founded in 1987, two years after the Clinique Bon Sauveur was set up in Cange, Haiti, to deliver healthcare to the residents of the mountainous central plateau.
"We have used satellite Internet at our clinics in the central plateau for over a decade, long before the cell phone system was available there – there are still no landlines in most areas," said Hamish Fraser, director of informatics and telemedicine for PIH. "This has been crucial for our projects in allowing coordination of staff, logistics and supply chain and clinical data management."
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http://www.fortherecordmag.com/archives/011810p14.shtml
January 18, 2010
Healthcare 2010: What’s in Store?
For The Record
Vol. 22 No. 1 P. 14
Several of e-health’s leading thinkers offer their perspectives on what promises to be a landmark year in the industry.
No one can predict the future—except for Oprah, maybe, but that’s beside the point. Despite our lack of forecasting skills, it’s always fun to use our experience to take an educated look forward to what’s coming down the road.
To ascertain what may lie ahead in the health information field, For The Record (FTR) posed a series of questions to some of the industry’s brightest minds—with one exception. Sal Obfuscato, executive director of SEEDIE (the Society for Exorbitantly Expensive and Difficult to Implement EHRs), clearly is out of his league here, but he gives it his best shot. In all seriousness, although Obfuscato’s answers are tongue-in-cheek, like most satire, they contain elements of truth that others may want to ignore.
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http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/5564/milton_keynes_first_on_microsoft_amalga
Milton Keynes first on Microsoft Amalga
20 Jan 2010
Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust has become the first UK customer for Microsoft’s healthcare data aggregation platform.
It has bought the Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS), which combines the features of a portal and business intelligence product, to provide a single real-time view of ten clinical and business systems.
Among the core systems the trust will integrate is Cerner Millennium, which was implemented by the foundation trust in 2006.
Trust IT director David Powell told E-Health Insider that Amalga UIS had been chosen because it was a proven product that offered a flexible way to maximise the value of data from the trust’s existing systems.
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http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/5562/one_in_ten_child_prescriptions_wrong
One in ten child prescriptions wrong
20 Jan 2010
More than one in ten prescriptions given to children in hospitals contain errors and almost a fifth of drugs are incorrectly administered, according to a newly published study by the University of London.
The study is believed to be the largest of its kind in the UK and reports far higher error rates than previous studies, which showed that 5% of drugs were wrongly prescribed. It also reiterates calls for e-prescribing to be introduced to reduce errors.
The study of five London hospitals over a two week period showed that when pharmacists reviewed the drugs charts of 444 children they found and corrected errors in more than 13% of almost 3,000 prescriptions. In one hospital ward the rate of error was 32%.
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http://www.govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=72939
Health IT committee streamlines approach to NHIN
By Mary Mosquera
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Federal health IT policymakers yesterday okayed a set of recommendations to recast the National Health Information Network (NHIN) as a set of broader, more practical services designed to help providers meet fast approaching deadlines for qualifying as meaningful users of health IT.
In a Jan 13th meeting of the Health and Human Service Department's Health IT Policy Committee, experts said that the original plan for the NHIN, conceived almost a decade ago, may no longer be equal to the current demands on healthcare providers to digitize their practices.
Instead, policymakers recommended a new focus on the NHIN as a more basic set of services designed to expedite meaningful use, including an emphasis on ‘push’ transactions, electronic directories, a reliance on secure transport services via the Internet and practices for authenticating information handling.
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http://www.healthimaging.com/index.php?option=com_articles&view=article&id=20187&division=hiit
Swedish researchers offer free cardiovascular image analysis software
Researchers from the department of clinical physiology at Lund University and Lund University Hospital in Sweden have released a free cardiovascular image analysis software package, Segment, for the research community, according to an article published Jan.11 in BMC Medical Imaging.
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http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100119/NEWS/301199987
Defining 'open source' addressed at VistA meeting
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: January 19, 2010 - 11:00 am ET
Soup means different things to different people—and so does open source.
And what's not soup yet is a settled definition of open source for members of the community of programmers and users of derivatives of the Veterans Affairs Department's VistA clinical software system, who met for four days last week on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe.
For example, WorldVistA, a not-for-profit organization formed in 2002, offers a version of VistA that runs on the Linux operating system and GT.M database and programming language, both open-source software systems. It is licensed under the Free Software Foundation GNU General Public License, or GPL for short.
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Tenn. Blues Breach Affects 500,000
HDM Breaking News, January 15, 2010
BlueCross and BlueShield of Tennessee has announced it has so far notified more than 157,000 members of the theft of identifiable data in early October that affected an estimated 500,000 members. The Chattanooga, Tenn.-based insurer announced the theft within days of its occurance. It started notifying members in early December as evidence that their information was on stolen files surfaced during an investigation that continues.
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Users pan U of I Hospitals' records system
By B.A. MORELLI
Iowa City Press-Citizen
Iowa City, Ia. — A new electronic record system at University of Iowa Hospitals is generating backlash from doctors, nurses and staff complaining of increased work.
U of I officials acknowledge frustrations but say growing pains are to be expected with the new system, called Epic.
The $61 million system, which is supposed to improve efficiency and patient safety, was necessary to keep pace with changing regulations, said Lee Carmen, chief information officer.
Last year, University Hospitals switched from a homegrown record system to an all-in-one model made by Epic Systems of Wisconsin.
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Quality Reporting May Prove Challenging Under Meaningful Use
Carrie Vaughan, for HealthLeaders Media, January 19, 2010
I think it's fair to say that healthcare executives and physicians would all agree that the sooner hospitals, health systems, and physicians start gathering and reporting on quality indicators, the sooner healthcare quality can be improved. So it's not surprising that quality metrics are central to the meaningful use requirements outlined in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services interim final rule.
What did surprise healthcare leaders, however, was the number of quality measures that is required for 2011.
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
FTC's New Red Flags Rules: Are They the Right Cure at the Right Time?
by Jacqueline Klosek
Identity theft is a serious problem that causes its victims financial loss, inconvenience and mental suffering. Despite a wide range of different efforts to clamp down on identity theft, it continues to grow. A recent Federal Trade Commission report revealed that in 2008, the number of identity theft complaints exceeded 1.2 million, the highest number on record for any year since such complaints were tracked.
Medical identity theft, while far less prevalent than financial identity theft, is a major concern for consumers. It is thus not very surprising that legislators, consumer protection agencies and advocates continue to seek new ways to prevent identity theft of all kinds and mitigate the effects of identity theft when it does occur.
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http://ehealtheurope.net/news/5551/germany_suspends_e-health_card_project
Germany suspends e-health card project
18 Jan 2010
The roll-out of Germay’s national e-health smart card has been put on hold, with a review to be carried out of security and confidentiality.
Germany’s new health minister, Philipp Rösler, has decided to suspend the introduction of the planned electronic health card system.
The national ehealth project is one of the largest in Europe and intended to eventually provide every German citizen with an electronic card carrying their health data, medical history, prescriptions, and insurance status.
In the first phases the e-health card had been planned to be used mostly to simplify health insurance transactions and claims, providing proof of eligibility. In its later phases medical data and prescription information would be added to the card.
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http://www.ehiprimarycare.com/news/5550/no_action_against_doc_who_accessed_ecs
No action against doc who accessed ECS
15 Jan 2010
A hospital doctor accused of accessing the Emergency Care Summary records of high profile politicians, footballers and BBC journalists will not be prosecuted, Scotland’s Crown Office has decided.
Dr Andrew Jamieson, who worked at Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline, was accused of contravening the Data Protection Act by misusing access to the Emergency Care Summary database.
A Crown Office spokesperson told EHI Primary Care: “After full consideration of all the facts and circumstances, including confidential medical reports, Crown Counsel decided that no proceedings should be taken against Dr Andrew Jamieson. Letters explaining the decision have now been written to all those affected.”
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http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100118/NEWS/301189973
VistA attendees discuss giving code back to VA
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: January 18, 2010 - 11:00 am ET
The Veterans Affairs Department and the WorldVistA community don't have a symbiotic relationship, at least not yet.
For the most part, it's been a one-way street between the federal agency that created the VistA clinical software system and the not-for-profit organization formed in 2002 to promote the use of the VistA system outside the VA.
Creating a two-way relationship with the VA was a prime topic of discussion when Roger Baker, chief information officer at the VA, got on a conference call with attendees at the 20th VistA Community Meeting in Tempe, Ariz., Friday.
So, too, was restoring the iterative software development process used within the VA to create much of VistA. In that process, which has been neglected if not totally abandoned, clinicians and programmers worked together in close proximity at the local level to solve specific problems. The resultant software code, if good enough, then was distributed throughout the VA system.
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http://health-care-it.advanceweb.com/editorial/content/editorial.aspx?cc=213728
Emotional Connectedness - The Health Care Connection
New emotional networking tools can lower cost of health care.
By Robert N. Mitchell
How much does emotion play into an older person's overall health? Research shows that the more a person communicates and stays in touch with others, the better their health.
And, applying that premise to technology developments in light of the discussions around medical homes and long-term care facilities where the patient is in close contact with family members, you knew it was just a matter of time before someone looked at a person's emotional state.
Published reports have shown the correlation between emotional connectedness and improved health, especially in the elderly. "It turned out that for every one measure of increase in perceived emotional support, there were three measures of decrease in heart disease and other health risk," Paul To, CEO and founder of Emota.net Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif., company, said in a recent interview. "The study looked at how the elderly perceived things, and how they felt about the support."
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http://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/top-ten-predictions-healthcare-it-2010
Top Ten Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2010
January 15, 2010 | John Moore
There are plenty of top 10 predictions on any number of topics, but it is rare to find one focusing on healthcare IT, Chilmark Research's bailiwick. And while we may be just a little late in getting this out there onto the streets, it is mid-January after all, our quick search on the net did not turn up any other posts with such a finely tuned agenda so here goes...
1) HITECH Act Suffers Birthing Pains: Despite the hard work of many to create clear guidelines (meaningful use & certification of EHRs), roll-out extension centers, and establish Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), we have only just begun. The devil is in the details (implementation/execution) and 2010 will be marked by a number of stumbles and most likely a significant amount of wasted tax dollars.
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http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/epic-releases-iphone-app
Epic releases iPhone app
January 14, 2010 | Jack Beaudoin, VP, Content
CUPERTINO, CA – Electronic health record vendor Epic has just released Haiku, an iPhone application that provides authorized users with secure access to schedules, patient lists, health summaries, test results and notes.
The app is a free download on iTunes, but the user must belong to an organization that licenses Haiku and is currently on Epic's Summer 2009, according the the product description on iTunes.
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http://govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=72956
HHS panel: CMS should reconsider discarded quality measures
By Mary Mosquera
Friday, January 15, 2010
Quality measures that a federal advisory panel recommended but which were dropped from proposed rules for the meaningful use of health IT represent a missed opportunity to significantly improve patient care, according to members of the Health IT Policy Committee.
In its proposed rule for meaningful use, announced Dec. 30, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services incorporated many of the suggestions for quality objectives and measures that the Committee recommended be included in the rule.
But CMS dropped from the list recommendations that physicians generate progress notes for each patient visit, document the recording of advanced directives for the elderly and develop information resources that are easy for patients to understand.
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http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/5555/swindells:_don%27t_compromise_npfit_vision
Swindells: Don't compromise NPfIT vision
18 Jan 2010
Prolonged contract renegotiations with local service providers risk compromising the central vision of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, the Department of Health’s former acting chief information officer has warned.
Matthew Swindells, who led a review of NHS informatics before leaving the DH to head up Tribal Group’s healthcare practice, told E-Health Insider he was concerned the renegotiations could lose sight of the “core vision of integrated systems to support integrated care.”
“If they compromise on the core vision... we will have spent a lot of money and not delivered the infrastructure that the NHS needs to transform quality and cost of care,” he said.
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http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/5557/%C2%A340m_npfit_legal_bills_revealed
£40m NPfIT legal bills revealed
18 Jan 2010
Almost £40m has been paid to just two law firms for legal and commercial support for the National Programme for IT in the NHS, a parliamentary written answer has revealed.
Conservative shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien told E-Health Insider "the £40 million spent on legal fees is only the tip of the iceberg”.
The figure was given in response to a question from Conservative shadow health spokesperson, Stephen O’Brien, who asked exactly how much had been paid to each legal firm employed to draft the contracts for the NPfIT.
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Enjoy!
David.
