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Global telemedicine market on growth track
August 30, 2011 | Bernie
Monegain, Editor
LONDON – The global
telemedicine market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19
percent, driven mainly by growth opportunities in Europe, according to a recent
report by Technavio, specialists in emerging technologies market
research.
The report covers
the Americas as well as the EMEA and APAC regions.
“Though the United States has been dominating
the global telemedicine market, Europe and developing nations are rapidly catching
up," said Technavio’s industry analyst. “This shift is occurring mainly
because of the increase in the number of patients with chronic diseases and the
increasing availability of online healthcare services.”
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How PHRs boosted shareholder value at EMC
August 30, 2011 | Mary
Mosquera
Two IT companies
that have made personal health records available to their employees in an
effort to engage them in their health care have also found that it’s good for
business.
Storage hardware
and software provider EMC Corp. and Cerner Corp., a maker of electronic health
records, differ somewhat in their methods, but employee adoption of personal
health records (PHRs) has resulted in measurable improvements in employees’
health, higher productivity, and reduced healthcare costs for the
companies.
The use of PHRs
should increase
based on recommendations for meaningful use stage 2, in which patients
will be able to view and download their information to their computers or PHRs
via patient portals and other methods.
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Thursday,
September 1, 2011
The Rise of Electronic Medicine
Medicine
today is a sea of paper and fax machines, privacy barriers, and unconnected
data. The public is ready for a better system.
Last November 9 at
2 a.m., I received a phone call from a hospital in Southern California.
"Your mother needs an emergency operation," said the voice on the
line. "Your father had chest pain while at her bedside and both are in
ICUs. We have no idea what medications they take, what allergies they have, or
what problems they have been treated for. Can you help?"
This is medicine
today. A sea of paper and fax machines, information silos, privacy barriers,
and unconnected data. And yet, we know the public is ready for a better system.
According to a 2010 Harris Poll, four in five Americans believe any doctor
treating them should have instant access to their medical record online.
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Morecambe Bay still working on Lorenzo
1 September
2011 Shanna Crispin
University
Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust says it’s on track to have two
further Lorenzo modules go live this autumn, despite further minor delays.
In July, eHealth
Insider reported that the trust was
due to go live in August with the pathology requesting and reporting module of
the iSoft electronic patient record.
However, a trust
spokesperson has told EHI this will now be deployed in the autumn, as
additional work on data messaging needs to be completed.
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Medical home achievement the goal of athenahealth 'accelerator program'
August 29, 2011 — 4:04pm
ET | By Ken Terry
athenahealth has
launched an "accelerator program" for its cloud-based electronic
health record to help physicians achieve recognition as patient-centered
medical homes (PCMHs). athenahealth is the first EHR vendor to meet the
corporate review requirements of the National Committee on Quality Assurance
(NCQA), which recognizes practices that meet its PCMH requirements. In
addition, NCQA will continue to evaluate athenahealth's EHR.
The accelerator
program will include prebuilt content that can help practices meet some PCMH
criteria, according to athenahealth.
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West Virginia Selects Thomson Reuters' HIE Advantage™ Platform for Statewide Health Information Exchange
Published Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2011
ANN
ARBOR, Mich., Aug. 30, 2011 -- /PRNewswire/ -- The
West Virginia Health Information Network (WVHIN) has selected Thomson Reuters
HIE Advantage™ as the technology backbone for its statewide health information
exchange (HIE) system. WVHIN is a state agency governed by healthcare payer,
provider, consumer, and government stakeholders.
The system will
securely capture real-time clinical and administrative data from electronic
medical records, healthcare claims, and other sources and provide clinicians
with comprehensive patient histories at the point of care so they can make
better-informed clinical decisions.
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By Joseph Conn
Taking license with open-source software
Let's wade together
into the deep weeds of open-source software licensure.
For nearly a
decade, the Veterans Affairs Department, developer of the publicly available
VistA electronic health-record software, has kept at arm's length a growing
community of outside, open-source VistA developers and users.
Recently, however,
the VA embraced open source as a
strategy for VistA enhancement. It hired the
Informatics Applications Group, or Tiag for
short, to create a not-for profit corporation, the Open
Source Electronic Health Record Agent, to oversee the
program.
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EHR shortcuts can backfire
August 31, 2011 | Jeff
Rowe, HITECH Watch
It’s no secret that
many HIT advocates are frustrated at the pace of the HIT transition.
To be sure, the
healthcare sector notoriously lags behind most other major sectors of the
economy when it comes to implementing new technology. But sometimes it helps to
step back and remember what, from the providers perspective, is actually
involved.
This consultant
provides just such a view, though it comes largely in the form of a warning
that many providers are not using their EHRs properly.
“A disturbing
number of practices,” he says, “have failed to analyze the clinical content of
their EHR and are distributing exam documents and other information that do not
adequately or accurately document patient care. In the more serious situations,
EHR clinical documents misrepresent the care provided and the patient’s
condition.”
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iPods, Androids Could Be Cancer-Detection Tools
By: Talea Miller
Cancer
screening...is there an app for that?
Not quite, but a
newly developed device run by an iPod Touch, iPad or Android tablet could help
diagnose cancers in poor or rural settings, researchers say.
The hand-held and
solar-powered system, called a Gene-Z, can perform genetic analysis of blood
samples in the field when connected to a consumer tablet like the Android.
When a patient has
cancer, certain changes occur in microRNAs -- molecules that regulate genes --
that can be detected by the device.
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Final CMS e-Prescribing Rule Eases Requirements
Gienna Shaw, for HealthLeaders Media , September 2, 2011
More physicians and
practices can expect to avoid cuts in Medicare payments now that the Centers
for Medicare & Medicaid Services has softened e-Prescribing rules.
In its final rule,
published in the Federal Register Tuesday, CMS added new "significant
hardship" exemptions, agreed to exempt those practices that are already
meaningful users of certified EHRs, and extended the deadline to apply for
those exceptions by one month to November 1, 2011 for the 2012 payment
adjustment.
A 1% cut in fees
for those who are not successful e-Prescribers will begin in 2012. Providers
also face a potential 1.5% and 2% cut for 2013 and 2014, respectively.
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Salford Royal looks to EPR for safety
1 September
2011 Lyn Whitfield
Salford Royal NHS
Foundation Trust is looking to further its ambition to be “the safest hospital
in the NHS” by going out to tender for a new
electronic patient record system.
The trust is
looking for a provider to replace its iSoft Clinical Management system with a
"more functional and integrated" electronic patient record system,
through a five year contract worth up to £10m.
ICM was first
implemented more than ten years ago, when the trust wanted to “create a patient
centric, comprehensive clinical record for every patient to improve patient
care.”
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Friending Your Doctor Online
A
new social-networking service aims to improve the flow of communication by
connecting doctors and patients online.
By
Katharine Gammon
A social network
that doctors can prescribe to their patients: that's the idea behind a new
San Diego startup called Wellaho. The company
creates software to manage and support patients after they leave the hospital
by bringing together different parts of a patient's support system. Doctors,
family, and friends could all be part of the network, which can be customized
for individual patients. The system will begin clinical trials in three large
San Diego hospitals next month, with a larger rollout planned for 2012.
Other patient-based
networks, including PatientsLikeMe, HealthCentral, Inspire, CureTogether, and
CaringBridge, are gaining popularity with the chronically ill. But this one is
different, says Wellaho's founder, Naser Partovi. "It's prescribed by a
doctor, and it involves clinicians as well as friends and family. It's much
more controlled."
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/30/140059492/taming-high-health-costs-takes-taming-high-tech
Taming High Health Costs Takes Taming High-Tech
01:49 pm
August 30, 2011
Expensive
technologies like proton beam therapy and hot chemo baths are among the
reasons America's health care spending is rising at an unsustainable clip and
making the federal deficit so hard to tame.
But two of the
nation's top health care economists are expressing doubts that accountable care
organizations — one of Obama administration's most-hyped
mechanisms to save money — will be able to overcome
the medical system's lust for the new new thing.
Established through
last year's health law, ACOs are networks of doctors and hospitals that would
collaborate to provide quality care at lower cost, with the motivation of
keeping a share of the savings they deliver to Medicare and private insurers.
Medicare has been working for months to get the program
running by next year.
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What's Going On With Health Benefit Exchanges?
Health
Data Management Blogs, August 30, 2011
It's quite amazing
to see the reaction to the health insurance/benefit exchanges that have been
mandated by the health reform bill, to be created and maintained by each state
to manage its uninsured population. There were seven states/coalitions that had
received the early innovator grants, ranging from just above $6 million to
Maryland, all the way in excess of $50 million to Oklahoma. Now that is some
range of innovation, I must say. But I deviate. The point is that two of the
top three grantees—Oklahoma and Kansas--have since returned the grants. And by the
looks of the conversations we have been hearing in the corridors of power,
there may be others who are contemplating a similar response. On the other
hand, the second round of grants provided additional funding to the smallest
grantee, Maryland, in excess of $20 million. That brings me to my original
question.
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Lessons learned from Steve Jobs
August 30, 2011 by MassDevice
Newly resigned
Apple CEO and technology titan Steve Jobs left quite a mark on health care and
med-tech.
I recently spoke
with several reporters about Steve
Jobs' impact on healthcare , thanking him for the past 15 years of
innovation. In preparing for those interviews, I reviewed Steve's career
milestones,
In 1997, Apple
Computer was in trouble. Its sales had declined from 11 billion in 1995 to 7
billion in 1997. Its energies were focused on battling Microsoft. It had lost
its way.
Steve Jobs made these remarks at MacWorld 1997,
a few months before becoming Apple's CEO. He outlined a simple go forward plan:
1. Board of
Directors
2. Focus on Relevance
3. Invest in Core Assets
4. Meaningful Partnerships
5. New Product Paradigm
2. Focus on Relevance
3. Invest in Core Assets
4. Meaningful Partnerships
5. New Product Paradigm
How can we apply
these 5 ideas to the work we're doing in HIT?
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BI Tools Prep Clinicians For Accountable Care
Healthcare
organizations are turning to business intelligence software to help navigate a
new era in the delivery of patient care, says KLAS report.
By Nicole
Lewis, InformationWeek
August 30, 2011
Healthcare providers
pursuing accountable care organization (ACO) initiatives are increasingly
relying on business intelligence (BI) tools to help identify inefficiencies,
quality gaps, and cost issues, reports a study from healthcare research firm
KLAS.
The report, Business
Intelligence: Making Cents of Performance, notes that in an era in which pay
for performance will shift the focus from quantity of care to quality of care,
many clinicians see BI tools as an essential component monitoring patient care
data and focusing on enhancing efficiency. The aim is to adopt new business
models to accommodate the changing requirements of 2010's health reform law.
Lorin Bird, KLAS
research director and author of the report, told InformationWeek Healthcare he'd spoken with
a healthcare provider that had used Humedica's BI system--which connects
patient information across varied medical settings and time periods--to
generate information that showed a higher quality of care and lower costs when
compared to medical peers.
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EHI focus on: paperless at King’s
King’s College
Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is hoping to virtually eliminate paper in the
next two years. Shanna Crispin joined staff at the IT department’s annual open
day to find out more.
31 August 2011
King’s College
Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is on a tight deadline to becoming paperless – it
has set 2013 as the year it wants paper eradicated.
Granted, the trust
already has been 60% and 70% of its departments operating on electronic
systems; but converting the remainder within two years will be no mean feat.
The trust first
went live with its iSoft iClinical Management (iCM) electronic patient record
in 1998; and director of ICT Colin Sweeney says it has had an ambition to
become paperless ever since.
“When I think about
it, it has really been the last six months to a year that we’ve been saying
‘yes this is a real objective for us’,” he tells eHealth Insider at a recent
open day to promote the concept to staff. “But when we started off with our EPR
vision back in 1997 I think we thought that ultimately we would go paperless.”
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EHI focus on: Aintree University Hospitals
Aintree University
Hospitals may have found that mythical animal: the electronic patient record
system that takes trusts paperless. Shanna Crispin reports.
22 August 2011
The electronic
patient record system being assembled at Aintree University Hospitals NHS
Foundation Trust is fondly referred to by staff as a ‘unicorn’ – as in they’ve
found one that exists.
The trust is less
than a year away from becoming paper-light and 18 months shy of completing an
IT strategy aimed squarely at implementing an operational electronic patient
record.
Sticking with
System C
The trust has been
a System C customer for more than a decade, and in 2009 opted to stick with the
supplier and deploy its Medway Sigma system – instead of taking what might have
been on offer from the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
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Aintree info exchange goes two-way
22 August
2011 Shanna Crispin
Aintree University
Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has started to give local GPs online access to
patient information held on its in-hospital system.
The trust went live
with a link-up between local primary care systems and its Medway
patient administration system, using EMIS Web, back in June 2010.
It initially gave
urgent care clinicians access to information held on the GP systems, such as
allergies, medications and results.
Now it
has started giving GPs the same access to information held in the
hospital’s Medway Sigma electronic patient record.
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Natural Language Processing IDs Medical Complications
Embedding NLP into
electronic health records allows clinicians to spot more postop complications,
finds JAMA study.
By Ken Terry,
InformationWeek
August 29, 2011
While we have yet to
reach the holy grail of converting free text to structured data in an
electronic health record (EHR), natural language processing (NLP) is beginning
to show real promise in healthcare. The latest indication of this is a study
showing that the application of NLP to free text in an EHR identifies
postsurgical complications more accurately than the analysis of discharge
billing codes.
The study in the Journal of the American Medical
Association compared the NLP method to the use of
administrative data in the Veterans Affairs Surgical Quality Improvement
Program (VASQIP). The study population is a randomly selected sample of nearly
3,000 patients treated at six VA hospitals between 1999 and 2006.
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Behind the mHealth, Telehealth Boom
Gienna Shaw, for HealthLeaders Media , August 30, 2011
The market for
technologies that bring healthcare to patients instead of the other way
around—mobile healthcare and telehealth—has been growing steadily. And many
predict it will take an even bigger jump in the next few years.
That growth will be
driven by a number of factors, including government initiatives and a trend
toward collaboration between healthcare organizations and vendors.
The global mobile
healthcare application market was $1.7 billion last year and it’s expected to
reach $4.1 billion by 2014. And the global telemedicine market is expected to
reach $19.5 billion by 2014, according to two separate reports released by
Infiniti Research, a global market research firm based in London.
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Nurses urged to lead on informatics
30 August
2011 Daloni Carlisle
NHS Connecting
for Health’s chief nurse is to launch a programme to develop leadership skills
for nurses in informatics.
Two three-day
workshops will take place in late September to look at the leadership
skills that are needed and how they can be developed.
Susan Hamer, the
director of nursing, midwifery and allied health professionals, said: “This is
not an informatics course. It is about understanding the shifting context and
trying to increase leadership capacity.”
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EHI CCIO interview: Susan Hamer
NHS Connecting for
Health’s director of nursing, midwifery and heath visiting has been studying
the role of chief nursing information officer that is emerging in the US. As a
result, she is an enthusiastic supporter of the EHI CCIO Campaign.
30 August 2011
In July this year,
Trinity Mother Frances Health System in Texas advertised in the Washington Post
for a chief nursing information officer.
In the lengthy job
description was this key phrase: “The CNIO leads nursing in the design and
execution of technology-enabled process change that maximizes patient safety,
quality of care and operational efficiency.”
Trinity Mother
Frances’ job is one of a number of similar posts that have been created in the
past 18 months as leading healthcare organisations in the US have started to
advocate for a senior nursing executive to lead, co-ordinate and champion
informatics and IT. Yet the very idea that a UK hospital would place such an
advert is almost unthinkable at present.
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EHR App Draws on Photos, Images
HDM
Breaking News, August 29, 2011
HealthFusion Inc.
has introduced a feature for its ambulatory electronic health records software
enabling physicians to draw on a patient picture or one of more than 100
built-in anatomical images.
The MediDraw
feature works with the vendor's MediTouch EHR on a tablet, laptop or desktop
computer running Windows or Apple operating systems. A physician can access
embedded anatomical images, or take a picture of a patient and use a smartphone
to upload the picture to the EHR via the Internet, and then draw with a
fingertip on the picture.
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Super-sized HIEs rise up nationwide
August 22, 2011 — 7:06pm
ET | By Ken Terry
Even as some health
information exchange projects fail, others are rising to take their place, and
some are quite large. The two latest examples are regional HIEs in western
Pennsylvania and southern California.
The ClinicalConnect
exchange in Pennsylvania will include nine of the area's health care systems.
Among them are Altoona Regional Health System, Armstrong County Memorial
Hospital, Butler Health System, Excela Health, Heritage Valley Health System,
Jefferson Regional Medical Center, St. Clair Hospital, The Washington Hospital
and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).
Starting with a
pilot at Heritage Valley, ClinicalConnect will be implemented over the next two
years. There are plans to bring in other regional health systems in the near
future.
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HIEs save payers big bucks
August 25, 2011 — 4:15pm
ET | By Ken Terry
A study of
emergency-department visits conducted by Humana in the Milwaukee area
shows that payers can save money if EDs have access to community health
information exchanges (HIEs).
When ED clinicians
queried patients' encounter histories in the Wisconsin Health Information
Exchange (WHIE), the patients' visits cost Humana $29 less, on average, than
did visits by patients whose doctors did not have the benefit of that
information, the study found. Much of the savings came from a reduction in
redundant testing.
The study, which
ran from 2008 to 2010, involved 1,482 fully insured Humana members who sought
care at 10 Milwaukee hospitals. The test group consisted of patients for whom
the WHIE database was consulted during at least two ED visits; the database was
not consulted for those in the control group, who also made at least two ED
visits.
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Study: HIE Cuts Emergency Dept. Costs
HDM
Breaking News, August 29, 2011
A study of
emergency department visits at 10 Milwaukee hospitals finds average savings of
$29 per visit when the attending physician can access historical medical
encounter information from a patient's insurer via a health information
exchange.
"Decreased
utilization of imaging procedures and diagnostic tests drove this
cost-savings," according to the study, published in the July-August 2011
issue of American Health
& Drug Benefits and available
here.
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Increased stress causing hospital CIOs to rethink their job situations
August 28, 2011 — 4:25pm
ET | By Ken Terry
Nearly a quarter of
hospital CIOs are considering leaving their positions for a less stressful job
within the next three years, according
to a survey by healthsystemCIO.com.
Moreover, 55 percent agree with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John
Halamka that with all of the projects being heaped on their plates, the
position of CIO might eventually be untenable. Halamka made this remark in
an earlier
interview with healthsystemCIO.com, a blog written by
former Healthcare
Informatics Editor Anthony Guerra.
Meaningful Use,
ICD-10 and, in some cases, accountable care organizations have made the CIO's
job more difficult than ever. Fifty-five percent of the respondents believe
that they need more senior IT staff, especially project managers.
Sixty-five percent
have communicated their concerns to the hospital managers above them. In
written comments, some of the respondents said that the managers don't
understand that the initial investment in hardware and software is only the
beginning of the ongoing investment in implementation and maintenance of
complex applications. But other respondents noted that their hospitals are
doing the best they can to give them the funds they need to do a good job.
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Axolotl HIE is now OptumInsight
August 24, 2011 | Diana
Manos, Healthcare IT News
EDEN PRAIRIE, MN –
Axolotl HIE solutions are now part of OptumInsight (formerly Ingenix)
healthcare management systems and services, Optum announced Wednesday.
"For more than
16 years, Axolotl Health Information Exchange (HIE) solutions have been
consistently top-ranked among all HIE systems," Optum said.
"Hospitals, regions and entire states that use Axolotl HIE are unequalled
in delivering vital patient information, empowering clinical collaboration,
improving quality of care and patient safety and reducing healthcare costs."
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7 things to consider when choosing mobile devices
For physicians who
want a mobile device, what's the best choice -- a smartphone or a tablet? Or
both? Or something else? Experts say the answer depends on how a physician is planning
to use the device, and where.
Frost &
Sullivan, a business consulting firm, published a white paper that looks at the
decision-making process of adopting one or more major wireless devices --
smartphones, tablets, push-to-talk and machine-to-machine (M2M) monitoring
tools, such as home monitoring instruments that send data to an electronic
medical record. The paper, which received financial support from Sprint, says
the decision can be broken down into seven criteria: functionality, usability,
security, network connectivity, durability, application availability and price.
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Mostashari: Pick a health problem, 'knock the heck out of it'
August 29, 2011 | Bernie
Monegain, Healthcare IT News
National
Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, urged an audience at the annual Allscripts
Client Experience Conference Monday morning to pick a health problem - stroke
or heart attack, for example – and "knock the heck out of it."
"All of you
out there, pick a target."
As he has before,
Mostashari reminded the group that "technology is not an end to
itself." Better care for individuals and better care for the population,
along with lower costs are the goals, he said.
He forecast more
innovation and more connection between healthcare providers and individual
consumers for the future, and "more liberation of data."
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Red Cross: Social media prevalent in disasters
August 25, 2011 | Molly
Merrill, Contributing Editor
A pair of new
surveys conducted by the American Red Cross confirmed that the uptick seen on
sites such as Twitter and Facebook is part of a growing trend of Americans
turning to social media in response to emergencies.
“Social media is
becoming an integral part of disaster response,” said Wendy Harman, director of
social strategy for the American Red Cross.
Clear evidence of
this was the East Coast earthquake that occurred on Aug. 23, which produced
more than 40,000 earthquake-related tweets on Twitter, was discussed in more
than 3 million Facebook accounts, and caused Twitter to hit 5,000 tweets per
second.
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EHR Vendors Give Keyboard-Hating Docs Pen Alternative
Digital pen
technology becomes an option from more EHR vendors. Will it help doctors cross
the bridge away from legacy process?
By Ken Terry,
InformationWeek
August 26, 2011
Digital pen
technology--an alternative to keyboard-based data entry--is starting to make serious inroads in healthcare, according to Anoto, the
Swedish company that manufactures the leading digital pen in the U.S. Most
significantly, electronic health record (EHR) vendors are beginning to offer
Anoto-licensed digital-pen applications as part of their hospital, ED, and
ambulatory-care products.
Anoto partner Shareable
Ink said it has integrated its application
with the EHRs of Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, and Meditech. Allscripts
confirmed that it is offering Shareable Ink with its Enterprise EHR for large
group practices and is in the process of implementing it with its Professional
EHR for medium-sized groups.
-----
ANSI launches operations to approve EHR certifiers
August 26, 2011 | Mary
Mosquera
WASHINGTON – The
American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has launched its program to
approve organizations that want to certify electronic health records for
meaningful use.
ANSI will accept
applications through Oct. 7, with its first organization accreditations
anticipated in 2012, the standards-setting group said in an Aug. 25
announcement.
The Office of the
National Coordinator for Health IT named ANSI in June as the sole
authorized accreditor of certifying bodies for the permanent certification
program.
-----
Enjoy!
David.
