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Think tank puts data sharing as priority
By Tom Sullivan, Editor, Government Health IT
Created 04/19/2013
Delivering what founder and president Jason Grumet described as “one of the most challenging projects we’ve undertaken,” the Bipartisan Policy Center on Thursday put forth what it hopes will be “a viable political plan to reign in the spiraling costs” of healthcare while also improving quality. At the center is a recommendation to prioritize electronic sharing of information among providers.
The plan, "A Bipartisan Rx for Patient-Centered Care and System-Wide Cost Containment," is signed by former Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD, former Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, and former Congressional Budget Office Director Alice Rivlin.
“There is no fiscal solution that doesn’t involve healthcare,” said Michael Peterson, president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in Thursday’s event introducing the report, adding that healthcare has its own challenges.
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CHIME Comments to HHS on New Initiatives to Accelerate HIE
APR 18, 2013 5:25pm ET
As the federal government looks to further enhance the exchange of health information exchange, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives suggests the feds model new initiatives after some of their existing programs.
The Department of Health and Human Services in March issued a request for information as it considers policy moves to further accelerate interoperability and health information exchange beyond initiatives previously launched under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Responding to the request for information, CHIME applauds the certification programs that HHS already has in place for the electronic prescribing and meaningful use programs.
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Computational model predicts cancer survival rates
April 19, 2013 | By Ashley Gold
A new computational model highly predictive of breast cancer survival has been developed by Columbia University engineering researchers. Their work is outlined in a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine.
Lead researcher Dimitris Anastassiou--a professor of engineering at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science--and his team identified "attractor metagenes," which are gene signatures present in identical form among many types of cancer, according to an announcement from the school.
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Privacy framework necessary as healthcare social networks grow in popularity
April 19, 2013 | By Dan Bowman
As an increasing number of patients and providers flock to health social networking sites to share information and connect with similar individuals, privacy remains a paramount concern. To that end, a comprehensive privacy framework is vital for such environments, according to research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
"Empirical and theoretical research suggest that users often lack enough information to make privacy-sensitive decisions and, even with sufficient information, are likely to trade-off long-term privacy for short-term benefits," says author Jingquan Li, an associate professor of computer information systems with the Texas A&M University-San Antonio's school of business. "Users' online practices are also constrained by their degree of digital literacy and by the technical design of the website, which may impede easy management of settings and consent regarding the use and disclosure of personal data."
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Bryant backs The Big EPR Debate
17 April 2013
Beverley Bryant, NHS England’s director of strategic systems and technology, has given her support to EHI’s Big EPR Debate.
“It will be helpful because I want to be more consultative – not just to funnel stuff down from the centre - and this will help achieve that,” she said.
EHI has launched The Big EPR Debate now because the NHS is once again being urged to implement electronic patient records on a tight timescale.
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Viewing medical history through HIE reduces readmissions
April 18, 2013 | By Susan D. Hall
Emergency room access to a patient's medical history compiled through health information exchange reduced both readmissions and single-day admissions in a study from Israel.
The study tracked whether ED physicians looked at patient medical histories after an information system was installed linking the state-run HMO's seven hospital and various clinics. Data on patients covered by the HMO would be compiled from these various sources, presumably offering a more complete picture. Other patients' data would be limited to that from the facility where they were being treated.
Only 31.2 percent of ED physicians accessed the medical histories at all, according to the study published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. The study looked at seven-day readmissions and single-day admissions for frequent diagnoses: chest pain, abdominal pain, gastroenteritis, urinary tract infection (UTI) and pneumonia organism.
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Healthcare execs reliant on IT now more than ever
April 18, 2013 | By Ashley Gold
Healthcare executives are becoming more and more reliant on healthcare technology, according to new research from The Economist and RICOH Europe.
Of 432 healthcare executives who responded to the publication's survey, close to 93 percent percent said that they've become more reliant on technology and they're positive about the impact it's having on the industry. Roughly 70 percent said the increased use of technology has increased employees' creativity, while 65 percent agreed there is even more room for efficiency gains
Still, 35 percent of respondents admitted that a computer-automated decision has cost their organization money recently. An accompanying infographic highlights the numbers.
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Kinsa launches a smartphone-connected thermometer to create a real-time health map
Summary:
New York-based Kinsa is trying to create a real-time picture of the country’s health with a smartphone and a simplified digital thermometer.
If you want a real-time picture of the country’s health, you can check out Google Flu Trends or insights from social media. And if you want a more official perspective, you can turn to the Centers for Disease Control. But getting information that is both real-time and accurate is tricky business.
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Feds say big data rewards 3 years away
By Tom Sullivan, Editor
Despite all the attention, the catchphrase big data is lacking any kind of a clear definition.
The TechAmerica Foundation last October put together its take and on Monday MeriTalk posted the results of its research into the matter, which involved polling 17 “big data big brains” in the federal government and industry on what exactly big data is, what agencies are doing with it today, and what obstacles remain.
“Most of the respondents shared the view of Big Data as the point at which the traditional data management tools and practices no longer apply,” the Meritalk report explained.
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Thursday, April 18, 2013
mHealth Regulation Under the Spotlight on Capitol Hill
by David Collins and Tom Martin
The March House Energy and Commerce hearings on mobile health regulation provided insight into the attention that the mHealth space is garnering on Capitol Hill.
Major topics included the effect of mHealth on health care costs, interoperability of EHRs, the role of FDA in maintaining patient safety and the applicability of the medical device excise tax on tablets and smartphones. The mHIMSS work groups provided an early review of the draft regulations when they were released more than a year ago.
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Contest seeks new big data strategies
By Mike Miliard, Managing Editor
Created 04/17/2013
The Bipartisan Policy Center, Heritage Provider Network and The Advisory Board Company announced Tuesday the launch the Care Transformation Prize Series, a nationwide contest to find ways to more effectively deploy big data in healthcare.
As U.S. healthcare organizations grapple with big changes to care delivery and payment reform, the contest seeks to uncover more effectively use data to drive improvements in healthcare cost and quality, officials say.
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Cost reminders via CPOE lead to fewer test orders
April 17, 2013 | By Susan D. Hall
Displaying the cost of a test via computerized provider order entry systems prompted a 9 percent reduction in the number of tests ordered, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The study compared the number of tests ordered over six months when the CPOE system at Johns Hopkins Hospital displayed the cost of 61 tests to a six-month baseline when costs were not presented. Meanwhile, 6 percent more tests were ordered when cost information was not presented, according to a MedPage Today article.
"Displaying the Medicare allowable fees of diagnostic tests at the time of ordering can modestly affect provider ordering behavior," the study's authors wrote. "Whether broadening this intervention and coupling it with educational interventions related to cost consciousness and stewardship of resources will increase its effect on clinical practice deserves further study, provided that providers are not inappropriately incentivized to limit needed care."
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Hagel promises plan in 30 days for DOD-VA health records sharing
Stars and Stripes
Published: April 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — Faced with tough questions from legislators, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Tuesday said he would decide on a plan within 30 days to work through the tangled process to seamlessly share medical records between the Department of Defense and the VA.
At a hearing with members of the House Appropriations Committee, Hagel admitted the process has bogged down, and promised quick action.
“I’m going to acknowledge that we’re way behind,” said Hagel, who took over as defense secretary in February, and previously served as an official at the VA in the 1980s. “We will do better.”
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Hagel on iEHR: 'I didn't think we knew what the hell we were doing'
April 17, 2013 | By Dan Bowman
Secretary for the U.S. Department of Defense Chuck Hagel said Tuesday that lack of understanding regarding the creation of a joint electronic health record system with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs led him to block DoD from issuing a request for proposals last month, Federal News Radio reports.
Hagel, speaking at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, said that while not all of the money that has been poured into the project has been wasted, the DoD must do better. He said that he has ordered a restructuring of the process that will include "direct management oversight" by his office, according to the article.
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GOP Senators: HITECH Program Needs to be Rebooted
April 16, 2013 by Gabriel Perna
Six Republican Senators have released a whitepaper that argues Congress and the Obama administration need to reboot the Health Information Technology and Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the efforts to deploy health IT, because the current program is deficient.
The whitepaper, “REBOOT: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT,” is the work of Senators John Thune (R-S.D.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.). The Senators say the failed implementation of health IT through HITECH can be summed up in five points:
- Lack of Clear Path Toward Interoperability
- Increased Costs
- Lack of Oversight
- Patient Privacy at Risk
- Program Sustainability
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4 questions on HIT in America vs. the rest of the world
By Tom Sullivan, Editor
Among America’s dichotomies: The country is widely-viewed as a leader in IT, yet the healthcare industry is notoriously perceived as lagging others in tech adoption. But is it really?
To find out, Government Health IT Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with David Lareau, who as CEO of health IT vendor Medicomp Systems, travels the globe and meets with healthcare customers in other nations.
Q: What is the health IT landscape in other countries like right now?
A: We’re involved in Malaysia and it has the closest thing to what I’d call the Balkanized healthcare system where every enterprise is its own country with its own clinical data definitions. What is it about every one of our hospitals that makes them think they are such a unique and exciting experience that they need to define their own clinical data? And when I see that it drives me crazy, but when you go to other countries, like Malaysia where there are more chains of hospitals, each one reinvents this stuff time and time again. Remember a few years ago when the big, big thing in our industry everybody was talking about was interoperability?
A: We’re involved in Malaysia and it has the closest thing to what I’d call the Balkanized healthcare system where every enterprise is its own country with its own clinical data definitions. What is it about every one of our hospitals that makes them think they are such a unique and exciting experience that they need to define their own clinical data? And when I see that it drives me crazy, but when you go to other countries, like Malaysia where there are more chains of hospitals, each one reinvents this stuff time and time again. Remember a few years ago when the big, big thing in our industry everybody was talking about was interoperability?
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6 ways to avoid breaches
By Diana Manos, Senior Editor
Created 04/16/2013
Healthcare organizations should not assume that compliance with regulations, like HIPAA, automatically makes their organization secure, says Larry Hurtado, CEO of Digital Defense, a risk assessment firm in San Antonio, Texas.
“Organizations need a blended approach,” Hurtado says. “They need to balance out compliance with security.”
More than a decade ago, Digital Defense “cut its teeth” on providing security audits to financial institutions, but these days, the company has clients across all types of industries, including healthcare.
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Social media key in enabling quick provider response to Boston bombings
April 16, 2013 | By Dan Bowman
In the wake of two explosions that rocked downtown Boston at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, technology and social media played a critical role in the coordination of care efforts.
John Halamka (right), CIO at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and FierceHealthIT Editorial Advisory Board member, told FierceHealthIT that from his perspective, maintaining a high bandwidth was key for employees at his hospital in keeping care efforts as fluent as possible, as was a reliable and secure infrastructure.
"The demand for communication--voice, email, social media and streaming video--was very high," Halamka said. "The scalability built into the design of all our systems--networks, servers, storage and client devices--served us well."
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Boston Marathon tragedy reveals potential EHR, HIE flaws
April 18, 2013 | By Marla Durben Hirsch
The Boston hospitals that have been treating the hundreds of victims of the horrific Boston marathon bombings this week have done a terrific job. They, in turn, have credited technology in helping them communicate to staff, volunteers and the public. I presume that these hospitals also have good electronic health record systems that they can rely on.
But I can't help but wonder: wouldn't their work have been enhanced even further and their jobs made easier if the nation was further along in health IT and interoperability? Would it have helped these hospitals if they had had electronic access to victims as they were rushed in, to know about an allergy to penicillin, a patient's blood type, a heart condition that could affect the outcome of surgery?
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IT key for Boston bombing patients
By Bernie Monegain, Editor
Created 04/17/2013
As a Bostonian and an emergency physician, Jonathan Teich's first instinct when the explosions shook the Boston Marathon on April 15 ordinarily would have been to rush to Brigham & Women’s Hospital to help treat the victims, many of whom had life-threatening injuries.
But this Patriot’s Day, it was different. Teich’s son and brother-in-law were both running the marathon. His brother-in-law crossed the finish line at the time of the second explosion – unhurt. Teich’s son, just a couple of miles back, was among the runners diverted off course. So an anxious Teich waited for that first text message saying he was OK. It would be two hours, though, before father and son were reunited.
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Are eICUs as efficient as some studies portray?
April 16, 2013 | By Susan D. Hall
While remote monitoring of intensive care units promises to stretch the skills of an inadequate pool of specialists, a recent New York Times article questions whether eICUs actually improve care for patients or the bottom line for hospitals.
According to the article, while some studies linked to companies that sell such systems have produced large declines in mortality in addition to huge return on investment, other independent studies have found just the opposite in terms of the latter, with no significant impact on survival rates, complications or length of stay.
What's more, some hospitals adopted the technology, then ditched it, according to the Times, including NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Kaleida Health in Buffalo, as well as hospital systems in Michigan, Texas and Kentucky.
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Another view: Neil Paul
EHI Primary Care’s columnist is not sure about giving patients online access to their notes; although he has lots of other ideas for helping them digitally.
16 April 2013
The government is having another push on making sure that patients can get access to their GP-held records. In fact, one of the few, definite, commitments that has made on the NHS IT front is that patients should have online access by 2015.
Yet, I’m not convinced that this is something that people really want; even though there may be some benefits when we get around to implementing the idea that have not been discussed yet.
Why aren’t doctors keen?
Most of the doctors I speak with don’t have an intrinsic problem with patients seeing their notes; they just don’t feel it’s a high priority or that it’s going to help more than it hinders.
Their main fear is that they will have to spend time dealing with the minority that hassle them about trivial inaccuracies: “I said the pain was six hours not five”; “the scar is two centimetres above my left knee not three.”
In the same vein, a number worry that some patients will want every medical term explaining. However, I know of companies that are trying to make front-ends to the patient record that make understanding easier, while providing links to existing sources of further information.
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Caldicott recommends 'duty to share'
11 April 2013 Lis Evenstad
The Caldicott2 review of information governance in the NHS recommends a new duty to share information when it is in the interest of the patient.
'Information: to share or not to share' will be launched on 17 April alongside health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s response to the recommendations.
It details how the NHS should share patient information while also protecting patient confidentiality as it moves towards a paperless future.
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4 Steps to Engage Patients While Meeting Meaningful Use Requirements
April 12, 2013
The focus on engaging patients in their care and the need to meet meaningful use requirements converge in one online tool: the patient portal. Patient portals on a health system's website can allow patient to easily schedule appointments, contact their provider and access other resources, which engages them in their care. These portals also help hospitals and physicians fulfill meaningful use stage 2 requirements of providing patients the ability to view their health information online and using electronic health records to identify patient-specific education resources.
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Lab Tech Standards, With Benefits
Scott Mace, for HealthLeaders Media , April 16, 2013
Is your laboratory thinking about Meaningful Use yet? In all the hubbub over ONC's mammoth incentive program (and the penalties that follow in a few short years if you don't get on board), technology changes affecting every medical lab will provide their own benefits to healthcare's bottom line.
It's been a long time coming.
As far back as the 1960s, it was already understood that a standardized vocabulary for the multitude of lab tests performed in this country was lacking. Those lab tests now amount to about 30-billion-per-year.
While the industry argues about which version of ICD to agree upon in the diagnostic code area, and just how we would get physicians to agree upon these diagnosis codes, information about lab tests were always more amenable to being digitized. A serum sodium test is a serum sodium test, and once a lab test standard exists, there's no reason not to bake it right into the diagnostic equipment itself.
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4 ways health IT can build trust
By Benjamin Harris, New Media Producer, Healthcare IT News
Created 04/04/2013
Medicine is a two-way street; it works best when the patient and the provider trust each other, and can work together for the best outcome. While technology can enable those outcomes, when improperly used -- consider the epidemic of patient data breaches -- it can also raise some eyebrows and scare some people away from embracing it. Scott Zimmerman, president at TeleVox Software, understands these concerns. But he sees technology offering a net gain on the road to improving patien-physician relationships and enhancing trust. He shares four ways health IT can improve the quality of care and enhance trust between the patient and the provider.
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E-prescribing in growth mode
By Bernie Monegain, Editor
Created 04/15/2013
The electronic prescribing systems market is estimated to grow to $794 million, at a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent from 2012 to 2017, according to a new study by MarketsandMarkets, which analyzed the major market drivers, restraints and opportunities around the world.
In the U.S., the HITECH Act designates e-prescribing as an essential requirement for meaningful use under the electronic health record incentive programs, thus driving the adoption of electronic prescribing systems, the report found. According to findings, costs can be reduced with the use of eRx systems as these help to improve quality and efficiency and show promise in reducing costs by actively promoting appropriate drug usage; providing information to providers and dispensers about formulary-based drug coverage, including formulary alternatives and co-pay information; and speeding up the process of renewing medications.
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The Big Data Revolution: Part 2
APR 12, 2013 4:16pm ET
Last week’s blog introduced a new book, “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How Live, Work and Think,” that I like a lot. Starting from the current obsession with datafication – “taking information about all things under the sun…and transforming it into a data format to make it quantified” – Big Data identifies three major developments, incredibly large data sets, acceptance of messy data, and a tolerance for correlation in lieu of causation, as drivers of the revolution. From Big Data’s perspective, the business and social implications of these shifts are substantial.
The value of data is evolving. Historically seen as ancillary, “in the age of big data, all data will be regarded as valuable, in and of itself.” Indeed, “data’s value needs to be considered in terms of all possible ways it can be deployed in the future, not simply how it is used in the present …Ultimately, the value of data is what one can gain from all the possible ways it can be deployed.” The “option value” of data is the sum of those possibilities.
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CDS can make best-practices guidelines more accessible
April 15, 2013 | By Susan D. Hall
Electronic health records offer the opportunity to better integrate clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) at the point of care, but the technology and physician practice must evolve, according to a paper published at BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.
Just sending out more reminders to physicians won't do the trick, researchers say. At this point, most information about best practices is "parked" in lengthy documents or graphics, such as decision trees, that are too cumbersome for physicians to parse during a patient encounter.
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Researchers call for national standards for genomic data use
April 15, 2013 | By Ashley Gold
Better standards are needed for how discoveries in genomic medicine are found and recorded as health information technology develops, according to researchers from Harvard and the Mayo Clinic who published a viewpoint in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week.
Advances in genomic medicine, the researchers said, have lead patients and providers to be able to expect large improvements in healthcare effectiveness by 2020. However, institutions must be ready to incorporate "exponentially" larger volumes of genomic, medical, ethical and legal information into electronic health records, which already are fragmented, they added.
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Healthcare firms struggle with IT staffing: survey
Posted: April 12, 2013 - 11:45 am ET
Many U.S. healthcare companies—about 67%—report that they're struggling to attract experienced information technology workers, according to a survey.
That's compared with 10% that said they have problems attracting all workers, according to the Towers Watson 2013 Healthcare IT Survey (PDF). Meanwhile, 38% of healthcare companies reported problems with retaining experienced IT workers, compared with 8% reporting problems retaining all types of workers.
The problems may stem from misconceptions about what attracts employees to a healthcare workplace.
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Monday, April 15, 2013
Efforts Seek To Improve Drug-Drug Interaction Alert Tools
by Bonnie Darves, iHealthBeat Contributing Reporter
In the realm evolving at the intersection of electronic health records and technology-enabled clinical decision support, few issues have gotten as much attention -- in the negative category that is -- as the pesky problem of electronic alert fatigue resulting from what some view as hyper-vigilant drug-drug interaction (DDI) alert systems.
Although the growing use of computer-accessible knowledge databases that flag potentially dangerous DDIs at or before the point of prescribing have been a boon to medication safety improvement overall, a serious downside has emerged. The alerts are so numerous and, in many cases, also either very low priority or irrelevant that clinicians are increasingly overriding or ignoring them -- which might result in important, pertinent alerts being missed. Recent studies have found override rates as high as 95%.
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Enjoy!
David.
