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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Period-Tracking Apps Are Monetizing Women’s Extremely Personal Data
More than 100 million women monitor their cycles on their phones. Here come the ads.
Naomi Kresge, Ilya Khrennikov and David Ramli
Sarah Martin, a Berlin-based aid worker who specializes in women’s issues, used to track her periods in the same paper planner where she wrote down her work appointments. Sometimes she’d also draw a little heart for the days she’d had sex. Nowadays she uses a smartphone app to track her cycle, because “the app feels more private and discreet,” she says, even though she realizes it’s probably not.
Martin is one of more than 100 million women around the world who each month use free menstruation-tracking apps with such names as Flo, Glow, Ovia, and Clue, and may want to be warier about that. Some women use these apps to help them get pregnant or avoid pregnancy; others simply to get a better handle on what their bodies are doing. In any case, the apps have built in a wide variety of other health-tracking features, too, and most are widening their use of the data they collect to make money, betting they’ll be able to build business models off this extremely sensitive data.
Apps don’t have to meet the privacy standards of, say, doctors or hospitals. They also aren’t always right. See Natural Cycles, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved app that drew criticism last year after women in Sweden reported unwanted pregnancies while using it. Swedish health regulators asked the company to more clearly disclaim that it doesn’t promise 100 percent accuracy.
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Startup 98point6 reveals nationwide availability of on-demand primary care app
In October, the Seattle-based company completed a $50 million Series C round led by the Merchant Banking Division of Goldman Sachs.
Post a comment / Jan 24, 2019 at 4:39 PM
98point6, a Seattle-based startup, has announced its on-demand primary care platform is available in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., according to a news release sent to MedCity. The company also posted the announcement on Twitter:
Here at 98point6, our mission is to bring affordable and accessible primary care to everyone. Today, we’re excited to share that we are one step closer to our goal, by announcing that 98point6 is now available in all 50 U.S. states plus D.C. pic.twitter.com/7vJhQkoiJS
— 98point6 Inc. (@98point6Inc) January 22, 2019
The company was founded in 2015 and officially launched its platform last year.
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Gene test for sale on NHS
Healthy patients to learn risk of killer diseases
Chris Smyth, Health Editor
The NHS is to charge healthy people to map their genetic code under controversial plans to amass data on millions of Britons.
Ministers are to compete in the fast-growing market for DNA testing by offering to sequence a person’s whole genome for an estimated few hundred pounds.
The test promises to predict the risk of cancer, dementia and other diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It is offered free to seriously ill patients but the government intends to open the scheme to paying customers within a year. Each will receive a personalised health report but will have to share their genetic data with researchers in the hope that it will improve understanding of diseases.
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Machine learning shows promise in optimizing ICU blood tests
Published January 25 2019, 7:33am EST
A computational approach has the potential to help clinicians in intensive care units make better decisions about ordering common blood tests.
Results of their study, presented earlier this month at the 2019 Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, showed that using a machine learning algorithm developed by Princeton University researchers could have reduced the number of lab orders for white blood cell tests by as much as 44 percent.
In addition, researchers demonstrated that their approach would have helped inform clinicians to intervene sometimes hours sooner when a patient’s condition began to deteriorate.
“With the lab test ordering policy that this method developed, we were able to order labs to determine that the patient’s health had degraded enough to need treatment, on average, four hours before the clinician actually initiated treatment based on clinician ordered labs,” says Barbara Engelhardt, senior author of the study and associate professor of computer science at Princeton.
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Why hospitals' future will involve keeping people from showing up
Published January 25 2019, 4:47pm EST
The biggest challenge hospital operators face is how to keep people from showing up in the first place.
That’s the perspective of healthcare experts who spoke on healthcare at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Smartphones, wearable devices, along with time-honored anti-smoking and nutrition approaches are key to keeping hospitals from providing excess, unnecessary care while focusing on the most vulnerable populations, a panel of executives at the event said.
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HIT Think 6 trends that will drive AI deployments in 2019
Published January 25 2019, 4:40pm EST
Artificial intelligence is poised to break out of the hype cycle and become an important element in strategic business planning.
A lot has been written about AI over the last year, but much of what has been offered for public consumption has been superficial and, in some cases, misleading.
AI is neither a simple panacea poised to solve all our business problems, nor is it a looming evil ready to usher in a dystopian future. It is a powerful tool that can aid decision making in a fast-moving, digital business climate--and there’s ample evidence that it’s already happening.
As machine learning practitioners who have spent the better part of their careers involved with AI and machine learning, here is a look into the future of AI. Those insights and our own experiences have informed a brief forecast for where and how we’re likely to see this technology make meaningful inroads in the year ahead.
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Interoperability – Advisory Series, January 2019
By Maja Dragovic – Digital Health
Data sharing between primary and secondary care has long been a digital challenge for the NHS. But with Matt Hancock focusing his attention on resolving the problem and a new national programme underway, is a corner about to be turned? Maja Dragovic finds out.
Ask Phil Koczan to sum up where things stand on interoperability between primary and secondary care, and he speaks of a “transition phase”.
A practising GP for more than 20 years – and now also clinical director for health and care at the Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) – Koczan has been around for various national pushes on data sharing between the two sectors.
Jeremy Hunt went as far as to visit specific GP suppliers to urge them to improve the data sharing of their systems. His successor as secretary of state for health and social care, Matt Hancock, has also singled out interoperability between primary and secondary care as a real problem.
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DirectTrust Touts 2018 Growth in Data Exchange Volume, Participants
January 23, 2019
by Rajiv Leventhal, Managing Editor
DirectTrust, a nonprofit organization that supports health information exchange via the Direct message protocols, has announced continued steady growth in the number of healthcare organizations using its interoperability services during 2018.
The organization also noted an upsurge in the number of Direct message transactions, patient use, and addresses. According to year-end 2018 metrics:
- There were nearly 274 million Direct message transactions between DirectTrust addresses in 2018, a 63-percent increase over the 2017 total of 168 million transactions. There were more than 110 million Direct messages transmitted during the fourth quarter of 2018 alone.
- The number of patients/consumers involved using Direct increased approximately 35 percent to nearly 248,000.
- The number of healthcare organizations served by DirectTrust accredited health information service providers (HISPs) increased 30 percent to nearly 139,000, compared with approximately 107,000 at year-end 2017.
- The number of trusted DirectTrust addresses able to share PHI across the DirectTrust network increased 16 percent to more than 1.8 million since the end of 2017.
- Eleven healthcare organizations joined DirectTrust during 2018, bringing the organization’s total membership to 115.
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Artificial Intelligence System Can Triage Chest Radiographs
Average reporting delay reduced from 11.2 to 2.7 days for critical image findings in simulation
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 23, 2019 (HealthDay News) -- An artificial intelligence (AI) system based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) can accurately detect normal chest radiographs, according to a study published online Jan. 22 in Radiology.
Mauro Annarumma, from King's College London, and colleagues developed an AI system based on 470,388 fully anonymized institutional adult chest radiographs acquired from 2007 to 2017. The free-text report was analyzed using a natural language processing system to prioritize each radiograph as critical, urgent, nonurgent, or normal. Using labeled radiographs, an AI system for computer vision using an ensemble of two deep CNNs was trained to predict the clinical priority from radiologic appearances only. The system's performance was tested using an independent set of 15,887 radiographs.
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EHR Demographic Data Standards Could Improve Patient Matching
Implementing standards for demographic data in EHRs could improve patient matching among providers.
By Jessica Kent
January 23, 2019 - Healthcare organizations should work to adopt more standardized methods of inputting demographic data into the EHR to ensure accurate patient matching, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
While matching patient records is an essential component of coordinated, effective care, many entities still struggle to accurately match patients to their health data, especially when exchanging this information among providers from different organizations. In fact, GAO cited a 2014 study which found that only half of records are accurately matched when organizations exchange information.
“Accurate record matching can help ensure that providers have current information about patients’ laboratory or other diagnostic test results; their medications; their diagnosed medical conditions, such as allergies; and their family medical histories,” GAO said in its report.
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6 Keys to Hospital Interoperability
Hospital stakeholders call for accelerating 'truly interoperable system' that advances best practices while ensuring accuracy, standardization, accessibility and security.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Standardization seen as key to minimizing proprietary solutions and gatekeeping.
· Interoperability means that data must be readily available anywhere, at any time and in a usable format.
· Data sharing networks must support population health, social determinants of health, and remote monitoring of patient-generated data.
The nation's seven largest national hospital associations have released a report urging all stakeholders to accelerate interoperability.
"We see interoperability in action all around us. Mobile phones can call each other regardless of make, model, or operating system," said American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack.
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Tool cuts wait times at pediatric hospital’s after-hours clinics
Published January 24 2019, 7:38am EST
Parents looking to bring sick children to one of five pediatric after-hours clinics run by Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt are leveraging online scheduling to avoid long waits.
In fact, the software has cut in half the waiting times at Children’s Hospital’s five after-hours locations.
The tool, called Skip the Wait from patient engagement vendor Clockwise.MD, enables parents to view estimated wait times at the clinics to help them determine the best scheduling options.
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Pop health yielding results, but efforts face rising complexity
By Fred Bazzoli
Published January 24 2019, 7:15am EST
To a degree, population health management doesn’t have the wow factor possessed by many of the hot technologies grabbing the attention of information executives.
Let’s face it—things like blockchain technology, precision medicine, artificial intelligence and machine learning—get a lot of attention. Over time, these approaches—and the IT to support them—hold significant promise to improve healthcare delivery.
But even without the big headlines, population health is quietly yielding positive results for providers. Health systems are becoming increasingly adept at using population health initiatives to segment patients into groups and then define care processes tailored to each group. They also are also coordinating care across healthcare settings, teaching patients how to manage their health effectively, and helping chronically ill patients avoid high-cost ER visits and hospital stays.
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HITRUST builds GDPR into its data protection framework
The organization is broadening into a single assessment tool for varying regulations around the world.
By Diana Manos
January 24, 2019 02:40 PM
HITRUST announced that it is expanding its framework to include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Singapore Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) requirements and pulling them into what it described as a global 'one framework, one assessment' model.
WHY IT MATTERS
"As countries around the world continue to adopt and advance data protection laws, the challenge of doing business on a global scale grows increasingly complex," says Anne Kimbol, chief privacy officer, HITRUST. "Many countries have their own unique regulatory requirements, creating costs and challenges for organizations to determine if they are compliant to conduct business globally."
THE BIGGER TREND
As providers and enterprises wrestle with the complexity of global compliance, the U.S. government is working on integrating risk management across all the aspects of a business.
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As Genetic Testing Blossoms, Companies Search for a Killer App
Color, Invitae are among DNA firms revamping their focus
By Kristen V Brown
January 18, 2019, 9:00 PM GMT+11
Millions of Americans have taken genetic tests to help them learn more about who they are or how sick they could become. In a crowded field of firms selling DNA tests — 10 new products enter the market each day by one estimate — many of the companies are racing to sort out their own identities.
Color Genomics Chief Executive Officer Otham Laraki, a former product manager at Google, likens genetic testing today to the early days of smartphones. When location data came on the scene, he said, everyone thought check-in apps like Foursquare would be a hit. But the killer app turned out to be a completely different use of GPS data: Uber.
“Diagnostics on its own is not going to be the app,’’ said Laraki.
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AHA, FAH urge faster progress on interoperability in new report
by Eli Richman
Jan 23, 2019 8:15am
Seven leading hospital organizations are putting out a call to arms to advance data sharing and interoperability across the healthcare industry.
Data sharing improves care coordination, patient safety, family empowerment, efficiency and cost, the groups wrote in the new report (PDF) released by the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), among others. While health systems have come far with their EHRs in the last decade, those systems are still riddled with barriers to interoperability.
“We see interoperability in action all around us. Mobile phones can call each other regardless of make, model, or operating system," said AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack in a statement. "The hospital field has made good headway, but it’s time to complete the job. We are united in calling for a truly interoperable system that allows all providers and patients to benefit from shared health records and data, leading to fully informed care decisions."
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Oregon bill moves to ban unauthorized sale of deidentified data
by Eli Richman |
Jan 22, 2019 12:01am
A new bill under consideration in Oregon would move one step closer to treating personal data as property.
And while the measure would surely pull patients further into the data sharing process, it also has the potential to inhibit the flow of clinical data to researchers. This could stymie precision medicine efforts and other research that relies on large quantities of data.
The Health Information Property Act, to be introduced on Wednesday, would put restrictions on the sale of deidentified health data. When they're being sold to business associates, like data brokers, those entities must first obtain the authorization of the patients in the data sets.
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Oregon may give individuals control over health data
Published January 24 2019, 5:56pm EST
Proposed legislation in Oregon would ban the unauthorized sale of de-identified healthcare data and enable individuals to have control over their information.
Passage of The Health Information Property Act in Oregon would be a fundamental shift in intellectual property law, says Michael DePalma, founder, co-president and chief operating officer at Hu-manity.co, a data privacy firm that markets an app to enable individuals to claim their data as their property.
“Your healthcare data is property, and it’s your property,” he contends. “Chances of passage in liberal Oregon are excellent. This is a human issue. This is a shift in the value we create every day. This is about quality, fairness and transparency.”
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Survey: Digital, AI Top Priorities in 2019, but EHRs Will Dominate IT Spend
January 22, 2019
by Heather Landi, Associate Editor
Digital, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are top spending priorities for healthcare executives in 2019, but electronic health record (EHR) systems will dominate technology spending budgets, according to a recent technology-focused healthcare survey.
Damo Consulting, a Chicago-based healthcare growth and digital transformation advisory firm, surveyed technology and service provider executives and healthcare enterprise executives about how the demand environment for healthcare IT is changing and will impact the industry in the coming year. Damo Consulting’s third annual Healthcare IT Demand Survey also analyzes the challenges for healthcare organizations and the perceived impact of macro-level changes.
The report indicates technology vendors will continue to struggle with long sales cycles as they aggressively market digital and AI. For the second year in a row, the rise of non-traditional players such as Amazon and Google will have a strong impact on the competitive environment among technology vendors while EHR vendors grow in dominance.
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Hospital groups set forth health IT interoperability agenda
Published January 23 2019, 7:26am EST
Seven national hospital associations are joining to help the healthcare industry to achieve the promise of fully interoperable health information.
While progress is being made in the sharing of health data, the hospital groups contend that the current state of interoperability is still a “patchwork system” that is “working well in some but not all settings” and requires healthcare stakeholder support to succeed nationwide.
“The hospital field has made good headway, but it’s time to complete the job,” says Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association. “We are united in calling for a truly interoperable system that allows all providers and patients to benefit from shared health records and data, leading to fully informed care decisions.”
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Google begins to stake out its place in healthcare
By Linda Wilson
Published January 23 2019, 7:32am EST
It’s no secret that Alphabet is knee deep in healthcare projects.
Through acquisitions, new hires, partnerships and research efforts, Alphabet, parent company of Google, is using its expertise to organize and analyze enormous volumes of healthcare data.
In mid-November, DeepMind—a London-based Alphabet company focused on AI research— handed off its health team to a newly formed Google division, called Google Health. Former Geisinger President and CEO David Feinberg, MD, is overseeing the new division of Google which he officially joined this month.
Feinberg also will collaborate with leaders at other Alphabet companies working in healthcare, such as Verily Life Sciences, Jeff Dean, senior fellow at Google, explained on Twitter.
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HIT Think Why HIPAA enforcement leads to confusion, dissatisfaction
Published January 23 2019, 4:58pm EST
Compliance with HIPAA and the attendant privacy and security requirements is a frequent topic and still a big worry in the industry. Discussions around compliance are driven by the daily reporting of breaches and the probably more than daily issues faced by patients, clinicians and others when HIPAA is misinterpreted.
In that face of all of these issues, there are not many options to turn to in order to obtain redress. Unless state law offers some alternative, HIPAA permits filing a complaint with an organization’s privacy officer, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) or the applicable attorney general. With those options, those making complaints may then feel like these filings feel like they’re disappearing into a black hole.
Complaints are not just dismissed, however. Many thousands result in some form of action, most often by OCR. The typical response from OCR is to send an investigative demand, usually by asking for documentation, to the organization in question, reviewing the responses, and then offering technical or other similar advice to address the situation. Following that resolution, OCR will notify the complainant about that general action taken.
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Consumers don’t fully trust healthcare chatbots, study finds
A new report from UserTesting reveals how 500 consumers evaluated the following five healthcare chatbot apps: Ada, HealthTap, Mediktor, Your.MD and Symptomate.
Jan 21, 2019 at 12:00 PM
A new report from UserTesting, a company offering an on-demand human insight platform, found healthcare chatbots aren’t quite meeting users’ expectations, particularly when it comes to trust, handling complex conditions and usability.
UserTesting ran a study of five healthcare chatbot apps: Ada, HealthTap, Mediktor, Your.MD and Symptomate.
Five hundred consumers evaluated the apps on ease of use, speed, credibility, aesthetics and delight. Participants were given a list of symptoms for the common cold and for food poisoning. They were asked to use the apps to get a diagnosis, then answer a list of questions about their experience.
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Survey: Container security is a growing concern for IT professionals
by Mike Robuck
Jan 18, 2019 9:30am
It's not surprising that 60% of the IT security professionals in a recent survey have experienced security incidents with their container usage over the past year.
But it is somewhat surprising 47% of those security professionals who manage environments with containers responded that they did deploy containers with known vulnerabilities. Maybe the promise of containers is too tempting for some IT professionals to resist. And a majority of them don't have the same IT resources as a large telco.
Tripwire, along with Dimensional Research, conducted a survey of 311 IT security professionals that manage environments with containers with a head count of more than 100 employees. The November survey also found that 94% of the respondents acknowledged they had concerns about container security.
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4 Cybersecurity Threats Healthcare Organizations Need to Watch Out for in 2019
From cryptomining to bad passwords, there are a lot of threats lurking around the healthcare sector this year.
by Juliet Van Wagenen
With the new year comes new viruses threatening healthcare systems. HIMSS’ latest monthly Healthcare and Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Report, unveiled just before the new year, laid out several threats that providers everywhere should be keeping an eye on as they seek to shore up cyberdefenses.
1. Kubernetes Hole Exploits May Appear
Pointing to a recent advisory from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, providers should beware of a possible Kubernetes hole in earlier versions.
NIST warns:
In all Kubernetes versions prior to v1.10.11, v1.11.5, and v1.12.3, incorrect handling of error responses to proxied upgrade requests in the kube-apiserver allowed specially crafted requests to establish a connection through the Kubernetes API server to backend servers, then send arbitrary requests over the same connection directly to the backend, authenticated with the Kubernetes API server's TLS credentials used to establish the backend connection.
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Providers begin using AI to improve clinical decision making
By Fred Bazzoli
Published January 22 2019, 7:10am EST
Healthcare organizations across the country are beginning to cash in on early efforts in artificial intelligence and data visualization.
First reports on initial efforts to use these advanced technologies show tantalizing potential.
- At Massachusetts General Hospital researchers have developed an AI algorithm to rapidly diagnose and classify brain hemorrhages from unenhanced computed tomography scans, detecting acute incidents and offering prediction capabilities that eventually could help staff in hospital emergency departments evaluate patients with acute stroke symptoms.
- Researchers led by Boston Children’s Hospital are using AI in combination with two forecasting methods to produce what they call the most accurate estimates of flu activity to date—a week ahead of traditional healthcare-based reports, at the state level across the United States. That could help providers get ahead of resource demands and better respond to current influenza trends.
- HCA Healthcare, a Nashville, Tenn.‐based chain operating hospitals nationwide, estimates it has saved more than 5,500 lives using sepsis algorithms that monitor every patient in every hospital that’s been part of the health system for more than a year. The algorithmic system is getting impressive results in combating this life-threatening condition that is the ninth leading cause of death in U.S. hospitals.
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https://www.healthdatamanagement.com/opinion/the-5-top-trends-for-data-governance-strategies-in-2019
HIT Think The 5 top trends for data governance strategies in 2019
Published January 22 2019, 6:23pm EST
Technology has propelled the growth of data-based systems and operations over the past decade, especially due to the emergence of IoT, mobile, big data and analytics, AI and machine learning, and even cloud computing.
As a result, organizations and enterprises are constantly looking to improve their existing processes and update solutions to satisfy customer demand and more competitive practices.
Of course, at the heart of all things data-oriented is the concept of data governance, which calls for proper protocols for data collection, storage, management, security and processing.
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Top News
Medicare patient readmissions within 30 days dropped sharply after CMS started penalizing hospitals financially, but the death rate appears to have increased during the same period. That raises questions over whether the lower readmission rate was created by hospitals turning away older patients with a legitimate medical need just to avoid paying penalties.
The 20-percent readmission rate turned sharply down within weeks of the penalty’s implementation (which raises eyebrows of how that happened so quickly), but a Health Affairs study attributes at least half the decline to Medicare’s simultaneous expansion of billing forms to include up to 25 diagnoses instead of the previous nine.
The corrected readmission rate reduction was 1.3 percent, about the same as reported by hospitals that were exempt from the penalties. More patients who had been admitted for heart failure and pneumonia died, however.
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The NHS long-term plan: Digital ambitions
Dr. Saif Abed, founding partner of health IT consultancy AbedGraham, looks at the new 10-year plan for the National Health Service in England.
January 22, 2019 09:02 AM
Every time a plan is published for the NHS, the health IT community holds its collective breath for a moment as it waits to see how its digital fortunes will fare. Fortunately, on this occasion a plan has been published with the backing of a health secretary that few could argue is not profoundly embracing technology. However, amidst the collective sigh of relief, we have to probe more closely about the key themes that have emerged and what they mean in practice.
For me, there were three elements that jumped out in the plan that are clearly related to one another – access, interoperability and security. These are not new themes but they have definitely gathered steam in the last 18 months. For example, telemedicine has been around for a generation, but it is only now that providers of app-based video consultation services seem to be gaining traction within the NHS, albeit not without controversy.
Meanwhile, interoperability has been a raging issue between healthcare providers and vendors so much so that the government has stepped in to support the development of regional Local Health and Care Record Exemplars (LHCREs). Finally, cybersecurity has continued, with good reason, to be a part of the conversation at all levels, and the NHS has actually made great strides in improving its risk posture in a way that is actually enviable for other health systems. That, perhaps, is the silver lining that came from WannaCry.
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3 Ways Queen's Health Systems Conquers EHR Navigation Issues With One Simple Tool
An electronic EHR 'ribbon' provides one-click access to data and reduces certain costs by 14%.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Access to cost information reduced direct medication, lab, and radiology costs by 14%.
· No physician training was required.
· A simple tool in the EHR enables physicians to quickly adhere to controlled substance mandates.
What if it a simple one-click solution existed that enabled hospitals to reduce certain costs by 14%, ensured compliance with narcotics prescription mandates, informed physicians of coding gaps, and notified the doctor if a patient was due for a test?
In an era of complex electronic health records (EHR) that are sometimes difficult to navigate, this goal may seem impossible, yet The Queen's Health Systems in Honolulu has achieved all of those objectives and more. The solution? A simple "Smart Ribbon" from IllumiCare that appears on the EHR screen. The graphic floats across the screen, like a toolbar, issues no alerts or warnings, and can be ignored, if desired.
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HITRUST updates program for HIPAA, HITECH compliance assessments
HITRUST, a security standards development and accreditation organization, updated its common security framework, or CSF, assurance program Jan. 15.
The HITRUST CSF Assurance Program delivers simplified compliance assessment and reporting for information protection standards from multiple industries, including healthcare. The program incorporates requirements from relevant regulations, such as HIPAA and the Health IT for Economic and Clinical Health Act, to help organizations and their business associates demonstrate compliance.
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Study: EHRs Contribute to Family Physician Stress, Burnout
January 16, 2019 12:06 pm Michael Devitt – In theory, health information technology is supposed to improve communication among health care professionals, make it easier to access and review patient data, cut through the billing and insurance bureaucracy, and enhance the overall health experience for physicians and patients alike.
But as most family physicians know, what sounds good in theory doesn't always play out that way in the real world. In fact, increasing evidence suggests that use of electronic health records (EHRs)(www.annfammed.org) can take up a significant amount of a family physician's workday, making it more difficult for them to do their jobs and contributing to professional burnout.(medcitynews.com)
A study published online(academic.oup.com) Dec. 5 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association examined the relationship between health IT-related stress and burnout. It found that stress is common among physicians who use EHRs, and that both stress and burnout are especially prevalent among family physicians and others who practice primary care.
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Mobile app for pacemaker patients trims need for monitors
Published January 18 2019, 4:18pm EST
Medtronic is marketing a mobile app for patients with pacemakers that communicates with patients’ smartphones and tablet devices.
The MyCareLink Heart app securely sends device data to the Medtronic CareLink network, which can eliminate the need for remote monitoring hardware, according to the vendor, which manufactures biomedical engineering devices and technology.
“The mobile app is a game-changer for patients with pacemakers,” says James Allred, MD, an electrophysiologist at Cone Health Medical Group in Greensboro, N.C. “The introduction of convenient and secure data transmissions and easy access to information changes how patients track and understand their health.”
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HIT Think The long and winding road to health data exchange
By Brian Ahier
Published January 18 2019, 3:52pm EST
I have been looking back at all of the work accomplished on health data exchange as well as some of the challenges that still remain.
In 2008, most of our healthcare system was still paper-based. Fewer than 10 percent of hospitals had implemented even a basic electronic health records system.
As we can see from the data, provided by the Office of the Nation Coordinator (ONC), a great deal of progress occurred from 2008 to 2015. Of course, much of this was a result of the federal incentives for EHR adoption incorporated in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. The HITECH Act was enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009, to promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology.
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HL7 gives a glimpse of FHIR 5
Organization says 5 will build on FHIR 4 with more normative content, support for apps that use multiple versions of the spec and other advancements.
By Tom Sullivan
January 21, 2019 01:16 PM
Health Level 7 International on Monday offered a peek at its roadmap for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, aka FHIR 5.
WHY IT MATTERS
FHIR is widely viewed as holding great promise for enabling health data sharing among vendors, providers, payers, government, health information exchanges and other entities.
FHIR is widely viewed as holding great promise for enabling health data sharing among vendors, providers, payers, government, health information exchanges and other entities.
THE LARGER TREND
HL7 earlier this month posted the eagerly awaited FHIR 4 iteration — which is the first version of the interoperability specification to be normative.
HL7 earlier this month posted the eagerly awaited FHIR 4 iteration — which is the first version of the interoperability specification to be normative.
That was seen as a milestone for EHR and other software vendors, as well as startups and innovative hospitals looking to implement FHIR can now plan future versions including and beyond FHIR 5 being backward compatible with FHIR 4.
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Weekly News Recap
- Atul Gawande cancels his HIMSS19 keynote without explanation
- 24 hospitals in Ontario invoke downtime procedures after a virus brings down their IT systems
- TV stock pundit Jim Cramer urges Apple to acquire Epic to bolster its sagging business
- Definitive Healthcare acquires HIMSS Analytics
- PerfectServe acquires Telmediq
- Cerner co-founder Cliff Illig retires from the company’s board, which along with Paul Gorup’s 2015 retirement and Neal Patterson’s 2017 death, leaves no founders involved
- Walgreens signs a technology and software development agreement with Microsoft
- The first chief digital officer of NHS England resigns to take a job with a vendor that provides telemedicine services to NHS
- A study of 2018 hospital acquisitions finds that deals are larger, the selling hospitals are usually not experiencing financial distress, and the line between for-profit and not-for-profit health systems is blurring
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Enjoy!
David.
