ONC used data from AHA’s Information Technology survey to assess trends in EHR data use among non-federal acute care hospitals. According to data from AHA, 81 percent of hospitals use EHR data to monitor patient safety, while 77 percent use it to measure organization performance.
Sixty-eight percent of hospitals used EHR data to identify high risk patients, while 67 percent used data to create individual provider profiles.
Overall, 97 percent of hospitals nationwide used EHR data in 2017, compared to 87 percent in 2015.
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Telehealth Device Puts Power of Medical Exam Into Consumer's Hands
Tyto Care digital kit is available through Best Buy and participating health systems.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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The physical divide between telehealth providers and consumers has now been compressed thanks to TytoHome, a handheld device that enables patients to conduct remote exams from their home and transmit the data through a smartphone.
Manufactured by
Tyto Care , the digital kit is now available through
BestBuy.com , as well as from participating health systems, including
Ochsner Health System , based in New Orleans, and
Sanford Health , headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Most kits purchased directly through Best Buy will connect consumers to physicians at
LiveHealth Online , setting up a national caller base for the telehealth provider.
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ONC extends comment period for interoperability rules, updates TEFCA
April 19, 2019 12:12 PM
The extension had been sought by many industry groups, who see the proposed rules as "too important to not get right." Draft two of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement is now also open for comment.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT made interoperability news on several fronts Friday: granting a much-requested 30-day extension for public comments on its proposed data exchange, information blocking and patient access rules and publishing the second draft of its Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement.
WHY IT MATTERS
ONC says the new due date for
public comments , now June 3, will allow additional time for the public to review the proposed rules.
"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and ONC understand that both rules include a range of issues having major effects on healthcare," the agency noted. "The extension of the public comment deadline will maximize the opportunity for meaningful input and further the overall objective to obtain public input on the proposed provisions to move the healthcare ecosystem in the direction of interoperability."
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HHS Extends Comment Period for Interoperability Proposed Rules to June 3
New documents also released for comment along with clarification of liability issue.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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The race toward a key deadline to comment on U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) interoperability proposals has been extended to June 3, according to an announcement made this morning. Concerned parties across the nation were pushing toward the original May 3 deadline, with many, such as the AMA, requesting an extension.
In addition, HHS also shared other important news, inviting public comment on a second draft of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) that will support the full, network-to-network exchange of health information nationally, according to a news release. It also released notice of a funding opportunity to engage a non-profit, industry-based organization that will advance nationwide interoperability.
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Special Report: Diagnostic Digital Pathology
Both NHS staff and vendors say the interest in diagnostic digital pathology is growing. So could this previously larger analogue specialty be about to fully take the digital plunge? Jennifer Trueland investigates.
Even the greatest advocate for the digitisation of pathology would probably admit that it’s been slow to take off, at least in the UK health market. While its near neighbour radiology has seen a tech transformation – so much so that many providers are on their second or third PACS procurement – the majority of pathology services remain distinctly analogue.
All this could be about to change. Pathologists are increasingly seeing the benefits of going digital for diagnoses: scanning slides and viewing them by a computer rather than a microscope. And a move to greater regionalisation of pathology services – plus a greater national focus on early and speedy diagnosis – is helping to make the case for transformation at provider level.
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WHO releases 1st recommendations for digital health tech use
The World Health Organization, a Geneva, Switzerland-based agency of the United Nations, released a
report on April 17 detailing 10 key ways in which nations around the world can use digital health technologies to better the health of their populations.
According to the report, compiled after two years of research and consultations, though digital resources are not all-encompassing health solutions, they can have a sizable positive impact on users' wellbeing and access to healthcare. To do so, developers must ensure health workers and users are well-trained in the technology, security systems are in place to protect medical information and new systems coordinate with other digital health resources.
"Digital health is not a silver bullet," Bernardo Mariano, CIO of WHO, said. "WHO is working to make sure it's used as effectively as possible. This means ensuring that it adds value to the health workers and individuals using these technologies, takes into account the infrastructural limitations, and that there is proper coordination."
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HIT Think Are we working to improve healthcare or health?
Published April 18 2019, 4:29pm EDT
I’m not sure what the relevant analogy might be, but I’ll take a shot nonetheless.
Let’s say we poured billions of dollars into improving highways and city streets, but the local commute for residents continued to get longer, more frustrating and less effective.
Or try this—maybe we also dumped billions of dollars into school systems, but student test scores only got worse.
I ask if these comparisons are relevant after reading about a recent study published in the Lancet, which suggests that poor diet and lack of exercise kill more people globally every year than even smoking, the go-to bogeyman for all negative health indicators.
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Implementation best practices: The keys to launching an EHR
April 18, 2019 02:00 PM
Four experts from Cerner, DrChrono, CTG and Chilmark Research offer healthcare CIOs and other executives and health IT workers crucial advice for successfully getting electronic health records up and running.
Electronic health records are the mothership of healthcare information technology, and integrate with many other IT systems. As a result, implementing these all-important tools is a crucial task to get right.
In this article, four experts in the field of EHRs offer healthcare CIOs and other healthcare executives and health IT workers their advice and tips for implementing EHRs successfully. These experts include: Farrell Sanders, senior vice president, consulting and application services, at EHR giant Cerner; Daniel Kivatinos, co-founder and COO at EHR vendor DrChrono; Dana Bensinger, client solutions executive for consulting firm CTG’s health solutions practice; and John Moore, founder and managing partner at Chilmark Research, a healthcare IT research and consulting firm.
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Activist investors pushing Cerner to reach for higher margins
April 18, 2019 09:29 AM
Starboard, which got two members appointed to Cerner’s board last week, sees the EHR vendor’s business as “highly sticky.”
Investment adviser Starboard Value’s CEO Jeff Smith said there is a “huge” investment opportunity in Cerner and claimed the company could widen its operating margins by around 3.5 percent if it met certain targets during an
interview with MSNBC.
WHY IT MATTERS
While Smith didn’t elaborate on what those targets were, Starboard, which owns a 1.2 percent stake in the company, last week pushed to appoint four new board members — two selected by Starboard and two selected by Cerner.
Joe Mandacina, the head of communications for the Kansas City-based Cerner,
told the Kansas City Business Journal a board refresh was already in the works prior to Starboard entering the picture. And he told Healthcare IT News last week that the EHR vendor is "very comfortable with all four new members."
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3 questions to ask before putting a healthcare application in the cloud
April 17, 2019 12:49 PM
And 5 tenants to understand once you’ve decided to move data into a private, public or hybrid cloud.
Several years ago, many experts were indicating that by 2020 everything would be running in the cloud. The promises of economical on-demand computing and storage resources were appealing. Companies could look to reduce capital investments and begin to sunset expensive data centers by quickly spinning up cloud technology. Speed to market, costs savings, optimized processing environments, elasticity, agility — the hype was real. Organizations began to adopt Cloud First strategies. Cloud articles were dominating the headlines and cloud vendors were investing big time and pushing for traction and momentum.
Fast forward to 2019. While there have been cloud success stories and the marketplace is full of cloud services and solutions, the full promise of the cloud has not yet been fully realized – particularly in healthcare.
Yet there are adoption opportunities you can begin to leverage immediately.
Most healthcare organizations have private cloud capabilities. These typically run in their own data centers and support mission critical applications. More and more of these private cloud environments are run on hyperconverged technologies that offer some unique opportunities to streamline operations and tightly integrate compute, storage and backup in one platform.
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ONC: Here’s how hospitals are using EHR data beyond patient care
April 17, 2019 12:45 PM
New research shows that the ways hospitals tap into EHR information varies from vendor to vendor.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT shared
the results of a new study that sheds new insight on a number of EHR uses from 2015 through 2017.
WHY IT MATTERS
Hospitals are continuing to surge in their adoption and use of EHRs, partially pushed by the 21st Century Cures Act. The records enable healthcare providers to more easily record and access information about a patient and, as the number of hospitals who make this data interoperable rises, providers can share the data with outside organizations as well. The fluidity and mobility of patient data speeds up and improves patient care and when it becomes portable it allows for a more seamless patient experience.
WHAT THE RESEARCH FOUND
By 2017, 94 percent of hospitals were using electronic health record data. The study used data from the American Hospital Association which found that across the three-year period almost every measure of EHR use rose throughout hospitals.
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Readers Write: Uniting the Full Continuum of Care for the Individual: Why Digital Technologies Must Embrace Holistic Patient Engagement
April 17, 2019
Uniting the Full Continuum of Care for the Individual: Why Digital Technologies Must Embrace Holistic Patient Engagement By Mary Kay Thalken, RN, MBA
More than half of healthcare professionals believe digitization is transforming the healthcare industry. Of adults 55+, 85% believe technology will improve healthcare in the next five years by delivering faster and more accurate diagnoses, curing diseases, and predicting and preventing diseases and conditions before they happen. However, 35% of seniors feel their health plans do not use any technology to improve access, information, or care, and they want more tech-enabled solutions.
Though the first two survey findings from 2017-2018 are encouraging, the third speaks loudly to this need: payer organizations as well as provider organizations must examine what is lagging in their technology offerings to better serve our biggest generation of people spanning the birth years of 1946 to 1964. From politics to fiscal projections, it’s reasonable to predict that Baby Boomers will have an outsized influence on the healthcare technology landscape for years to come.
The projected growth of this population has also caught the eye of Washington. In March, the US Task Force on Research and Development for Technology to Support Aging Adults and the Committee on Technology of the Science & Technology Council released the “
Emerging Technologies to Support an Aging Population Report .” It identified six primary functional capabilities as being critical to individuals who wish to maintain their independence as they age and for which technology may have a positive impact:
Key activities of independent living
Cognition
Communication and social connectivity
Personal mobility
Transportation
Access to healthcare
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WHO releases 10 recommendations on digital health interventions to improve care
Apr 17, 2019 11:48am
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a new list of recommendations Wednesday offering guidance on how the global healthcare industry can use digital health technology accessible via mobile phones, tablets and computers to improve people’s health and essential services around the world.
“Harnessing the power of digital technologies is essential for achieving universal health coverage,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, M.D., said in a
press release . “Ultimately, digital technologies are not ends in themselves; they are vital tools to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable.”
The list of 10 recommendations is based on a “critical evaluation of the evidence on emerging digital interventions that are contributing to health system improvements” and is the result of a two-year-long research project by WHO on digital technologies, including consulting with global experts, to produce recommendations on how such tools may be used for maximum impact. For example, the WHO guideline points to the potential to improve civil registrations and vital statistics by enabling birth and death notifications via mobile devices as this can help to reach under-registered populations.
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Emergency-Medicine Residents Often Miscalculate IV Doses for Kids
By Will Boggs MD
April 16, 2019
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Emergency-medicine residents often miscalculate doses for a variety of intravenous medications used to treat children, according to new findings.
Under- or over-dosing of pediatric medication can have devastating consequences, but there are few data on the frequency of resident dosing errors in pediatric-care settings.
Dr. William Bonadio from Mount Sinai St. Luke's Medical Center in New York City reviewed 500 consecutive IV orders for a broad range of medications placed by emergency-medicine residents in the pediatric emergency-medicine department in 2018.
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Researchers provide roadmap for AI in medical imaging
Published April 17 2019, 7:33am EDT
While artificial intelligence could transform clinical imaging practice over the next decade, research is still in its early stages and knowledge gaps must be filled if AI is to reach its full potential in radiology.
That’s the contention of researchers who have developed a roadmap to help identify and prioritize research needs for academic research laboratories, funding agencies, professional societies, as well as industry.
The
roadmap , published on Tuesday in the journal
Radiology , is based on an August 2018 workshop held at the National Institutes of Health that addressed the future of AI in medical imaging.
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Patients to clean up a breach after protective services not offered
Published April 17 2019, 4:58pm EDT
A virus that prohibited access to files crippled IT systems at Centrelake Medical Group this past February.
It appears the virus was not ransomware, but it did deny access to data, according to executives of the healthcare organization, which has eight locations in California.
The organization’s breach notification letter does not include an offer of protective services to affected individuals, which are sometimes offered in similar incidents.
“Centrelake enourages affected individuals to remain vigilant against incidents of identity theft and fraud, and to seek to protect against possible identity theft or financial loss by regularly reviewing their financial account statements, credit reports and explanations of benefits for suspicious activity,” patients were told.
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ATA Takes Aim at Big Target: 'Telehealth Interoperability'
Telehealth organization provides leadership for the cause, putting health systems and payers in the 'driver's seat' to help remove barriers to safe, affordable, and effective care when and where patients need it.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Just as HIMSS became the industry association to take on interoperability of electronic health data,
ATA aims to take a leading role in the push for "telehealth interoperability."
The national telehealth organization put its stake in the ground Monday morning during
ATA19 in New Orleans, hoping to achieve seamless communication between all providers and systems involved in a patient's care, even when the patient and provider are in different locations and not necessarily interacting in real time.
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Health care needs less #innovation
By Dhruv Khullar
April 12, 2019
H ealth care has caught the innovation bug.
An industry famously resistant to change suddenly can’t stop innovating — or at least saying it is. Silicon Valley startups are disrupting health care. Academic medical centers are transforming it. Insurers are revolutionizing medicine and there are any number of conferences devoted to health care innovation. Even the federal government wants in on the action.
Meanwhile, the U.S. health system is unable to safely and consistently provide some of the most basic elements of care. It struggles with massive discrepancies in quality, cost, and outcomes across the country — and performs worse than nearly all its peer nations .
The most glaring deficiencies don’t stem from a lack of technology or creativity or innovation. Many shortcomings could be solved by adopting widely recognized best practices and committing to a handful of mundane, lifesaving processes. Think surgical checklists, timely removal of central venous catheters, and adoption of safe birth practices.
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The CIO’s Role in Promoting Cybersecurity
Because of the importance of cybersecurity and the increasing risks, most companies now have someone responsible for leading and overseeing cybersecurity. In many organizations, information security leaders (i.e., CISO, IT Security Director) report to the CIO, making it easier for him or her to directly influence cybersecurity decisions. Even when this isn’t the case, the CIO should remain heavily involved in promoting and supporting cybersecurity initiatives.
Depending on which source you read, slightly more than half of the information security individuals report to the CIO. When this is the case, the CIO has many things he or she can do to help promote cybersecurity and support their security person(s) or team. Regardless of the reporting structure, many of these will hold true even if the CIO does not have direct responsibility or oversight of cybersecurity.
Funding Priorities
While cyberattacks continue to rise, the amount we invest in cybersecurity has declined from previous years. Hospitals and healthcare organizations
spend less on cybersecurity, as a percentage of revenue, when compared with the retail industry and finance sector. These reductions in budgets are occurring at a time when healthcare breaches now surpass both of these industries in size and scale.
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OIG to audit NIH’s EHR for IT, interoperability challenges
Published April 16 2019, 7:24am EDT
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General intends to put the National Institutes of Health’s electronic medical records under the microscope.
According to an updated work plan released on Monday, OIG is planning to conduct an audit this year of NIH’s information technology and interoperability challenges within the agency’s electronic health record system.
The OIG work plan notes that certain NIH institutes and centers provide direct patient care and that these organizations leverage “an electronic health records system to help facilitate effective care.”
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Study finds first-year interns spend 43% of their day on EHR
Published April 16 2019, 7:19am EDT
Internal medicine residents devote 87 percent of their work time away from patients, about half of which is taken up interacting with electronic health records.
That’s the finding of a new
study , conducted by researchers at Penn Medicine and Johns Hopkins University, published on Monday in
JAMA Internal Medicine .
The analysis of six internal medicine programs in the mid-Atlantic region assessed how first-year interns allocate time while working on general medicine inpatient services. The researchers documented the activities of 80 interns—which included 194 shifts and 2,173 hours—during a three-month period.
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CMS using data to better monitor nursing home performance
Published April 16 2019, 4:44pm EDT
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is warning nursing homes that it wants to see better care and outcomes and is using data to track progress.
“Every nursing home resident deserves to retain their basic human dignity and to be treated with respect at all times,” CMS administer Seema Verma cautions. “Just as we’re unleashing innovative strategies and technologies in other areas of CMS, we’re continuously looking for ways to improve our approach to nursing home safety and quality.”
Consequently, CMS is undergoing a comprehensive review of regulations, guidelines, internal structure and processes related to safety and quality in nursing homes. It initially focuses on updating the Nursing Home Compare website that helps consumers select a home, and consumers to identify and report instances of non-compliance in homes.
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NHS introduces new tool to reduce unnecessary and lengthy stays in hospital
April 16, 2019 03:30 AM
Over 6,250 care homes have now registered to use the portal, according to NHS England.
What happened
The NHS and local authorities in England are rolling out a new digital tool that has been proven to cut avoidable long stays in the hospital in a trial in Devon, Berkshire and the north last year.
The pilot was led by the North of England Commissioning Support Unit, which developed the portal with funding from NHS England.
Called the Capacity Tracker, it allows health and social care staff to access information about the number of beds available in local care homes on any device.
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China launches platform to enhance country's community-level healthcare services
April 16, 2019 03:00 AM
“Talent team building is the key component to enhancing community level healthcare services”, said Wang Hesheng, NHC deputy director.
China’s National Health Commission (NHC) officially launched a capacity building platform designed for community-level healthcare services, according to a
report by Xinhua News on April 15.
At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in October 2017, a report summarised that community-level healthcare services should be improved and the work of general practitioners strengthened.
In 2018, the NHC launched a capacity building and training program for community level talents and was preparing to establish a capacity building platform combining online and offline efforts.
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Telehealth is past the 'tipping point' – how's it doing with interoperability?
April 15, 2019 04:26 PM
A new survey from the American Telemedicine Association assesses the current state of data exchange standards for remote care and offers best practices for health systems looking to capitalize on its potential.
As the American Telemedicine Association annual conference kicks off in New Orleans this week, the organization has published a white paper focused on the status of telehealth interoperability.
The promise is immense, but big hurdles still remain before it reaches its full potential.
"In many cases, telehealth clinical services and settings are fragmented and data is siloed, with low-volume telehealth services such as those for specific locations or clinical specialties standing alone rather than being designed as part of a larger, integrated system," according to the ATA.
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Global health
In African Villages, These Phones Become Ultrasound Scanners
A hand-held device brings medical imaging to remote communities, often for the first time.
BUSHORO, Uganda — Lying on a church pew with his arm over his head, 6-year-old Gordon Andindagaye whimpered a bit — in fear, not pain — as Dr. William A. Cherniak slowly swept a small ultrasound scanner up and down his chest.
Dr. Cherniak and Rodgers Ssekawoko Muhumuza, the Ugandan clinical officer he was training, stared at the iPhone into which the scanner was plugged, watching Gordon’s lung expand and contract.
“O.K.,” Dr. Cherniak finally said. “What do you recommend?”
Gordon had a persistent cough and swollen lymph nodes, and looked tired and unwell. As other boys ran around outside, kicking a soccer ball made of rags and twine, he clung weakly to his mother. The scan on the iPhone’s screen suggested his lungs had fluid in them.
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Families Use Apps to Track Relatives With Dementia
Technology can keep tabs on people with dementia, but apps crash, batteries die and systems fail
By Julie Jargon
April 16, 2019 5:30 a.m. ET
Kim Rice tracks her husband’s every move, including his arrival home each night from adult day care.
She’s among the millions of Americans caring for a loved one with dementia at home. And like many, she turned to tracking and monitoring devices to help her manage the daily juggle of working, ensuring her husband’s safety and maintaining her own sanity.
Most days, Mr. Rice’s bus driver walks him to the door of his home and sees him inside. But there’s sometimes a 15-minute lag before Ms. Rice receives the notification her husband made it home, courtesy of a GPS tracker she slips in his pocket.
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After record-setting 2018, digital health venture funding levels off
Apr 15, 2019 4:46pm
After hitting record levels in 2018, venture funding for digital health companies leveled off in the first quarter of 2019, dropping 19% compared to the first quarter of 2018, according to a new report.
In the first quarter of 2019, $2 billion raised in 149 deals compared to nearly $2.5 billion was raised in 187 deals in the same quarter of 2018, according to the
report from Austin, Texas-based Mercom Capital Group, a communications and research firm. Venture funding was up compared to the fourth quarter in 2018, which brought in $1.4 billion in 142 deals.
“Funding levels were down compared to last year in digital health in the absence of larger deals. M&A activity was also flat,” Raj Prabhu, CEO of Mercom Capital Group, said in a statement. “However, digital health public equities experienced a turnaround in the first quarter of 2019 with 66% of them beating the S&P 500 compared to the last quarter of 2018 when 63% of the equities we tracked performed below the S&P 500. Favorable market conditions have prompted several companies to announce IPO plans."
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Patient data, telemedicine will drive health IT growth in 2019, Venrock survey finds
Jackie Drees -
Friday, April 12th, 2019
Seventy-eight percent of healthcare professionals expect health IT companies to "somewhat," or "significantly," increase by 2020, according to Venrock's 2019 Healthcare Prognosis
report .
In March 2019, Venrock surveyed more than 250 respondents from health IT startups, healthcare providers and insurance companies, among other organizations, about the future of health IT.
Three insights:
1. When asked which health IT subsectors will experience both "rapid" and "some growth," by 2020, survey respondents said analytics and big data (94 percent) and telemedicine (93 percent) would lead.
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12 healthcare areas where AI will result in near-term breakthroughs
Published April 15 2019, 7:17am EDT
Faculty members of Partners HealthCare have ranked artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that will have the greatest impact on medicine in the next 12 months.
The Boston-based health system announced the
2019 “Disruptive Dozen” AI technologies last week during a panel session at its World Medical Innovation Forum.
More than 60 in-person and telephone interviews were conducted with Partners HealthCare faculty to nominate the breakthrough innovations that were ultimately whittled down to 12 AI technologies, according to Erica Shenoy, MD, associate chief of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Infection Control Unit.
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Barriers to patients accessing their health data are falling
Published April 15 2019, 4:30pm EDT
While the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT continues to remind providers of patients’ rights to electronically view, download and transmit their health information via application programming interfaces, many hospitals are already complying.
Since 2014, eligible hospitals have been required to provide patients with the capability to get their information, and in 2017 nearly all hospitals were providing the access, according to a new ONC data brief.
Smaller hospitals, however, lag to some degree compared to mid-size and larger hospitals, particularly critical access hospitals which offer significantly less access compared to non-critical access facilities.
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HIT Think How to gain effectiveness as a cybersecurity leader
Published April 15 2019, 1:00pm EDT
It’s important to think about leadership in the cybersecurity realm through the lens of the “lines of defense” model. If you are a leader that is executing in the first line of defense (1LOD), then your job is the proper and timely execution of control activities (processes and technologies) to ensure that your organization is properly protected.
If, however, your job is in the second line of defense, (2LOD), then you need to make sure that you have thoroughly communicated the risk associated with various actions (and lack of action) to decision-makers so that they can make an informed decision.
This clarity is often muddled as most cybersecurity organizations find themselves operating in what is often called the 1.5 line of defense. They operate some controls: data loss prevention (DLP), endpoint detection, protection and response (EDPR), intrusion detection and incident management. However, they also are frequently responsible for reviewing configurations and patching, as well as involved with features and capabilities of applications, infrastructure and third-party organizations, and advising on the good, the bad and the ugly therein.
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European Society of Cardiology paper calls for an integrated approach to digital health
April 15, 2019 05:47 AM
Patients, clinicians and technology vendors must work together to drive the adoption of digital health at the heart of national models and systems, researchers say.
The potential of digital health to provide a comprehensive framework for the research, prevention and treatment of chronic disease is being inhibited by the failure of national health systems to reimburse it and integrate it into routine care.
This is the stark warning of a recent position paper from European cardiology leaders published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology
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All-in-one practice management system enables a fivefold increase in patients
April 15, 2019 02:31 PM
Advanced Behavioral Health's practice management, billing, scheduling and clinical data collection system has reaped the practice many rewards, including reducing time spent on billing from three hours to 30 minutes per week.
Before Mike Pearson became founder and president of Advanced Behavioral Health in Huntington Beach, California, he understood the value of a concise and user-friendly practice management system. The organization he previously worked for as CFO had used one particular system for more than 10 years.
THE PROBLEM
After realizing that most of his Advanced Behavioral Health team was already familiar with this system, Pearson decided to purchase it for the practice. However, the system wasn't a good fit for the organization's specific goals.
Pearson and his team quickly experienced hurdles they needed to overcome – and fast. The biggest challenge the team was facing was that the system lacked electronic data collection, leaving the organization no choice but to use paper data sheets.
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Pregnancy club Bounty UK fined £400,000 by data protection regulator
April 15, 2019 04:26 AM
The fine was issued for breaching the Data Protection Act 1998.
The UK’s data protection regulator has fined pregnancy and parenting support club Bounty UK £400,000 after an investigation found it unlawfully shared the personal information of over 14 million people with a number of organisations, including credit reference and marketing companies.
Bounty collected the data for membership purposes, but the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it also acted as a "data broking service" until the end of April 2018, breaching the Data Protection Act 1998 by not making it clear to people that their personal information might be shared with third parties.
Before the General Data Protection Regulation came into force, Bounty shared over 34 million personal data records with 39 organisations for “the purposes of direct electronic marketing” from June 2017 until April 2018, the watchdog said on Friday (12 April).
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AI-powered voice note taking saves OrthoAtlanta an hour per physician per day
April 12, 2019 01:17 PM
Since deploying speech recognition and integrating it with its athenahealth EHR, the group practice has seen the average note completion time drop from 4.8 minutes to 1.6 minutes per note.
OrthoAtlanta, a 14-office group practice with 37 physicians, is one of the largest physician-owned orthopedic and sports medicine practices in the greater Atlanta area. It provides an integrated approach to delivering musculoskeletal care for muscles, bones, joints and spine. Its physicians treat patients at 14 offices, and many see patients at more than one location.
THE PROBLEM
Industrywide, it’s been reported that the sheer volume of documentation, much of it routine paperwork necessary for each patient encounter, is identified as a cause of physician burnout.
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Report: Nurses Have Significantly Higher Levels of EHR Satisfaction Than Providers
Nurses say highest satisfaction points are those related to patient care.
A new report from the
Arch Collaborative , 62% of nurses said they were pleased with their overall electronic health record (EHR) experience, compared with just 16% of physicians. The group surveyed 70,000 clinicians, including 28,000 nurses.
The
report identified two areas of success that successful facilities have in common: strong initial and ongoing education and shared EHR ownership. Nurses typically have a longer training period than physicians which can have an impact on how comfortable they have using the program. Indeed, 56% of surveyed nurses agreed that their initial training/education factored into their positive response, compared to just 43% of physicians who reported having a strong initial training/education period.
In terms of EHR ownership, nurses (59%) slightly edged out physicians (52%) when asked about their thoughts about the EHR vendor. They were also asked to rate themselves regarding whether they felt a personal sense of ownership over the EHR, 78% of nurses reported their confidence in their ability to use the EHR vs. 56% of providers who reported the same.
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Physician Telehealth Usage Wallops Early EHR Adoption Rates
Burned-out specialists are chomping at the bit to give telehealth a try, according to a physician survey American Well released today at the ATA19 conference in New Orleans.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Physician adoption of telehealth increased 340% between 2015 and 2018, far outpacing adoption rates in the early years of electronic health records (EHR). In addition, certain burned-out specialists—the ones least likely to have engaged in this form of practice—are now the most willing to try it, according to a survey that will be released today by
American Well at the
ATA19 telehealth conference, which kicked off Sunday in New Orleans.
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Weekly News Recap
Cityblock Health raises $65 million just three months after announcing a Series A round of $21 million
Partners HealthCare (MA) will equip its clinicians and researchers with the tools necessary to develop their own AI algorithms
Cerner bows to pressure applied by an activist investor by appointing four new board members as nominated by hedge fund operator Starboard Value
Microsoft announces that it will shut down its HealthVault personal health records service on November 20, 2019
Google Cloud opens its healthcare API for beta testing
Urgent care EHR/PM vendor DocuTAP and urgent care solutions vendor Practice Velocity announce plans to merge
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Enjoy!
David.
