News Clips
FHIR Holds Big Promise for Interoperability, but Will Need to Coexist with Other Standards for the Foreseeable Future
Once again this year, HL7's FHIR specification was a hot topic at HIMSS17, a burning issue discussed ardently across the show floor. (Our apologies, but heat- and flame-related puns seem to be required when writing about FHIR. Thankfully, we've gotten them out of the way early.) But while many vendors were touting their embrace of the interoperability spec, and while the promise it holds for enabling faster and easier exchange of data is very real, the open API isn't going to supplant existing HL7 standards such as Version 2 and CDA any time soon...
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Where HIMSS Can Take Health 2.0
I was quite privileged to talk to the leaders of Health 2.0, Dr. Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt, in the busy days after their announced merger with HIMSS. I was revving to talk to them because the Health 2.0 events I have attended have always been stimulating and challenging. I wanted to make sure that after their incorporation into the HIMSS empire they would continue to push clinicians as well as technologists to re-evaluate their workflows, goals, and philosophies...
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Epic and Other EHR Vendors Caught in Dilemmas by APIs (Part 2 of 2)
The first section of this article reported some news about Epic’s Orchard, a new attempt to provide an “app store” for health care. In this section we look over the role of APIs as seen by EHR vendors such as Epic. Dr. Travis Good, with whom I spoke for this article, pointed out that EHRs glom together two distinct functions: a canonical, trusted store for patient data and an interface that becomes a key part of the clinician workflow. They are being challenged in both these areas, for different reasons...
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Crafter Software Announces Partner Award Winners
Crafter Software, an award-winning provider of Web content management system software that drives high performance, personalized digital experiences, announced today the winners of its annual partner awards. The partner awards recognize exceptional and innovative implementations of digital experience solutions for our joint customers. These partner-led solutions demonstrate the valuable benefits our customers realize with the Crafter CMS digital experience platform...- Login to post comments
Drugs Are Killing So Many People in Ohio That Cold-Storage Trailers Are Being Used as Morgues
By about 3 p.m. Friday, a county morgue in east Ohio was already full — and more bodies were expected. Rick Walters, an investigator for the Stark County coroner's office, had just left for two death scenes: a suicide and an overdose. From the road, he called the director of the Ohio Emergency Management Agency to ask for help. He needed more space, he explained — specifically, a cold-storage trailer to act as an overflow morgue...
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UCHealth’s OpenNotes Journey: From a Few Docs to Enterprise-Wide Acceptance
Although the OpenNotes initiative—designed to give patients access and ability to read visit notes online—has now reached 12 million patients in the U.S. alone, there have been challenges and pushback along the way, dating back to the beginning of the movement. In fact, says CT Lin, M.D., chief medical information officer (CMIO) at UCHealth, a 7-hospital, 400-clinic system in the Rocky Mountain region, the “original” OpenNotes was actually called “SPPARRO,” or “Systems Providing Patients Access to Records Online”...
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Precision Medicine Platform Now Open for Collaborative Discovery about Cardiovascular Diseases
The American Heart Association Precision Medicine Platform — a global, secure data discovery platform, recently developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) — is now open for use. Researchers, physicians, computational biologists, computer engineers and trainees from around the globe can leverage this cloud-based resource to access and analyze volumes of cardiovascular and stroke data to accelerate the care of patients at risk of the number one killer in the United States and a leading global health threat...
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Epic and Other EHR Vendors Caught in Dilemmas by APIs (Part 1 of 2)
The HITECH act of 2009 (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) gave an unprecedented boost to an obscure corner of the IT industry that produced electronic health records. For the next eight years they were given the opportunity to bring health care into the 21st century and implement common-sense reforms in data sharing and analytics. They largely squandered this opportunity, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars while watching health care costs ascend into the stratosphere, and preening themselves over modest improvements in their poorly functioning systems...
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EHRs, Clinical Decision Support Top 2017 Patient Safety Hazard List
Information management errors in electronic health records, incorrect use of clinical decision support, and poor prescribing habits are among the most dangerous health IT hazards for 2017, according to ECRI Institute’s annual patient safety list. The repeat offenders are joined by a number of workflow and process shortfalls that can leave hospitalized patients without sufficient monitoring, lead to costly and deadly hospital-acquired infections, and open up serious behavioral health risks...
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Why Making the Case for Interoperability Standards Is Needed
It's buzzy. It's the fly in the ointment for many and vendors swear it's seriously. just. about. to. gain. traction. Interoperability. Thinking about the topic is daunting itself but for those on the frontlines of care delivery and for patients, its increasingly becoming necessary as the healthcare industry enters into a more networked era. When we last checked in on interoperability, the industry was touting the massive adoption of EHRs...
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What’s Next in Federal Healthcare Policy? Two Industry Observers Offer Predictions
On Monday, March 13, Healthcare Informatics Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland interviewed two healthcare industry observers regarding current developments in federal healthcare policy. Hagland interviewed Jeremy Miller and Miranda Franco just hours before the news broke of the “scoring” of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the healthcare legislation introduced by Republican leaders of the House of Representatives on March 6, to replace elements of the health insurance provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed by Congress and signed into law in March2010 by President Barack Obama...
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The Real Story About COTS for the VA
There has been a tremendous amount of news coverage of recent congressional hearings about the need for the Department of Veterans Affairs to replace its existing electronic health record technology. What's even more remarkable is how one-sided the discussions and the reporting have been. For anyone without a background in healthcare IT, it would seem like a slam dunk that moving to a commercial off the shelf electronic health record solution is the best way forward for the VA...
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Phage Therapy Shown to Kill Drug-Resistant Superbug
Scientists from the University of Liverpool have shown that phage therapy could offer a safe and effective alternative to antibiotics in the treatment of Cystic Fibrosis lung infections. Chronic lung infections caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa are becoming increasingly difficult to treat due to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). With limited alternative therapeutic options available this has led to a renewed interest in (bacterio)phage therapy. Phages are viruses that kill bacteria but are otherwise harmless. A major advantage is that phages only target the harmful bacteria, so there are less side of the effects often associated with antibiotics...
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Mount Sinai Researchers Publish Results of First-of-Its-Kind iPhone Asthma Study
Scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai today published results from a pioneering study of asthma patients in the U.S. conducted entirely via iPhone using the Apple ResearchKit framework and the Asthma Health app developed at Mount Sinai with collaborating organizations. The results demonstrated that this approach was successful for large-scale participant enrollment across the country, secure bi-directional data exchange between study investigators and app users, and collection of other useful information such as geolocation, air quality, and device data. The publication appears today in Nature Biotechnology...
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New Trends and Troubles for AI in Medicine
Medicine is a complex field. So complex that any given person can’t know more than a fraction of what’s going on. Keeping up with the latest discoveries is impossible. Machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence offer a new way of looking at medicine and a great power to automate medical tasks. At the South by Southwest conference event in Austin, TX, a panel of experts came together to discuss the state of medical AI and how machine learning can benefit both patients and doctors...
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