Five Tech Trends Affecting Healthcare IT Today, and Tomorrow
Technology is evolving faster than ever before, and shows no sign of slowing down. Digital innovation has enhanced the way we operate in almost every aspect of modern life, but in the healthcare industry, technology is not only changing lives, it's saving them too. Outlined below are five technology trends that are taking hold of the healthcare IT industry today, and what developments we can expect to see over the course of 2019 and beyond.
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CDC Issues RFI for Real-world Testing of Health Information Technology
In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) for a Natural Test Collaborative (NTC). Through a series of questions, the RFI seeks opinions and information about "The development of a national testbed (notionally called the National Test Collaborative (NTC)) for real-world testing of health information technology (IT)" and "Approaches for creating a sustainable infrastructure" to achieve it. The scope of the questions is somewhat confusing and quite broad, starting with Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) but quickly expanding to Electronic Health Records (EHR) and interoperability (not precisely defined).
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Get Smart, Integrate Artificial Intelligence into Your Business, Sooner
We've moved from the Computer Information Age to the "Digital Data Artificial Intelligence Age." It's the 4th Industrial Revolution. Just as computers transformed business processes and created the need for an "Information Technology Strategy." Today an integrated enterprise "Business - IT - Big Data - AI Strategy" is essential to lower costs and expand markets through differentiated products and services. The Artificial Intelligence strategy is not an add-on. It needs to be a core element of your enterprise strategic plan in 2019 and beyond!
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The Big Get Bigger, Until They Don't
You may have missed it, but the Open Markets Institute released a report on what it calls "America's Concentration Crisis." The report begins bluntly: "Monopoly power is all around us: as consumers, business owners, employees, entrepreneurs, and citizens." As David Leonhardt wrote in his op-ed about the report, "The federal government, under presidents of both parties, has largely surrendered to monopoly power." Their associated data set details market concentration within 32 industries, several of which are health related. For example, in electronic health record systems, the top 3 firms account for 58% of the market, whereas in pharmacies/drugstores, the top 3 control 67% (and the top 2 alone have 61% share).
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Google Taking Over Health Records Raises Patient Privacy Fears
Last year, the U.K. government privacy watchdog said an NHS hospital had illegally sent 1.6 million patient records to DeepMind to develop Streams, fanning public fears about data safety. In June, a group of outside experts DeepMind Health appointed to scrutinize its work urged the unit to "entrench" its separation from Alphabet. After the consolidation with Google was announced, Julia Powles, a researcher at New York University School of Law and a critic of DeepMind's work with the NHS, scorched the reversal. "DeepMind said it'd never connect Streams with Google," she wrote. "The whole Streams app is now a Google product! That is an atrocious breach of trust."...
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2018 ONC Annual Meeting
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will hold the 2018 Annual Meeting November 29-30, 2018 at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC. The 2-day meeting will gather approximately 1,200 health IT partners and will include a combination of plenaries and breakout sessions each day. The plenary sessions will include keynote addresses and panel discussions.
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VA CDS Knowledge Artifacts, CDS Connect, and the OSEHRA Community.
Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) has made significant investments in the representation of clinical knowledge in standardized, computer-friendly form, such that future systems may more rapidly manage and deploy documentation templates, order sets, and event-condition-action rules within and across VHA environments.
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The IHS Health Information Technology Modernization Research Project – Technical Assessment of RPMS
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), in cooperation with the Indian Health Service (IHS), has awarded a contract to Emerging Sun, with subcontracts to Pistis LLC and Regenstrief Institute, to conduct a multifactorial analysis of the opportunities for modernization of the health information systems that support clinical and business operations of IHS, Tribal, and Urban Indian health programs across the country.
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Is the US Finally Ready to Get Serious About Biodefense?
Biological and other disaster threats - whether accidental, driven by forces of nature, or intentional - pose fairly grave risks to the United States and the world. Situational awareness has been a conspicuous topic ever since the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed shortly thereafter. Since then we have experienced numerous disasters: health impacts of major weather events such as hurricanes and earthquakes, new virus outbreaks like Ebola in Africa, raging wildfires on the West Coast (I live in California), and the ever-present threat of pandemic flu which a hundred years ago infected some 500 million people across the globe and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, according to the Center for Disease Control and Preparedness (CDC). But since the initial flurry of public health preparedness funds in the ensuing several years after the 9/11 attacks, this topic has not had a high priority at CDC nor the funding necessary to implement it successfully.
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Fax Is Not a Machine, It Is a Technology
Once more I am listening to a presentation on interoperability. These always get a little uncomfortable - especially in the early going - because I can almost predict where the presenter will go horribly wrong and do a complete disservice to the audience (generally somewhere between slides 3 and 8). This time it was slide 6 where the speaker inserts stock picture of a decrepit old fax machine with paper cascading off a desk and onto the floor. This comes along with the typical lecture on everything that is wrong with "fax". With the lemmings in the audience nodding/snickering along, the speaker proceeds to misinform and mislead the group. Cringe-worthy really. What's misleading? Pretty much everything he says.
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