With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement (including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what’s next for EHRs. Clearly the industry is in a state of transition. eCW will be distracted by its 5 year corporate integrity agreement. AthenaHealth will have to focus on the activist investors at Elliott Management who now own 10% of the company and have a track record of changing management/preparing companies for sale. As mergers and acquisitions result in more enterprise solutions, Epic (and to some extent Cerner) will displace other vendors in large healthcare systems. However, the ongoing operational cost of these enterprise solutions will cause many to re-examine alternatives such as Meditech...
Workplace Factors Contribute to Burnout in Family Physicians
Family physicians who work in a hectic or chaotic environment, those who report high rates of job-related stress, and those who spend time at home working on electronic medical record (EMR) tasks may be particularly vulnerable to burnout, researchers report. In a study designed to assess workplace factors associated with burnout among family physicians, Monee Rassolian, MD, from Michigan State University, Flint, and colleagues administered an abbreviated burnout survey to a random sample of family physicians applying to take the 2016 American Board of Family Medicine Certification Examination. They report their findings online May 8 in JAMA Internal Medicine...
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Silicon gurney: EHR go-lives turn hospitals into software shops
Hospitals invest so much money in EHR implementations that it changes the very nature of their organization. And that means they need to think about operating more like a software company than just a hospital. If $100 million sounds like an exorbitant or even unrealistic ticket for an electronic health records platform, in fact, consider that Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and Partners HealthCare have publicly acknowledged spending an order of magnitude more than that — while other hospitals such as Scripps Health, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Lahey Hospital Medical Center and Lifespan revealed budgets bigger than $100 million. And that’s just to rattle off a fistful...
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HIT Think Why Interoperability Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
We hear the same thing from the health IT community every year: We’re committed to enabling seamless health data sharing. It’s the industry’s perennial commitment that electronic health records (EHRs) will soon share patient data across different platforms to ensure coordinated, high-quality care. Walls will come down in the name of better patient outcomes. Unfortunately, none of this is going to happen any time soon. In fact, I predict our industry’s struggle with interoperability will get worse before it gets better...
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HHS’ Cyber Threat Center Comes Out of Beta Soon
The Health and Human Services Department’s nascent cybersecurity center will soon reach initial operating capability to help share threat information with a sector constantly under attack and often short of cyber personnel of its own. Based on the Homeland Security Department's National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, the Healthcare Cybersecurity Communications and Integration Center will share health-care specific threats information with other agencies and the private sector...
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She’s Got a Radical Approach for the Age of Superbugs: Don’t Fight Infections. Learn to Live with Them
As her father lay dying of sepsis, Janelle Ayres spent nine agonizing days at his bedside. When he didn’t beat the virulent bloodstream infection, she grieved. And then she got frustrated. She knew there had to be a better way to help patients like her dad. In fact, she was working on one in her lab. Ayres, a hard-charging physiologist who has unapologetically decorated her lab with bright touches of hot pink, is intent on upending our most fundamental understanding of how the human body fights disease...
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Open Labs Leads 48-Hour Hackathon for Good
The local hackerspace in Tirana, Albania might be small, but they make up for size in spirit. During the weekend of March 18-19, 2017, the Open Labs Hackerspace organized the first-ever, 48-hour "open source" hackathon focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are 17 objectives identified by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to build a better world, starting in our own communities. Some of the goals include quality education, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, clean energy, and more....
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How OpenMRS is Used to Fight Malaria in Endemic Areas
Children receiving care at a health clinic using OpenMRS in rural Uganda. Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that malaria is still the leading cause of death in Uganda, accounting for over 27% of deaths. OpenMRS is an electronic medical record platform designed to be used in low-resource environments where malaria and many other deadly diseases are endemic such as Uganda, where malaria is the primary cause of death in children. OpenMRS is currently used in over 1,800 medical clinics in 64 countries, providing the health information technology infrastructure that is foundational to over 6.3 million patients...
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Halamka on What's Next for Electronic Health Records
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How a Lifecycle Management Tool Uses Metrics
Greg Sutcliffe is a long-time member and now community lead of the Foreman community. Foreman is a lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. He's been studying how the real-world application of community metrics gives insight into its effectiveness and discovering the gap that exists between the ideal and the practical. He shares what insights he's found behind the numbers and how he is using them to help the community grow...
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Invisible Fluorescent Ink Opens New Frontier in Fight against Counterfeiting
Counterfeiting gives brand owners major headaches. Companies lose sales and governments lose tax income. Resulting costs to businesses of counterfeit and pirated products add up to as much as US$650 billion a year worldwide, according to the International Chamber of Commerce. Scientists and engineers have developed many techniques in the fight against counterfeiters. You might have one example in your pocket right now – the banknotes we use almost every day are produced using special paper, with watermarks, holograms, glossy strips and many other security features...
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