News

Summaries of open source, health care, or health IT news and information from various sources on the web selected by Open Health News (OHNews) staff. Links are provided to the original news or information source, e.g. news article, web site, journal,blog, video, etc.

See the following -

EHRs For Behavioral Health Tough Task

Tom Sullivan | Healthcare IT News | March 11, 2014

Behavioral health and long-term post-acute care are perhaps the two most significant areas left out of the meaningful use program. “When we look at the big circle of care, there’s a huge hole — behavioral health,” said Mark Caron, CIO of Capital Blue. “Behavioral health is a mess.”

Read More »

EHRs Getting Mixed Reviews In North Carolina

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | November 5, 2012

Physician adoption of ambulatory electronic health records is increasing in the North Carolina Triangle area--Duke University, UNC Health Care and WakeMed--but not all physicians are embracing the technology with open arms, according to an article in the News & Observer. Read More »

EHRs Inflict Enormous Pain on Doctors. It’ll Take More Than Stopwatches to Learn Why

Jonathan Bush | STAT | September 6, 2016

Electronic health records slow doctors down and distract them from meaningful face time caring for patients. That is the sad but unsurprising finding of a time and motion study published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine1. A team of researchers determined that physicians are spending almost half of their time in the office on electronic health records (EHRs) and desk work and just 27 percent on face time with patients — which is what the vast majority of doctors went into medicine to do. Once they get home, they average another one to two hours completing EHRs...

Read More »

EHRs May Help Save Lives From Sepsis

Erin McCann | HealthIT News | March 21, 2014

Here's another reason why those multi-million dollar electronic health record systems might be finally paying off, in terms of lives potentially saved.  According to new research, EHRs can be used to predict the early stages of sepsis, one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., responsible for killing some 210,000 people each year.

Read More »

EHRs Need To Talk To Each Other, But Make Sure They Work First

Deep Ramachandran | KevinMD.com | June 17, 2013

I’ve written several times before about my love/hate status with my EMR. While I enjoy using mine, I long for it’s usefulness to get to the next level. While the EMR is useful at tracking data, it’s greatest handicap right now, is that it can’t talk to other systems. [...] Read More »

EHRs, Clinical Decision Support Top 2017 Patient Safety Hazard List

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | March 15, 2017

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...

Read More »

EIFL Starts An OA Project In Kenya, Tanzania And Uganda

Press Release | EIFL | January 16, 2013

“Open access: knowledge sharing and sustainable scholarly communication in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda” is a new EIFL regional project funded by Spider, the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions DSV, Department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University. Read More »

EKF Announces Collaboration with ANGLE on Open Source Parsortix Liquid Biopsy for Cancers

Press Release | EKF Diagnostics, ANGLE plc | January 23, 2015

ANGLE’s patented Parsortix system can harvest very rare CTCs in cancer patient blood – even when there is less than one CTC in one billion healthy cells.  The resulting liquid biopsy (simple blood test) enables the investigation of mutations in the patient’s cancer for personalised cancer care.  The Parsortix system is “open-source” and has been designed to work with all existing analytical procedures in the same way that the existing solid biopsy provides cancer cells for a wide variety of analytical procedures.

Read More »

Elections 2012: Missing From The Debate – The Indian Health System

Mark Trahant | Indian Country | October 2, 2012

There is one public health “system” in the United States. Its cost per patient is lower than the rest of the country. Some of the clinics and hospitals are models of what health care could be … and at the same time some of the clinics are substandard and represent the worst of what we think of as government-run health care. Read More »

Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus Battles Skeptics In Push To Protect The Planet

Billy House | Nextgov | March 11, 2013

Doomsday preppers or congressional visionaries? A small but growing cadre of House members is set to relaunch efforts to protect the nation against what they say is a very real threat: the unleashing of an electromagnetic pulse either by a solar storm or a nuclear-armed foe that could cripple much of the nation’s electrical infrastructure. Read More »

Electromagnetic Pulse Could Knock Out U.S. Power Grid

Kedar Pavgi | Nextgov | September 12, 2012

U.S. power grids and other civilian infrastructure are not prepared for electromagnetic pulses that could result from weapons or violent space weather, according to testimony at a congressional subcommittee hearing Wednesday. Read More »

Electronic (HTML) Telephone Triage Protocols & AHLTA

Julie S | Challenge.gov | January 14, 2013

MHS Registered Nurses managed 2.9 million telephone consults in FY 2012. Based on experience, the average telephone consult takes 10 minutes. Approximately, 3 minutes, is spent typing out relevant signs and symptoms or home care advice. This results in 146,784 hours or 6,116 days or 14 years that MHS RNs spend simply typing information into the electronic health record (EHR). We can do better! Read More »

Electronic Health Record Adoption Uneven Across U.S.

Sharyn Alden | Center For Advancing Health (CFAH) | June 27, 2013

A new study in Health Services Research finds wide geographic variation in the adoption of  electronic health records (EHRs) by ambulatory health care sites, ranging from a high of 88 percent to a low of just 8 percent. Read More »

Electronic Health Record Usability Where Art Thou?

Cliff Freeman | LinkedIn | July 11, 2017

I like to begin my articles with a little humor…no matter how little the humor. I am sure many in the User Interface community might find this joke hilarious. Not so much if you are a physician using an electronic health record (EHR) that does not provide good usability. Lack of EHR usability is one of the biggest complaints clinicians have with some currently available EHRs...So what are some of the pain points associated with EHRs that make them not user friendly? IDC Health completed a survey in 2013 to identify frequent causes of clinician EHR dissatisfaction. Of the seven dissatisfiers identified, four were associated with usability. These were...

Read More »

Electronic Health Records Purchasing Study Highlights Changes In Demand Drivers Since HITECH Act

Press Release | Software Advice | May 23, 2013

Study by Software Advice shows that current EHR buying activity is increasingly driven by a need to replace existing, unsuccessful EHR implementations as replacement of paper charts declined. Read More »