American Medical Association (AMA)

See the following -

Practices Buried Under MU 'Avalanche'

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | October 23, 2014

'2015 will be an extremely challenging year for medical practices on the IT and compliance side'...

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Providers Spend More Time in Front of Computers than Patients, Study Concludes

Chris Nerney | Healthcare IT News | September 12, 2017

Primary care physicians spend more than half of their workdays in front of computer screens, reducing the amount of time they spend with patients, according to a new study by the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association (AMA). During a typical 11.4-hour workday, primary care physicians spent an average of 5.9 hours on data entry and other tasks with electronic health records (EHR) systems during and after clinical hours, researchers found...

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Quest Opens Direct Access To Lab Results

David F Carr | Information Week | April 11, 2014

Quest Diagnostics capitalizes on regulatory change and gives patients access to their own lab results on the web and mobile devices, boosting its own EHR software in the process.

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Quest Opens Direct Access To Lab Results

David F Carr | Information Week | April 11, 2014

Quest Diagnostics capitalizes on regulatory change and gives patients access to their own lab results on the web and mobile devices, boosting its own EHR software in the process.

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RWJF Report: Time to Transition to a Post-HITECH World?

Context and perspective matter. And it’s often both context and perspective that are lacking from the daily snapshots we get of health information technology, meaningful use, interoperability and the progress we are either making or not making, depending on your perspective. So I welcome a report like the one the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released last month on the state of health information technology circa 2015 in these United States. Subtitled “Transition to a Post-HITECH World,” the detailed report, created in collaboration with the University of Michigan School of Communication, the Harvard School of Public Health and Mathematica Policy Research, takes a 10,000-feet view of the ongoing digitalization of healthcare and what the priorities are as we approach the terminus of HITECH.

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Senator's Call For Reboot Of EHR Incentive Program Evokes Responses

John Oncea | Healthcare Technology Online | June 5, 2013

The recent white paper released by six Republican Senators assessing federal progress promoting health information technology adoption and standards asked for reader feedback, and the healthcare industry responded. Read More »

Simple Ways to Deter Improper Antibiotic Prescribing

Kevin B. O'Reilly | AMA Wire | November 22, 2016

Inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics is a long-standing practice that once seemed benign but whose consequences are coming into sharper focus. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill at least 23,000 Americans annually and cause more than 2 million illnesses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There are some good ideas that can help physicians steer their patients away from antibiotics when they will do more harm than good...

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Slow Death by EMR or: How I Learned to Stop Clicking and Love Google Glass

Here's a dirty little secret that I'll share with you: the clinical usability of current-generation electronic medical record (EMR) systems is nothing short of atrocious. If the Geneva Convention's proscription against torture extended to healthcare information technology (HIT), most vendors would be out of business and behind bars. But you probably already knew that: a November 2013 article in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine (AJEM) found that community emergency physicians spend 44 percent of their time interacting with EMRs and click up to 4,000 times in a 10-hour shift.

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Texas Medical Association Slams ONC Safety Plan

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | February 12, 2013

The health IT safety action plan proposed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT in December is not specific enough to succeed, according to recent comments made by the Texas Medical Association. Read More »

The 'Digital Dystopia': 4 Thoughts from AMA CEO Dr. James Madara

Akanksha Jayanthi | Becker's Health IT & CIO Review | June 13, 2016

Not all digital tools are created equal, and some of these tools are detrimental to patient care. This was the message James Madara, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the American Medical Association, expressed in his address at the 2016 AMA Annual Meeting. Dr. Madara compared the current digital health landscape, "something I might call our digital dystopia", to the "quackery" of snake oil remedies.Here are four thoughts from Dr. Madara's address...

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The AMA's Specific Problem With ICD-10 Implementation

Carl Natale | Government Health IT | June 28, 2013

The American Medical Association's (AMA) decisions to reaffirm it's vigorous opposition to ICD-10 implementation and ask for a two-year grace period surprised me. Read More »

The Imminent Industry-Association War Over ICD-10

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | February 6, 2012

The stage is set for a war over U.S. adoption of ICD-10. Indeed, such a fight could pit industry associations that stand to profit from the code set against those representing the providers who have to actually implement and pay for the ICD-10 conversion.

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The Politics of the EHR: Why we’re not where we want to be and what we need to do to get there

By now, it seems abundantly clear that the vast potential offered by universal adoption of electronic health records (EHR) has not been achieved.  Indeed, the fulfillment of that potential seems a long way off.  Unsolved problems with interoperability, usability, safety, and security, to name a few, remain, and continue to pose barriers to universal adoption. There is ample evidence in the medical literature, of the unsolved problems of the EHR.  Indeed, two recent reports that offer (probably inadequate) solutions highlight the difficulties that exist with the EHR.  The proliferation of these problems has only increased with the increase in adoption of the EHR by physicians and institutions.   The Texas Medical Association has asked the (at the time) ONC, Farhad Mostashari, MD, to establish a health IT patient safety czar.1 Read More »

The Way To Doctors' Hearts Is Through Their EMR

Nahum Kovalski | The Times of Israel | September 23, 2014

...EPIC is perhaps the most popular of the present EMRs in the States. There have also been many complaints about EPICs design...

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Towards a New EHR Metaphor - Or, How to Fix Unusable EHRs

News flash: docs hate Excel! In a recent study, which included researchers from Yale, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford, and the AMA, physicians rated it only at 57% on a usability rating, far below Google search (93%), Amazon (82%), or even Word (76%). But, of course, Excel wasn't their real problem; the study was aimed at electronic health records (EHRs), which physicians rated even lower: 45%, which the study authors graded an "F." If we want EHRs get better, though, we may need to start with a new metaphor for them.Lead author Edward Melnick, MD, explained the usability issue: "A Google search is easy. There's not a lot of learning or memorization; it's not very error-prone. Excel, on the other hand, is a super-powerful platform, but you really have to study how to use it. EHRs mimic that."

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