Cerner

The promise of genomics and personalized care are closer than many realize. But clinical systems and EHRs are not ready yet. While policymakers and innovators play catch-up, here’s a look at what you need to know. Considering how fast technology advances in the healthcare industry, it seems natural that a once-innovative concept could become obsolete in the span of, say, a dozen years. Knowledge, comprehension and capabilities continue moving forward, and if the instruments of support don't keep pace, it can cause a rift to appear. If nothing is done, it can exacerbate into a seismic event...

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Confidential papers show a Health boss already was in talks with software company Cerner Corporation at least a year before consultants were hired to conduct an external investigation into potential suppliers. The electronic medical records project was even given the codename "Project Mango" to avoid constantly naming Cerner in official correspondence, the papers said. Read More »

After some seven years of watching the US government push interoperability among health records, and hearing how far we are from achieving it, I assumed that fundamental divergences among electronic health records at different sites posed problems of staggering complexity. I pricked up my ears, therefore, when John Orosco, CTO of Sansoro Health, said that they could get EHRs to expose real-time web services in a few hours, or at most a couple days.

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But what when the network goes down – across the country and possibly internationally?With remote hosting of business-critical systems becoming more widespread it’s worth looking at some of the implications of a major outage. Read More »

A year after roll-out, the Island Health electronic health record (EHR) project being piloted at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital (NRGH) is abandoning electronic processes and returning to pen and paper. An alert reader forwarded me this note from the Island Health CEO, sent out Friday afternoon: "The Nanaimo Medical Staff Association Executive has requested that the CPOE tools be suspended while improvements are made. An Island Health Board meeting was held yesterday to discuss the path forward. The Board and Executive take the concerns raised by the Medical Staff Association seriously, and recognize the need to have the commitment and confidence of the physician community in using advanced EHR tools such as CPE"...

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With more electronic health record systems continuing to fall short of providers' expectations, a recent report by Black Book Rankings suggests that 2013 may indeed be the "year of the great EHR vendor switch." Read More »