EHR adoption
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Medical Students' Training in EHRs Inadequate
Medical school students are using electronic health records at a higher rate than practicing physicians, but education is lacking. Without guidelines, physicians face significant roadblocks to adoption, according to two companion studies published in Teaching and Learning in Medicine. Read More »
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Moving Past the EHR Interoperability Blame Game
As a researcher who studies electronic health records (EHRs), I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked “Why can’t the systems talk to each other?” or, in more technical terms, “Why don’t we have interoperability?” The substantial increase in electronic health record adoption across the nation has not led to health data that can easily follow a patient across care settings. Still today, essential pieces of information are often missing or cumbersome to access. Patients are frustrated, and clinicians can’t make informed decisions...
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ONC Beacon Program Highlights EHR Adoption, Use Challenges
A research program out of the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) offers insights into how communities use health IT and EHR adoption to achieve the triple aim of better care, better costs, and overall better patient health. Launched in 2010, the Beacon Community Program provided $250 million in grants to each of 17 communities to examine how these communities adopt EHRs and other health IT to better their overall healthcare structure. In an after-the-fact analysis of the program, NORC at the University of Chicago found that many of these communities faced similar challenges that other healthcare systems face when adopting their health IT...
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ONC Must End Opposition to Behavioral Health EHRs
Because our policy makers in Washington, DC, wield words as weapons, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT has categorized behavioral health providers as “post-acute care,” thus excluding them from MU funding that has driven EHR adoption elsewhere. While the ONC has created one reality by lobbing definitions, behavioral health advocates are promoting THE reality of mental illness as acute and costly; as debilitating as any disease or condition, if not more so; and as a major co-morbidity factor exacerbating acute illnesses and driving up health care costs. Read More »
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ONC Playbook Breaks Down Health IT, EHR Tasks and Buzzwords
The healthcare industry seems to be largely driven by buzzwords: quick and snappy phrases that reduce complex, difficult, expensive and often confusing initiatives into keywords that may not mean much to the uninitiated. From big data and population health management to electronic health records and value-based care, these short and sweet terms have come to define the new direction of one of the nation’s largest sectors...
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ONC Rejects Claims Questioning Future Of EHR Certification
EHR certification at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is alive and well despite recent regulatory and organizational developments that might indicate otherwise, claims the recently appointed head of the Health IT Certification Program...
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ONC Targets 2024 For Full Health IT Interoperability
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has set its sights on 2024 as the target for achieving system-wide interoperability in the United States, according to ten-year plan published recently by the federal agency...
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Physician Feedback Key to EHR Usability Improvements
In order to improve physician EHR use, health IT developers need to take into consideration the needs of end users and practice managers. New research shows that developers can improve EHR usability when they collect user feedback periodically. According to a research team led by Anne Press, MD, this user feedback is important when integrating new specialty functions into an EHR...
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Readers Respond: Why Epic Adoption Requires Governance
When an EHR vendor selection process ends with the choice of Epic Systems, it is going to require a significant financial investment upfront that impacts a healthcare organization’s bottom line. Whether that initial expenditure is later accompanied by unexpected capital contributions tends to be the direct result of poor planning rather than having made the wrong choice of an EHR system...
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Return On Information: A Standard Model For Assessing Institutional Return On Electronic Health Records
The views expressed in discussion papers are those of the authors and not necessarily of the authors’ organizations or of the IOM. Discussion papers are intended to help inform and stimulate discussion. They have not been subjected to the review procedures of the IOM and are not reports of the IOM or of the National Research Council. Read More »
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Skilled Nursing Facilities Lag Acute Care Settings in EHR, HIE Use
The first nationally representative survey on electronic health record adoption and health information exchange among skilled nursing facilities has found that they are lagging behind acute care settings. While data released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT shows that most SNFs (64 percent) used EHRs to manage patient health information last year and a fifth of facilities (18 percent) used both an EHR and a state or regional health information organization (HIO), a HIT gap persists with their acute care counterparts...
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The EHR Debacle: Has Organized Medicine Failed Us?
By now, it should be no secret that physicians in the United States, although largely receptive to the idea of electronic health records (EHRs), are widely dissatisfied with the current state of the art, and with the way that EHR adoption is being implemented.[1] Indeed, Congress[2] has shown continuing – but sometimes seemingly perfunctory – interest in the concerns of physicians and other health care providers, and I am at this point pessimistic about seeing any results of its efforts in the near future unless a more fundamental change is made in our approach. As Einstein noted, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”
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The Fax of Life
When you walk into the Arlington Women’s Center, you see a spacious waiting room with artwork on the wall, maroon chairs, and a friendly receptionist sitting at the front desk. The obstetrics and gynecology practice serves a high-income suburb of Washington, DC. Framed photographs on the wall advertise the center’s physicians who’ve made lists of the city’s best doctors. It’s a modern, upscale doctor office. But when it needs to share patient records, it turns to an outdated technology: the fax machine...
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The HITECH Era – A Patient-Centered Perspective
We appreciate the recent perspectives published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the positive impact that it and resulting health IT policies have had on U.S. health care.1,2 The perspectives highlighted the remarkable increase in adoption and use of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past eight years, thanks to the HITECH Act and to ONC’s and CMS’s implementation of it with major advice and help from the multi-stakeholder HIT Policy and Standards committees...
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The Importance Of Usability In Healthcare Technology
Patients use technology to manage and coordinate their care now more than ever before. As Meaningful Use stages 2 and 3 approach, this will only increase. Patients will be using patient portals, for example, to glean information from their records and make informed decisions regarding their health. They will view, question and validate provider remarks, thus improving accuracy, awareness and patient /provider relationships. Read More »
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