Next week, 50,000 of our closest friends will gather together in Orlando to learn about the latest trends in the healthcare IT industry. I’ll be giving a few keynote addresses, trying to predict what the Trump administration will bring, identify those technologies that will move from hype to reality, and highlighting which products are only “compiled” in Powerpoint - a powerful development language that is really easy to modify! The Trump administration is likely to reduce regulatory burden but is unlikely to radically change the course of value-based purchasing. This means that interoperability, analytics, and workflow products that help improve outcomes while reducing costs will still be important...
electronic health records (EHRs)
See the following -
Hagel Orders DoD To 'Restructure' Path Toward Integrated Health Record
Jared Serbu | Federal News Radio | April 17, 2013
The Defense Department is "way behind" the Department of Veterans Affairs as the government's two largest bureaucracies push toward the longstanding objective of achieving interoperable health record systems, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday. Read More »
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Hagel Says DoD To Adopt Commercial EHR
Bernie Monegain | Government Health IT | May 22, 2013
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has notified the Department of Defense that it will look for an electronic health record system available on the commercial market rather than develop its own based on the Department of Veterans Affairs VistA system. Read More »
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Halamka Discusses Three Disruptive Care Coordination Innovations In Use at Beth Israel
By John D. Halamka, MD | July 20, 2016
Would you buy an iPhone if the only apps that ran on it were written by Apple? Maybe, but the functionality would not be very diverse. The same can be said of EHRs. Athena, Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and self developed EHRs such as BIDMC’s webOMR are purpose-built transaction engines for capturing data. However, it is impossible for any single vendor to provide all the innovation required by the marketplace to support new models of care I’m a strong believer in the concept of third party modules that layer on top of traditional EHRs in the same way that apps run in the iPhone ecosystem...
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Halamka Evaluates Blockchain for Health Information Exchange
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 31, 2016
Yesterday, I read a New York Times article about a possible successor to Bitcoin called Ethereum, which provides a distributed database (no central repository) for the purpose of tracking financial transactions. I immediately thought of the challenge we have turning silos of medical information into a linked, complete, accurate, secure, lifetime medical record. Might blockchain technology be useful in healthcare? I posted the question to my colleagues, Arien Malec (VP, Data Platform and Acquisition Tools at RelayHealth and the new Chair of the HIT Standards Committee) and David McCallie (SVP of Medical Informatics at Cerner).
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Halamka Gears Up for HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 15, 2017
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Halamka on China's Expanding Healthcare System
By John D. Halamka, MD | October 22, 2014
On Monday and Tuesday I met with government, industry, and academic stakeholders in Qingdao and Shenzhen China to discuss healthcare technology, patient empowerment, and process improvement in the rapidly expanding Chinese healthcare system. Over the past few years, I’ve watched the Chinese government gradually change policy - from promoting a fully public healthcare system, to limited pilots of private facilities, to embracing public/private partnerships... Read More »
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Halamka on MU3 Regs: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 26, 2015
On Friday March 20, CMS released the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program-Stage 3 and ONC released the 2015 Edition Health Information Technology (Health IT) Certification Criteria, 2015 Edition Base Electronic Health Record (EHR) Definition, and ONC Health IT Certification Program Modifications. Perhaps the most important statement in the entire 700+ pages is the following from the CMS rule: "Stage 3 of meaningful use is expected to be the final stage and would incorporate portions of the prior stages into its requirements."
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Halamka on the JASON Report
By John D. Halamka, MD | May 14, 2014
On 4/09/2014, AHRQ released the JASON report, facilitated by Mitre. JASON is an independent group of scientists who advise the United States government on matters of science and technology. The intent of the report is to make recommendations for a new healthcare IT architecture to accelerate interoperability. Read More »
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Halamka on the Most Important Interoperability Story of 2016
By John D. Halamka, MD | December 21, 2016
You may have missed or not understood the implications of this press release. Here's a guest post from Micky Tripathi, the CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative that explains everything you need to know: "This summary provides some additional information on the recently announced interoperability agreement between CommonWell and The Sequoia Project (Carequality). For full disclosure, I am on the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project, a contractor to CommonWell, and participated in the discussions leading to the agreement. The description below does not necessarily reflect the views of either of these organizations or any of the named vendors...
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Halamka on What's Next for Electronic Health Records
By John D. Halamka, MD | May 21, 2017
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...
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Halamka Says We Can and Must Improve Healthcare Management
By John D. Halamka, MD | September 12, 2017
As a physician and CIO, I’m quick to spot inefficiencies in healthcare workflow. More importantly, as the care navigator for my family, I have extensive firsthand experience with patient facing processes. My wife’s cancer treatment, my father’s end of life care, and my own recent primary hypertension diagnosis taught me how we can do better. Last week, when my wife received a rejection in coverage letter from Harvard Pilgrim/Caremark, it highlighted the imperative we have to improve care management workflow in the US. Since completing her estrogen positive, progesterone positive, HER2 negative breast cancer treatment in 2012 (chemotherapy, surgery, radiation), she’s been maintained on depot lupron and tamoxifen to suppress estrogen...
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Halamka Sets Healthcare Innovation Priorities for 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | January 4, 2017
As we begin 2017, what should be the focus of our work over the next year?... Regardless of the policies, repeals, and delays of the Trump administration, we’ll still need to optimize usability and support the four goals of value-based purchasing - quality measurement, total medical expense management, practice process improvement and technology adoption. BIDMC has already created a prototype of groupware documentation and we should complete our next generation inpatient documentation solution by mid 2017. Part of that work incorporates open source secure texting as part of the medical record. We’re also piloting Google’s G-suite so that our stakeholders can store/share, collaborate, and communicate on any device from anywhere using only a browser...
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Halamka Summarizes the CMS Meaningful Use Final Rule
By John D. Halamka, MD | October 21, 2015
I’ve been asked to summarize the 752 page CMS Meaningful Use Final Rule...Between the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and the publication of the CMS Final Rule, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) passed to include sunsetting the Meaningful Use payment adjustment for professionals at the end of 2018. Also, MACRA requires the establishment of a Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) which would incorporate Meaningful Use. The comment period will be used in an attempt to align the Meaningful Use program and the MIPS program...Stage 3 is more controversial and I will focus on that.
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Halamka's Dispatch from HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 22, 2017
As I wrote last week, I expected 2017 HIMSS to be filled with Wearables, Big Data, Social Networking concepts from other industries, Telemedicine, and Artificial Intelligence. I was not disappointed. 42,000 of my closest friends each walked an average of 5 miles per day through the Orlando Convention Center. One journalist told me “It’s overwhelming. You do your best to look professional and wear comfy shoes!” After 50 meetings, and 12 meals in 3 days, here’s my impression of the experience...
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Halamka's Health IT Observations from Japan and New Zealand
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 8, 2017
This week I’ve taken vacation time to help my colleagues in Japan and New Zealand with national IT planning. As I often say, the healthcare IT challenges are the same all over the world, but the cultural context is different. In Japan, I spent 2 days in Tokyo and 1 day in Kyoto, lecturing, meeting, and listening to stakeholders. There is a great desire to share data for care coordination and clinical trials/clinical research. Telemedicine/telehealth is increasingly important in an aging Japanese society that has increasing healthcare needs but a limited number of caregivers and few opportunities to increase healthcare budgets. Here are a few of the current issues we discussed...
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