HITECH Act

See the following -

Precision Medicine Requires Unlocking Data from EHRs, Other Sources

Greg Slabodkin | HealthData Management | May 6, 2015

Venture Funding for Digital Health in 2015 Reaches 2014 Level
Health information technology is “foundational” to President Obama’s $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative aimed at treating the specific needs and characteristics of individual patients, according to Karen DeSalvo, M.D., national coordinator for HIT. Read More »

Tech Companies Blew Their Chance with Health Records

Chris Tomlinson | Houston Chronicle | April 10, 2015

Turns out, though, that the tech industry is just as selfish as any other private concern. A new report from the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology finds that instead of innovating, companies developing electronic health records did their best to create expensive systems that were very difficult to share, all in the hope of locking clients into lucrative, long-term contracts. Instead of developing standardized, open source software that would allow the easy transfer of health records from a doctor's office in Houston to an emergency room in Dallas, software developers sold systems that make such a transfer almost impossible if the doctor and hospital don't have the same vendor.

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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 Staggering Cost Of An Epic Electronic Health Record Might Not Be Worth It

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | June 18, 2012

...[B]ecause it is no small task to deploy [Epic, Judith Faulkner] is there all the way to hand-hold jittery CIOs, and help them get millions of dollars in government subsidies by showing meaningful use of her EHR. Her not-for-profit clientèle will need every penny of those taxpayers’ dollars, but they won’t cover anywhere near the staggering cost of an Epic EHR. Read More »

Top Rated Electronic Health Record Software Is Free

Dan Munro | Forbes.com | July 27, 2014

Earlier this month, Medscape published the results of their recent survey (here) which asked 18,575 physicians across 25 specialties to rate their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. For overall satisfaction, the #1 ranked EHR solution was the VA’s Computerized Patient Record System ‒ also known as VistA. It was built using open‒source software and is therefore license free.

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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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Using Digital Ledger Technology To Put Physicians Back In Control

Our healthcare system is failing. It costs more and has overall worse outcomes than any other industrialized nation. It is failing because those on the front lines of healthcare - the physicians and patients- have no say in how the system is run. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) - otherwise known as blockchain - has the ability to change that. DLT allows for secure direct peer to peer (In healthcare this means patient to doctor and doctor to doctor) communication and data transfer. No more storage of private information and transactions on centralized data capturing systems like electronic health records platforms.

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VistA and Epic: A Tale of Two Systems

Over the last few weeks, access to VA health care for veterans has been all over the news.  At the same time, the DoD is moving to procure a replacement EHR system.  So it seems there is no time like the present to review a recent RAND case studies report entitled “Redirecting Innovation in U.S. Health Care: Options to Decrease Spending and Increase Value.” The case studies include a chapter comparing America’s two most broadly deployed EHRs: The VA’s VistA and Epic.

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Why ONC Seeks New Authorities Over Health Data Blocking

Kyle Murphy, PhD | EHR Intelligence | March 23, 2016

Increases in EHR adoption and the growth of EHR use since the passing of the law creating the EHR Incentive Programs and defining the authorities of the Office of the National Coordinator require Congress to provide the federal agency with new powers related to health data blocking. That's what National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, told members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform during a Subcommittee on Information Technology hearing on Tuesday...

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Will PHIEs Lead the Consumer Medical Record Revolution and Bridge the Gap Between Personal Health Records and EHRs?

It has only been about two generations since traveling medicine shows were common forums for medical information. Phony research and medical claims were used to back up the sale of all kinds of dubious medicines. Potential patients had no real method to determine what was true or false, let alone know what their real medical issues were. Healthcare has come a long way since those times, but similar to the lack of knowing the compositions of past medical concoctions and what ailed them, today’s digital age patients still don’t know what is in their medical records. They need transparency, not secret hospital –vendor contracts and data blocking, like the practices being questioned by the New York Times. One patient, Regina Holliday resorts to using art to bring awareness to the lack of patient’s access to their own medical records.

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