I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly. In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...
John D. Halamka
See the following -
21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead
By John D. Halamka, MD | December 7, 2016
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athenahealth’s CEO Jonathan Bush to Headline HIMSS16 Views from the Top With Dr. John Halamka
Press Release |
athenahealth |
February 25, 2016
athenahealth, Inc....today announced that Jonathan Bush, athenahealth CEO, and Dr. John Halamka, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) CIO, will headline a Views from the Top session on the benefits of a future-proof, interoperable network at the 2016 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition (HIMSS16), taking place February 29 - March 4 in Las Vegas. During the session, “How Future-Proof HIT Infrastructure Supports Data Sharing,” Bush and Halamka will observe the interoperability landscape, exploring challenges and benefits of health information exchange, as well as identifying opportunities and imperatives for providers to participate amidst the industry shift to accountable care.
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Beth Israel's CareKit App Leverages FHIR for Patient Engagement
By John D. Halamka, MD, and Seth Berkowitz, MD | November 23, 2016
The following is a guest blog post from Seth Berkowitz, MD, who authors many of the innovative apps in the BIDMC Crowdsourcing program: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has developed BIDMC@home, a new app for engaging patients using Apple’s CareKit and ResearchKit frameworks and the HealthKit API. The app provides a flexible framework to help patients manage their health from home, as directed by their physicians. The app will be piloted in several specific patient populations and will eventually be offered to BIDMC’s entire network of over 250,000 patients...
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CareKit as an Enabler for Patient Generated Healthcare Data
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 23, 2016
As we move from fee for service to alternative payment models/value-based purchasing we will increasingly measure our progress based on outcomes and total medical expense. HealthKit was an enabler that led Beth Israel Deaconess to create BIDMC@Home, an iPhone and iPad app that uploads internet of things (blood pressure cuff, glucometer, scale, activity, sleep data etc.) to our electronic health record. CareKit, announced by Apple this week, takes us one step further on our wellness-focused journey.
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Clarifying MACRA Certification Requirements for Hospitals
By John D. Halamka, MD | September 14, 2016
With all the changes happening to Meaningful Use, Quality Measurement, and MACRA in 2016, I’ve been asked many questions by many organizations to help them plan for the future. As I’ve said many times, one of the great challenges we have is that the 2015 Edition final rule has an enormous scope extending beyond Meaningful Use with the notion that it can be coupled to every government healthcare IT program. Standards need to be based on requirements and specific use cases with little optionality, so creating a broadly scoped rule before the use cases are known just doesn’t work...
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Crafting a Next Generation IT strategy
By John D. Halamka, MD | July 8, 2014
During my 16 years as CIO, I’ve witnessed the transition from client server to web, from desktops to mobile, and from locally hosted to cloud. As Beth Israel Deaconess merges and acquires more hospitals, more practices and more care management capabilities, what are its strategic IT choices?...
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Creating Beth Israel's FY16 Information Systems Strategic Plan
By John D. Halamka, MD | July 15, 2015
I recently wrote about the process of setting FY16 Clinical Information System Priorities for the next year. That project is proceeding well and in parallel I’ve created my own contribution. I do not want to influence the stakeholder consensus at all, but members of the IS Governance committee asked for my opinion. Here’s my thinking...Each year, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Information Systems works with business owners to support BIDMC annual goals with information technology tactics. This ensures that the mission of BIDMC is supported by suitable operational tools. From 2012-2015, all hospitals in the US were compelled to focus their attention on Meaningful Use, ICD-10, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, and the Affordable Care Act. Since those projects are nearly completed, it is important for BIDMC stakeholders to enumerate the new technology priorities which will best support their activities in the coming year. Read More »
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Dispatch from Denmark
By John D. Halamka, MD | October 12, 2016
Denmark is a remarkable country of 5 million people with a robust social support system. Healthcare is provided for life as part of being Danish. If you lose your job, generous unemployment benefits provide for the ongoing well being of you and your family. Income inequality is among the lowest in the world (see the world mapped by income inequality below). When people gather together in Denmark, there is a sense of common purpose and shared experiences. The Danish call this “hygge” or coziness. I spoke about the experiences of the Meaningful Use program, the evolving US reimbursement system, and the quest for innovation - especially in the areas of social networking for healthcare, mobile, analytics, and cloud hosting...
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Google Joins VistA Team Proposing Open Source EHR for the Department of Defense
By Roger A. Maduro | January 28, 2015
Google has thrown its hat into the EHR ring by joining the team led by PwC which is proposing that the Department of Defense (DoD) upgrade their current EHR to Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS), a customized application built for the DoD and based on VistA, the open source EHR developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)...Google’s participation has enormous implications for both the DoD’s EHR and to the healthcare industry as a whole. By choosing the open source EHR team, Google...has sent a clear message to the world that VistA is the best option for the DoD.
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Halamaka Takes a Deep Dive on the MACRA NPRM
By John D. Halamka, MD | May 5, 2016
As promised last week, I’ve read and taken detailed notes on the entire 962 page MACRA notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) so that you will not have to. Although this post is long, it is better than the 20 hours of reading I had to do! Here is everything you need to know from an IT perspective about the MACRA NPRM...What is the MACRA NPRM trying to achieve with regard to healthcare IT? The MACRA NPRM proposes to consolidate components of three existing programs, the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), the Physician Value-based Payment Modifier (VM), and the Medicare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program for eligible professionals (EPs), creating a single set of reporting requirements. The rule would sunset payment adjustments under the current PQRS, VM, and the Medicare EHR Incentive Program for eligible professionals...
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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 Does FY16 Strategic Planning
By John D. Halamka, MD | August 25, 2015
As we gather together stakeholders for strategic planning of next year’s priorities, what are we hearing and what we have learned? 1. Clinicians are overwhelmed by the current demands of Meaningful Use, hundreds of quality measures, population health, care management, and patient/family engagement. All of these are good ideas individually but the sum of their requirements overwhelms providers. In an era when we’re trying to control costs, adding more clinical FTEs to spread the work over a large team is not possible. The end result is that providers spend hours each night catching up on the day’s documentation and are demanding better tools/automation to reduce their strain.
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Halamka Explains Background to athenahealth/BIDMC Collaboration
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 3, 2015
BIDMC and athenahealth announced a new and unique collaboration. The collaboration between the two organizations provides athenahealth the chance to take BIDMC’s experience to a much larger audience, hopefully making a difference to providers, patients, and payers across the country. athenahealth will also accelerate its ability to develop expanded functionality more rapidly than doing it alone. Read More »
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Halamka Gears Up for HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 15, 2017
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...
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Halamka on "The Dark Side of E-commerce"
By John D. Halamka, MD | April 26, 2017
As I mentioned in a recent post, Amazon has focused on the convenience of the customer instead of the convenience of their business. Yesterday’s New York Times highlighted the trend for the hotel industry to do the same. In my post, I lamented that some industries including old school industrial companies and healthcare have not widely adopted customer focused technologies. To their credit, Marvin Windows followed up with me and promised to accelerate their automation efforts. I was impressed. However, all is not completely rosy in the transformation from brick and mortar to e-commerce...
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