patient safety

See the following -

Escaping The EHR Trap — The Future Of Health IT

Kenneth D. Mandl and Isaac S. Kohane | The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) | June 14, 2012

It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information-technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their “civilian” life.
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Fast Could Lead To Furious Over EHR Meaningful Use

Editorial | American Medical News | February 18, 2013

CMS’ schedule for physicians to show electronic health record proficiency is too ambitious given system limitations and issues that haven’t been addressed from stage 1. Read More »

Fax Is Not a Machine, It Is a Technology

Once more I am listening to a presentation on interoperability. These always get a little uncomfortable - especially in the early going - because I can almost predict where the presenter will go horribly wrong and do a complete disservice to the audience (generally somewhere between slides 3 and 8). This time it was slide 6 where the speaker inserts stock picture of a decrepit old fax machine with paper cascading off a desk and onto the floor. This comes along with the typical lecture on everything that is wrong with "fax". With the lemmings in the audience nodding/snickering along, the speaker proceeds to misinform and mislead the group. Cringe-worthy really. What's misleading? Pretty much everything he says.

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Fax Technology is the Cornerstone of Interoperability. Here's Why.

Fax is the dominant information exchange technology in U.S. healthcare, outpacing secure direct messaging 25-to-1. Most of that is exchanged using inefficient and unsecure machines. With the emergence of cloud-based fax technology to facilitate secure system-to-system document transfer, the use of cloud fax needs to be part of every CTO's/CIO's digital strategy...The evolution of fax from paper-based to cloud transmission and storage - Cloud Fax Technology (CFT) - is a key step that enables providers to comply with HIPAA and other regulations. Further strengthening CFT as a key component in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) is its evolution into Direct Messaging platforms, enabling the seamless exchange of Patient Health Information (PHI) between the diverse data and document management systems used by labs, pharmacies, doctor's offices, hospitals, and billing providers. CFT supports and contributes to the goal of interoperability...

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FCC To Hire Healthcare Director, Step Up Health Efforts

Brian Dolan | MobiHealthNews | September 25, 2012

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public briefing this week with its mHealth Task Force, which formed just this past June to work with various other healthcare professionals and technologists to create a report full of “concrete” next steps that the FCC (and other agencies) can take to facilitate the adoption and acceleration of mHealth in the United States. Read More »

Flagship Project on Precision Medicine for Underserved Women Will Advance Learning Health System

Press Release | Open Source Health, Inc., Learning Health Community | March 1, 2016

Marc Wine, a supporter of the LHS - Precision Medicine PCOS Project and participant in Learning Health Community initiatives, who attended the summit hosted by the president said, "One goal is to seek collaboration with underserved communities in genomics, open data and integrative medicine. This will result in engaging individual patients in ways that will move them from dependency on fragmented healthcare to the point where patients can use their own evidence-based genetic information to make the very best health decisions." The Precision Medicine PCOS Project is aimed at developing a protocol for women with PCOS while employing an integrative medicine approach to treatment based on the participant's molecular makeup, clinical data and available scientific knowledge.

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Good Health IT vs. Bad Health IT

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | January 26, 2013

The title of Dr. Scot Silverstein's teaching website at Drexel University, “Contemporary Issues in Medical Informatics: Good Health IT, Bad Health IT, and Common Examples of Healthcare IT Difficulties,” summarizes the veteran physician informaticist's general outlook on the current state of affairs in health information technology. It tells you nothing, however, of the passion with which Silverstein speaks or writes about the subject. Read More »

Government Asks Health IT Industry To Police Itself On Patient Safety

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | July 5, 2013

In a plan published earlier this week, the government stopped short of establishing a new agency to investigate patient deaths related to health information technology, as recommended by the Institute of Medicine. [...] Read More »

Green Light For £260 Million Technology Fund To Make The NHS Safer

Staff Writer | NHS England | May 22, 2013

Doctors and nurses are to get better information about patients so people get safer care thanks to a new £260 million NHS technology fund, announced by NHS England today. Read More »

Halamka on MU3 Regs: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

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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Harvard MOOC: Patient Safety And Quality With Ashish Jha

Ashish Jha | The Health Care Blog | May 15, 2014

Last year, about 43 million people around the globe were injured from the hospital care that was intended to help them; as a result, many died and millions suffered long-term disability...

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Has EHR Usability Suffered For The Sake Of Adoption Speed?

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | September 13, 2013

The need for speed may have left truly meaningful use of electronic health records in the dust, says Larry Pawola, Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Health Informatics in a blog for The Information Daily. Read More »

HBR: Redefining The Patient Experience With Collaborative Care

Leonard L. Berry and Jamie Dunham | MRA Alerts and Updates | September 20, 2013

It’s a common patient complaint about the people involved in their care: “Sometimes the left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing. I don’t feel everyone is working together.” To address this issue, nurses at ThedaCare employed lean techniques to create a patient-centered, team-based model that’s producing solid results. Read More »

Health Information Errors Cited Among Top 10 Health IT Hazards

Susan D. Hall | FierceHealthIT | November 6, 2012

Three of the 10 top health technology hazards cited in a report from ECRI Institute deal with errors in information management. Read More »

Health IT Interoperability Reimagined!

The evolution of fax from paper-based to cloud transmission and storage (CloudFax) is a key step that enables CloudFax providers to comply with HIPAA and other regulations. Further strengthening of CloudFax as a key component in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) will be its evolution into a Direct Messaging platform that enables the seamless exchange of Patient Health Information (PHI) between the diverse data and document management systems used by labs, pharmacies, doctor's offices, hospitals, and billing providers. CloudFax will support and contribute to the goals of interoperability. Consider:

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