HealthGrades. Office of the Inspector General. RAC. These are just a few...

Healthcare IT is rapidly gaining attention thanks to the spotlight on healthcare reform...

Health information technology (HIT) has always held the promise of reducing costs and medical errors, improving efficiencies...

With the impending implementation of the federal meaningful-use (MU) standards...

It's amazing the amount of work the federal government can create for everyone else in just a few...

When Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act last year, government made enormous strides in advancing technology adoption in healthcare. By providing incentives to organizations that successfully implement electronic health records (EHRs)...

Research published in October 2008 in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia stated that 44 percent of 140 U.S. academic departments had implemented or were planning to acquire an anesthesia information-management system (AIMS). Industry data suggests that outside of academic environments...

The healthcare tea leaves are already settling, and ARRA/HITECH legislation passed to accelerate the adoption of EHR has had exactly the opposite effect for many...

For most medical practices in the U.S., implementing an electronic health record (EHR) is not a question of if; it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that electronic...

In October of 2011, the staff at Botsford Hospital, a 330-bed, 2,300-employee hospital located in Farmington Hills, Mich., will experience its own version of...

More than 40 years ago, the introduction of problem lists in clinical care was aimed at controlling the complexity of the rapidly expanding universe of...

How do we train hundreds of thousands of doctors to become meaningful users in a year or two in time for full stimulus incentives?.

Much of the dialogue around personalized healthcare, comparative effectiveness research and evidence-based medicine (EBM) has focused on the cost of the scientific and biotechnology breakthroughs we have witnessed in recent years, as well as the ethical, regulatory and reimbursement changes required in supporting this new model of care.

From the impact of HITECH to the industry's perception of healthcare IT, our panel of experts weighs in on some heavy issues:

The federal government's role in healthcare IT continues to evolve; where do you see it heading after a couple years of HITECH implementations? Will a single, lead certification and standards entity emerge after the HITECH dust settles?

Connecticut's first health information exchange (HIE) moved recently from inception into piloting when a network of hospitals and clinics began sharing patient data as part of a project that will connect several federally qualified health centers to the exchange.

Among those participating in the pilot project is Staywell Health Care of Waterbury, Conn., one of two qualified health centers in the state, participating in part because the clinic is one of the few to have adopted electronic health records (EHR). The clinic moved to an EHR in July 2009.

One of the chief concerns of widespread implementation of electronic medical records (EMRs) is how to secure those records. With the volume of electronic data growing exponentially and access points expanding outside the hospital walls, securing access to hospital networks and the protected health records they contain requires strong, two-factor authentication. However, solutions like security tokens are costly to implement and a pain for IT departments and end users.

It's what we don't hear at EHR and HIE conference presentations that gets our attention. We hear the assertion that Web-based EHRs are superior to other alternatives for smaller practices, but we don't hear much about their bad points. One provider's solution is another provider's problem — particularly when 100,000 primary care physicians (known as priority primary care physicians, or PPCPs, when they sign up with regional extension centers) are involved. The "single-deployment approach is best for everyone" assertion being propagated is a dangerous and potentially expensive myth. In our opinion, there are three major deployment approaches each practice should consider.

Since our article ran in the July issue of Health Management Technology on the impact of delays in defining meaningful use (MU), the long-awaited update to January's interim MU release was finally issued on July 13. MSP is already analyzing the changes and updating its MSP EHR Selector to reflect them. The EHR Selector is a Web-based tool that uses 689 criteria to characterize all EHR products from developers who submit them and are willing to have them independently vetted. Once this update has been completed, MSP will invite (via e-mail) all currently subscribed EHR developers to update their product profile to indicate compliance with the final MU standards. The EHR Selector includes an MU profile that allows all MU criteria to be asserted with one mouse click.

What practice owners should consider when looking at electronic health records systems.

Passage of the HITECH Act provides medical practices a windfall of incentives (ranging up to $44,000) to adopt and use a certified electronic health record (EHR) system in a meaningful way. Because of this, there has been a renewed effort from solution providers to promote solutions as a one-stop shop for all the needs of the practices. At the same time, practices are trying to implement a solution and reap the benefits ASAP. However, before the practices start scouting and evaluating products, it is important to understand that the implementation of an EHR product is a complex activity requiring dedicated effort and due diligence. The numbers of implementations that fail in the first year of their implementation provide testimony to this.

Because of the emphasis by the Obama Administration on converting 100,000 primary-care physicians using paper-based medical records to become users of electronic medical records (EMRs) that achieve meaningful use (MU), there is strong interest in how well the EMR market is doing.

Driven by CCHIT certification, meaningful use and ARRA/HITECH incentive programs, the purchase of electronic health records/electronic medical records systems is looming large on many hospitals' horizons — most likely for this fiscal year.

According to a report recently released by the American College of Physicians, "Increasing the use of quality measurement as part of EHR systems is critical to achieving meaningful use of health information technology."

Clinicians are able to insert their thoughts and assessments into the documentation, allowing subsequent caregivers to understand and coordinate care more effectively.

If one reads clinician-authored critiques of the current state of electronic health records (EHRs), a recurring theme emerges: the poor quality of clinical notes in EHRs. The authors may cite excessive use of "cut and paste" to replicate past documentation (often without appropriate changes), excessive citation of results that needlessly expand a note's length, and the absence of any clear articulation of the clinician's thoughts, judgments and priorities.

Today, barely more than a quarter of physicians use electronic medical records (EMR) in an ambulatory setting, and roughly only 10 percent of hospitals have the technology to allow physicians to enter orders directly into a computer for transmission to the laboratory, pharmacy or other units. The consolidation inherent in a move to EMR has a number of implications, including the increased importance of IT infrastructure recovery capabilities.

LibertyHealth upgraded its wireless network to assure users had the 24-hour access needed by healthcare applications.

Patients' vital signs are not the only information LibertyHealth needs to monitor at its hospitals, health centers and other facilities in the Jersey City, N.J., region. From high-tech infant care and adult surgery to in-hospital rehabilitation and home-care services, the system's medical personnel depend on a wide range of networked applications. These, in turn, depend on a reliable wireless network.

Two systems replace traditional paper-based informed-consent process with an electronic time-out checklist integrated into electronic records.

The "time-out" process is an established, but often overlooked, mechanism for preventing a critical patient-safety issue: wrong-site/wrong-procedure/wrong-patient surgery. At a minimum, this process involves a standard by which members of the surgical team are required to agree on the correct patient identity, the correct procedure site and the procedure to be performed.

Healthcare system replaces time-consuming review process with a content-management system for developing and maintaining evidence-based order sets.

In the spring of 2008, Aurora Health Care experienced tremendous growth and was set to launch two healthcare facilities. The creation, adoption and maintenance of clinical order sets within the hospitals and clinics at Aurora was time consuming and inefficient. The process for summarizing clinical evidence, creating, reviewing and standardizing order sets, particularly in reaching a consensus among the physicians, was slow.

An Aide for EMRs

By Farida Ali, CEO, Dynamic Computer

The industry is witnessing the beginning of a trend of including automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) with electronic medical-record (EMR) adoption. EMR adoption has lagged despite a strong push from both private and public entities. Simultaneously, there has been an increase in the adoption of real-time locating systems (RTLS) and other technologies in the healthcare market. The paired adoption of EMR and AIDC systems holds the highest potential for improving patient care, reducing costs and minimizing risks.

AIDC refers to methods that automatically identify objects and then capture data about them directly into computer systems. These include radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies, bar codes, biometrics, optical character recognition (OCR), voice recognition and other electronic means of automatically identifying people and tagged objects.