Successful disease management is a team sport. However, there is one player...

Workflow is when one action or event triggers the start of another action or event that...

The Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program has taken center stage...

Be it a coastal hurricane or live combat situation overseas...

As the federal government's meaningful-use incentives dismantle the financial...

Buying an electronic health record (EHR) system now has potential risks and rewards. If providers adopt EHRs and are certified for meaningful use for at least 90 days...

Standard fee-for-service payment models will soon face what may be their most viable competition to date: accountable care. Established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010, accountable care organizations (ACOs) represent integrated care...

The deadline set by the Department of Health and Human Services for U.S. health records systems to implement the International Statistical...

Healthcare organizations are in the throes of a data explosion. Government incentives — such as the HITECH provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Most physicians believe that, to show meaningful use and qualify for government incentives, they will need an electronic medical record (EMR) system. This may not be accurate, because several EMR systems on the market today may not certify as EHR Technology under meaningful use largely due to limitations of the client-server architecture. A new type of application known as an "integrated health record" (IHR), offered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, may include all the necessary components to demonstrate meaningful use. The IHR provides better connectivity and discrete data in comparison to the capabilities of traditional EMRs. Considering the IHR's patient-centric data structure, which accepts information from multiple sources, and its decision support, the IHR may actually offer more to improve the quality-of-care coordination and patient safety than a traditional EMR.

Today's advanced service desk professional should be able to provide assistance between the major IT platforms while simultaneously dealing with the usual clinical processes.

With the rapid deployment of complex IT implementations in healthcare, the need for enhanced IT support services has never been more urgent — and will only increase in the near future, particularly with ARRA requirements taking effect in 2011. It has never been truer that "meaningful use requires meaningful support."

In addition, the sophistication of current IT systems is increasing at an exponential rate. Whether developed in-house or partnered with a healthcare-specific provider, the need for an equally sophisticated support network is critical in the most literal sense. The focus should be on an enhanced help desk which is really more of a complete "service desk."

Current EHRs capture most information — patient demographics, medications and problem lists — as structured data, and often codify the details to support billing instead of clinical activities.

Cautionary tales of throwing the patient out with the paper — in technical terms, failing to fully utilize unstructured clinicians' notes in the EHR — are surfacing everywhere. In her April 22 New York Times commentary, Pauline Chen, MD, discussed the importance of the patient narrative, and the challenges of replicating nuances of care in current EHRs. A month earlier, Gordon Schiff, MD, and David W. Bates, MD, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that "free-text narrative will often be superior to point-and-click boilerplate in accurately capturing a patient's history."

Thought-critical, free-text physicians' notes are under threat. Current EHRs capture most information — patient demographics, medications and problem lists — as structured data, and often codify the details to support billing instead of clinical activities. The frequent use of the word "structured" in the definition for meaningful use released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) may further encourage and compound this trend.

Due to uncompensated care, many hospitals are losing money from their emergency departments (EDs). Eligibility screening can help reverse the trend.

Many uninsured patients do not know that they may qualify for a range of public and private healthcare programs. Screening ED patients to determine health-insurance eligibility for programs, such as Medicaid, and facilitating a patient's application to these programs, can provide hospitals with funds to cover otherwise uncompensated care. Allocating the necessary levels of staff and finances to address eligibility, however, is often not economically feasible — and will become less so in three years, when healthcare reform mandates take effect.

The adoption of EMR technology holds the promise of improving processing times, patient care, information redundancy and records integrity.

A quick visit to any online practice-management buying guide reveals dozens of alternatives from companies whose products are designed to streamline the operations of today's healthcare practices. Whether single-tenant installed or multitenant systems built on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, the technology space has grown increasingly crowded as insurers and practitioners strive to operate more efficiently and deliver better patient care.

Simple ways exist for implementing technical safeguards to mitigate security risks, while becoming compliant and maintaining current levels of service.

Government-mandated migration to electronic medical records (EMR) brings with it inherent risks of healthcare information technology. Patient data in digital format is constantly at risk from intentional data manipulation or theft, accidental record access, and the ever-present risk of exposure to malware.

Other issues include the high cost of initial implementation, the logistical challenge that comes with necessary work-flow restructuring and the pressure to maintain current levels of service without interruption. Often, these issues pose significant challenges to business continuity and take priority over security — which can threaten compliance with HIPAA.

The chasm between finance and nursing can be addressed with features and functions that safeguard the quality of patient care by optimizing appropriate and effective staffing.

Finance and nursing have different perspectives and priorities for hospital-information technology. This is particularly evident in the evaluation of enterprise work-force-management systems for staffing and scheduling. In fact, when it comes to staffing and scheduling, there is a chasm between finance and nursing.

Monitoring service provides end-user analytics and assures the hospital of the availability of its physician-application site.

The opening of two hospitals in 2009 — expected to attract many new patients and prospective physicians — prompted a renewed focus on El Camino Hospital's Web operations. Specifically, the hospital needed to leverage its Web presence to better serve the needs of this growing number of patients and physicians, in a cost-effective, productive and brand-enhancing way.

Providers can take a number of actions right now to reduce healthcare costs, and improve efficiency and effectiveness of the U.S. healthcare system.

So what is the future of healthcare? Nobody knows for sure, but it must change, and we must strive for quality care that is affordable and delivered by a sustainable system for all parties involved. It will take us years to get to where the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now steering the direction of healthcare information technology — moving to electronic health records (EHRs) and establishing a nationwide electronic health-information system (HIS).

Appliances, free software and software-as-a-service offerings all provide feature benefits, as well.

Telephone consultations constitute 10 percent to 20 percent of all primary-care interactions, up to 80 percent of after-hours care, and account for more than one quarter of all medical decisions in some sub-specialties. Though phone interactions are characterized by a greater probability of malpractice lawsuits than face-to-face interactions, providers document fewer than 30 percent of phone interactions and most commonly rely on medically untrained phone operators to screen and relay messages to on-call providers.

Business-process management software enables the automation of goal-directed processes across people and systems, and continuously monitors patient events.

Today, cost concerns are greater than ever. With the rise of consumerism, individuals also are becoming more involved in their own healthcare decisions. Both patients and physicians alike are viewing health plans more as allies and also as important sources of critically needed healthcare data.

Fortunately, technology has changed, and the industry now has the tools it needs to quickly deploy new cost-cutting approaches and broaden its role as "health and wellness" facilitators. In addition, many health plans have already been using this technology to gain administrative efficiencies. Now, plans need to turn that power to clinical activities.

The importance of electronic health records increases exponentially when made available throughout the healthcare community.

The delivery of healthcare relies on accurate, up-to-date patient information. Unfortunately, much of that information resides in individual stores of paper, electronic records, databases and files scattered across all of the systems of numerous stakeholders. This is where electronic health records (EHRs) and health-information exchanges (HIEs) shine, and why so much of the national discussion now under way about the need to cut costs and increase care focuses on the meaningful use of EHRs within and among providers.