Jeff Rowe
The Los Angeles Times printed an interesting article about the rising use of medical scribes - young, often pre-med students - who follow physicians on their rounds to input notes into the hospital's EMR system.
If you've got a lot of money and your reputation on the line in an effort to create a huge paradigm shift in how we as an industry deliver healthcare, you need to create an infrastructure and make available the resources to support this tsunami of social and technological change. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has carefully architected such an infrastructure.
Federal incentives for the meaningful use of EHRs has been a hot topic within the discipline and profession of chiropractic. A fairly recent article in Chiropractic Economics brought up some interesting issues.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan pegs the EHR market to double in growth in three years, from $1.3 billion in 2009 to an estimated $2.6 billion in 2012. The research firm noted that the HITECH Act's federal incentive programs and healthcare reform are two of the drivers for the uptick.
The recent announcement by Detroit Medical Center officials that the deployment of their EMR has
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced that it has authorized the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology and the Drummond Group to certify EHR products to qualify for the federal incentives for meaningful use of EHRs.
A recent report shows that despite the big push for health IT adoption, only 2 percent of hospitals in the U.S. can meet the federal government's criteria for meaningful use of EHRs. Are you surprised?
While many healthcare providers are scrambling to apply the new Meaningful Use guidelines to their practices in order to qualify for HITECH incentives, RECs charged with assisting providers may want to look beyond financial incentives to other factors that support or inhibit organizational change.
Several studies point to a higher adoption rate of smartphones by physicians than the general public. Given the historical low rates of technology adoption within the healthcare industry, this news may come as a surprise.
Despite the relaxation of the proposed meaningful use criteria for the adoption of EHRs and EMRs, critics claim that the final rule is still too stringent and the rushed timeline will doom the whole transformation to a fully electronic healthcare delivery system. Politics aside, the critiques are actually a good thing.