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Yesterday's HIT Standards Committee included important discussions about NHIN Direct and a new Interoperability Framework supported by several ONC RFPs.
While the Apple iPhone was first targeted at the general consumer, Apple has been taking the necessary steps to bring this device into the enterprise, directly competing with RIM’s Blackberry. Unseating the Blackberry in many sectors, such as finance, may be near impossible but healthcare is another story.
Jerry Buchanan, Program Manager and Scrum Master at eMids Technologies, Inc., an IT and BPO consulting company, listed five features that are missing from EHRs in a recent article in Healthcare IT News: Information, not data; comprehensive health history; information tailored for various users; tracking the transition of care; and patient-side management of information. Some of the features he highlights seemed so basic to me, it made me ask: If EHRs are not turning data into actionable information and holding comprehensive health history, what are they doing?
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has announced that it “plans to conduct a nationwide survey of public opinion about electronic health information exchange and the privacy and security of personal data that is shared.”
Telehealth has been claiming its rightful place in the headlines over the past couple months, with news of regional funding for telehealth networks and the arrival of new telemedicine technologies becoming an almost daily occurrence. Now that an estimated one-third of the nation’s best and brightest physicians are eyeing the exits, we can expect telehealth’s role in healthcare to really pick up steam. Necessity is still the mother of all invention.
The Commonwealth Fund released a report on the usage of EMRs in Denmark. All primary care physicians (PCPs) use EMRs and 98 percent can manage their patients electronically. Usage went from 15 percent in the early 1990s to more than 90 percent by 2000. The keys to success are a coherent national policy, financial incentives to adopt health IT and technical support for providers, according to the report.
I read a pretty convincing blog from Software Advice, a Web site that provides comparisons of EHRs, on how clinical trial participation could be the tipping point for physicians to implement EHRs. It's not apparent how many physician offices will deploy EHRs as a result of the federal incentives. It's probably safe to say that the numbers could be higher, given the concerns that have been voiced about existing barriers to EHR adoption. One of those concerns is a perceived lack of business case for EHRs. So this topic of clinical trial participation is a promising one, and one that should be discussed widely.
Lawsuits are being filed against state agencies and state universities when residents find out that sensitive health information is used in ways they never expected or gave permission for.
A couple months ago, we pointed to the concerns many doctors have about the capacity of EHRs to capture the details they rely on when diagnosing patients. But one doctor is concerned about something even more basic: getting doctors to read the notes of physicians the patient has seen before.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) submitted to ONC its recommendations for changes to the Interim Final Rule on Monday, March 15. All the comments are in. Since the IFRs were released, we've been mucking around in the details (along with the devil, so to speak). As we wait for ONC to sift through the recommendations and figure out which to incorporate, we as an industry need to ask ourselves: What's the end goal?