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It's a chilling reality -- one often overlooked in annual mortality statistics: Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. -- third only to heart disease and cancer -- claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year. At a Congressional hearing July 17, patient safety officials put their best ideas forward on how to solve the crisis, with IT often at the center of discussions.
Geisinger Health System announced a new initiative this week that will offer patients access to advanced cancer treatment protocols and clinical trials. By partnering with Hamburg, Germany-based Indivumed, the health system has set its sights on the "next generation" of oncology, according to President and CEO Glenn D. Steele, Jr., MD.
Jonathan Bush, former ambulance driver, founder of birthing centers in San Diego and co-founder and CEO of athenahealth, a public company valued at nearly $5 billion, can add author to his list of achievements.
Venture capital funding for health information technology surpassed $1 billion for the first time in Q2 2014 -- far surpassed, in fact, with $1.8 billion raised in 161 deals, more than doubling the $861 million raised in the previous quarter.
Sure, HIPAA adds a layer of privacy protection for certain health data -- if organizations actually comply with it -- but there remains myriad avenues of mining health data and selling to the highest bidder that do not fall under the purview of HIPAA's privacy and security rules. And they may surprise you.
There has been no increase in new patient visits since the Affordable Care Act took effect. This, according to ACAView, a report from cloud-based EHR company athenahealth and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The report, released today, is the first of quarterly reports to come gauging the various metrics associated with healthcare reform.
As IBM and Apple team up for a new "mobile first" platform, we could be seeing what happens when the power of Watson analytics is put into a smartphone to be queried like Siri at the point of care.
BlackBerry continues to expand further its scope in the healthcare arena after one of its subsidiaries unveiled a new clinical operating system for medical devices.
Few healthcare IT policies these days are as delicate, sensitive and potentially emotionally explosive as efforts to restrict or regulate employee social media activity. And yet hospital hierarchies are routinely stepping on these political minefields as providers try to protect their reputations.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT continues to reshape itself as it adjusts to funding limits. To that end, National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, has outlined a new working group structure for ONC's Health IT Policy Committee.