News
A new House bill introduced on Dec. 30 that would expand telehealth services in Medicare and Medicaid programs has garnered the support of the American Telemedicine Association.
Healthcare data breach numbers not only continue to trend upwards but they are also costing the industry a pretty penny, according to a recent report conducted by privacy research firm Ponemon Institute.
Interoperability is a lynchpin for health IT advancement, yet it is lacking, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told the audience at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology 2012 Annual Meeting, Dec. 12 in Washington, DC.
Healthcare's clinical community should view population health as a frontier for deepening understanding about the nature of disease, providing incisive clues about patient demographics, behavior patterns and physiological makeup. Large group samples hold the potential to unlock mysteries that physicians may not even realize exist, says Jonathan Teich, MD, chief medical information officer for Amsterdam-based Elsevier.
Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth, a provider of cloud-based EMRs, announced recently it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates, a mobile health company known for its point-of-care medical apps. athenahealth will pay about $293 million in cash. It's a match hailed by the executives of both companies, and also by industry analysts, as a smart move for athenahealth.
Board members at the St. Paul, Minn.-based HealthEast Care System have unanimously approved a five-year $135 million budget to build a new electronic health record (EHR) system.
Despite the potential of mobile healthcare, experts say they worry about the added risks of security breaches, privacy violations and other concerns that come with the increasing use of mobile technology.
"The singularity is near," says Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, futurist and entrepreneur, who announced this past December he would be joining Google as director of engineering, with unlimited resources for researching artificial intelligence.
A majority of clinicians at The Mount Sinai Hospital using Epic's Beacon module, an electronic medical record (EMR) system designed specifically for cancer treatment, indicated the system improved patient care quality and safety.
"I would characterize this past year as an accelerating year," says John Hoyt, executive vice president of HIMSS Analytics.