Government & Policy
Over the past decade, the healthcare industry has added 2.6 million jobs nationwide, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution, accounting for a 22.7 percent employment growth rate over 10 years, compared with 2.1 percent in all other industries.
Jonathan Bush, CEO of athenahealth, treated the audience to an energetic keynote at Healthcare Datapalooza IV, offering up a great deal of humor and perspective on the state of data exchange, policy and the healthcare system at large.
Bending to criticism that requirements were burdensome and complex, the Obama Administration announced late Tuesday it would delay until 2015 a key provision in the healthcare reform law -- the requirement that businesses with more than 50 employees must offer them insurance.
As meaningful use advances, a dilemma has emerged: balancing structured patient data with the narrative data physicians have long collected in the still-important conversations with patients.
The inside story of how a 5-hospital health system leveraged its Epic EHR to arm physicians with clinical decision support technology at the point of care. What ThedaCare learned: EHR vendors should be working in lock step with content vendors.
As federal officials look to outcomes-based quality measurements, physicians and informaticists say clinical data integration could help the limitations of EHRs in population health management.
Developing an effective framework for driving healthcare quality improvements proves a multifaceted, complex endeavor, and although EHR systems can play a positive role in the task, much of the technology still misses the mark. This was just one of several concerns put before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance June 26.
A security analyst who could have knocked out the internet in the late 1990s says the VA's hacking could be part of U.S.-China cyber salvos. Either way, the agency needs to standardize its web security, especially for PHI.
You'd be forgiven for thinking revenue cycle management technology is a bit, well, boring. You'd also be wrong. The coming years are going to see some big changes in the way hospitals get paid -- and the IT they use to track when and how they get paid is going to have to change as well.
The former CMS administrator and Harvard professor explained that even Massachusetts healthcare system is "not going to be sustainable without major changes and improvements," and that will be part of his political platform.