Meaningful Use

Another misguided, uninformed EHR vendor will discount the price of EHR software for doctors willing to sell patient data! According to CEO Jonathan Bush, "Athena might be able to halve the amount that physicians pay to use its EHR."

With electronic patient records, the potential for privacy violations expands a thousand-fold. First, data can be accessed anywhere, not just on the physical premises. As a result, remote access makes snooping employees bolder.

Intuit Inc., the Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Medfusion, of Cary, N.C., which makes front-office and back-office software designed to improve patient-to-provider communications.

Amid an economy still recovering from a deep recession, students participating in the University of California San Diego Extension Health Information Technology Program are very lucky.

Students participating in the University of California San Diego Extension Health Information Technology Program are sharing the results of their capstone project – developing a plan to install an electronic health record that demonstrates meaningful use at a community clinic.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office on Disability has announced the establishment of a new Center of Excellence in Research on Disability Services, Care Coordination and Integration.

Two health IT extension centers in New York state have begun work helping primary care physicians convert from paper to digital records.

I have not read the report by the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University that demonstrates EHRs in some cases can impose higher costs to hospitals and lower quality of care. That said, I have some concerns about the study.

When you read articles about physicians who aren't going to make the switch to electronic health records, it's always interesting to note the age of the nay-sayers. I'm not trying to start a war between generations, but age has a lot to do with refusal to adopt health IT.

Doctors at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, California, say computerized physician order entry (CPOE), which is typically one of the first functionalities used in EHRs, has saved lives at their institution. It marks the first time evidence, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, has been presented that links EHRs with a decrease in mortality.