Quality and Safety

Health insurer WellPoint is the launch partner for an online continuing medical education program emphasizing a global focus to diagnosing diseases, something that might have been helpful in handling recent Ebola cases.

The University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, which has already achieved Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics scale, has won the 2014 enterprise Davies Award. With the use of its electronic health record, the health system was able to improve workflow and documentation as well as significantly reduce adverse drug events and hospital acquired infections.

Flu season is coming early this year. That forecast comes from data collected by athenahealth, which has reported early signs of influenza based on patient visit data from its cloud-based network.

With all the talk about patient engagement as a component of both meaningful use and of healthcare quality improvement, it seems to be lacking in one of the most obvious places of all: the hospital room.

We often hear about streams of data. Sometimes, the flood can seem like a data deluge. In its new analytics project with EMC Corporation, Partners HealthCare extends the watery metaphor, with a new initiative meant for shared use: the Partners Data Lake.

Without good data, patient-centeredness is just a buzzword. And without a patient-centric focus and proper organization, data can be rather useless. That was the message Sunday from Amy Abernethy, MD, who delivered the opening keynote address at the American Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium.

The Institute of Medicine has issued a new report calling for standardized social and behavioral data to be included in electronic health records. That may be good for population health research, but could be unwelcome news for system developers, and for physicians who already complain that EHRs are burdensome and distract from care delivery.

Persistent regulatory and reimbursement roadblocks notwithstanding, nine out of 10 providers are moving forward with telemedicine projects, according to a new survey.

In most of the country, it is still nearly impossible to compare the price and quality of anything in healthcare. Websites that mine such data are springing up to fill the void. But thanks to a law enacted in October, Massachusetts health insurers now have to make all their prices public -- in advance.

As chief data officer at Seattle Children's Hospital, Eugene Kolker has a fairly unusual job title -- especially for this industry. "In healthcare it's extremely, extremely rare," he says. But that may be changing.