Quality and Safety
Bill Spooner "retired" from his post as leader of Sharp HealthCare's 450-member IT team on Feb. 14. The quotes around "retired" are necessary because he has something in the works -- he won't say what yet. It's something that will keep him working halftime, or maybe more. It's too hard to leave healthcare IT altogether at this promising juncture, he says.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a highly regarded teaching hospital in Boston, but in 2012, the hospital found out it had one of the highest rates of readmissions among Medicare patients in the country. That meant federal fines of more than $1 million -- and a lot of soul searching for the staff, says Dr. Julius Yang, the head of quality for the hospital.
The New York eHealth Collaborative and the Partnership Fund for New York City are calling for applications for a second round of healthcare startups for its New York Digital Health Accelerator, a program designed to make New York a hub for the emerging digital health technology industry.
With apologies to Internet meme-makers everywhere, analytics experts have a message for healthcare providers trying to get their heads around business and clinical intelligence: "Big data, you're doing it wrong."
There are two types of analytics projects: those boundary-pushing advancements that, where they do exist, are mainly the product of big hospitals and academic medical centers, and the humbler, more doable -- but sometimes just as valuable -- insights that can be gleaned by smaller providers.
The American Health Information Management Association is urging controls on the copy-and-paste functionality in electronic health record systems. The use of copy-and-paste should be permitted only when such "strong technology and administrative controls," are in place, the organization wrote in a position statement.
Healthcare IT is very good at collecting data, but are we using it to make good decisions?
Learn what one doctor did to combat "note bloat" and get the most out of his health network's EHR. This physician, CMIO and CIO is used to pointing out problems and making sure they get fixed.
It's not only federal HIPAA privacy and security violations that may end up costing industry groups a pretty penny. There's also state privacy laws to heed. Case in point is what recently transpired at Stanford Hospital and Clinics.
An open source software program created with the help of the Office of the National Coordinator is now federally certified and ready to be used as a population health tool.