Quality and Safety

The healthcare industry depends on data, so unplanned data center outages can be a real downer. How much so? Well, in addition to the expected consequences of business and care disruption, there's also the financial cost incurred due to system outages. And it's no small number.

For the second consecutive year, rural hospitals stood out, with 22 hospitals making the Leapfrog Group's 2013 Top Hospitals list -- a 69 percent increase from last year. Rounding out the list are 55 urban hospitals and 13 children's hospitals.

Leveraging the Industrial Internet to better impact patient outcomes, GE Healthcare launched Centricity 360, a cloud service that the company calls "a GE Predictivity solution."

MedStar Health, in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic Innovations, has signed a deal with InnoVital Systems of Beltsville, Md., to license patent rights for a device that potentially could make it easier for patients with severe lung and neuromuscular diseases to breathe.

Richmond, Va., gastroenterologist Michael P. Jones, MD, is not anti-technology. He just does not like electronic medical records in their current form. He's expecting the technology to improve, but for now, he's opted for paper charts.

Epic Systems Corp. will help Oregon Health & Science University set up two laboratory installations of its EpicCare electronic health record on its servers for medical informatics education and research purposes. On the research side, the school will have access to Epic's source code.

If hospital chief information officers and vendor hiring managers think it's tough to find qualified health IT workers now, just wait until technology implementation moves beyond EHR installation, data capture and moderate interoperability to a full-blown effort to transform a broken healthcare industry.

Before White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park even uttered a word about HealthCare.gov in front of the House panel that had subpoenaed him to testify Nov. 13, the chairman and the ranking member were sparring over the failed launch of the government's insurance website.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. Irked by the growing number of report cards assessing the quality of hospitals, a New York state hospital association has taken this biblical admonition to heart by putting out a report card grading the quality of hospital graders. Five of the 10 report cards that were evaluated were given low marks.

Now covering about half the state's beneficiaries, Colorado's Medicaid accountable care program saw a 15 percent reduction in hospital admissions and a 25 percent reduction in high-cost imaging in the 2013 fiscal year, contributing to $44 million in savings.