Quality and Safety
New findings show that communities where hospitals, other healthcare providers and community services work together to coordinate evidence-based hospital discharges and provide better support in the community can see a 6 percent drop in hospitalizations and rehospitalizations per 1,000 beneficiaries in just the first two years.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have teamed up with Optum, the health IT unit of UnitedHealth, to launch a collaborative research and development facility where both clinical and claims data will be shared for the aim of improving patient care, officials announced Tuesday.
Once considered the leading edge of information technology, computerized physician order entry is now simmering on the back burner of healthcare priorities. While it is not forgotten, attention toward CPOE has been deflected in favor of other concerns, such as meaningful use, interoperability, RAC audits and ICD-10 coding projects. Yet it is a critical piece of meaningful use.
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An infusion of cash from Partners HealthCare is set to spur a promising 2013 for Healthrageous, whose health self-management technology traces its roots to Partners' Center for Connected Health.
Disease is too complex to just think your way through it," says Raimond Winslow, director of The Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins. "We can no longer work with what I call purely mental models of how biological systems function in either health or disease."
The burgeoning and highly complex field of computational medicine is showing promise for the treatment of illnesses such as Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer and more, as technology and troves of data are harnessed to investigate the underpinnings and map the progression of diseases.
Xenex Healthcare Services, a provider of ultraviolet (UV) room disinfection, has announced that the Veterans Health Care System in central Texas is using its mercury-free UV light technology to disinfect hospital rooms and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAI).
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT wants to use EHR certification criteria to make it easier for physicians to report patient safety events. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will encourage providers to report adverse events to patient safety organizations, and ONC will propose certification requirements that, where appropriate, EHRs can report safety events in AHRQ's Common Formats.
The National eHealth Collaborative's Health Information Exchange Learning Network has recommendations for tackling some of the most challenging HIE issues.