Quality and Safety
Health information technology has the power to drive advances in personalized medicine that will offer better-targeted treatments - and save the health system money - according to a new report from the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings.
In an effort to boost drug safety, a new online service has been launched that allows doctors to check the FDA-approved labeling for the most commonly prescribed drugs. The service is at the center of a new campaign being led by PDR Network called "Know the Label."
Hospital watchdog The Leapfrog Group has released the elective delivery rates of 773 hospitals online. The data reveals significant variation among hospitals in their early elective - meaning without medical reason - rates of Cesarean section and elective inductions, with some hospitals having 10 times the rate of others.
HealthGrades, Inc., an online healthcare quality rating and services company, has identified the top 50 cities for hospital care. The list recognizes cities that have the highest concentration of top performing hospitals - those ranked the top 5 percent nationwide for care.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded grants to 44 healthcare organizations to improve access to healthcare in rural areas.
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology has announced that EHR technology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston has been certified as a complete EHR under CCHIT's new EHR Alternative Certification for Hospitals (EACH), an ONC-ATCB certification program for installed hospital EHR technology.
As hospitals and health systems across the country grapple with achieving meaningful use of electronic medical records, Accenture is the latest to offer a survey on how they are doing. This one is a survey of CIOs from health systems with advanced use of EMRs, and one of the key findings is that most health systems underestimate the time and cost of implementation.
Mobility is a "vital" sign that should be regularly checked in adults over the age of sixty, and according to two health and exercise science professors at Wake Forest University, the iPad is just the tool for the job.
The Kansas Academy of Family Physicians (KAFP) has launched a patient centered medical home initiative involving eight practices, which will run over the next three years.
Mobile technology has become an must-have tool for Walgreens, which bills itself as the nation's largest drugstore chain. The company now offers mobile applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, featuring text alerts for more than 1 million subscribers and a function that allows patients to scan the bar code of their prescription to send in refills.