Archive for April, 2010
-
1 New Study Reveals Burden of Unpaid Work on Primary Care Physicians
Apr 30, 2010. Insight.Many may think the doctor’s work is done when he or she leaves the exam room, but a new study shows that primary care physicians are burdened by hours of additional unpaid work. As healthcare reform prepares to pour millions of patients into the healthcare system, many primary care physicians are concerned that their unpaid workload will only increase.
This unpaid work is even further compounded by the fact that primary care physicians currently earn about half the salary of specialists. With rising unpaid work and a small paycheck, it’s not surprising that medical students are swarming to specialty fields and running from primary care. This problem will only cripple the healthcare system, which will need more primary care physicians to meet the needs of an estimated 30 million newly insured people in the coming years.
Continue Reading... -
1 How many doctors and how many different medical records will you have in a lifetime?
Apr 27, 2010. Health Information Technology.Technology will influence the answer to this question, and that’s exactly what a recent Practice Fusion survey conducted by GfK Roper sought to explore. The survey sample included 1,035 adults aged 18 and over. It aimed to identify how many individual doctors participants estimated they had seen in their lifetimes. This estimate included all primary care, specialists, hospital and urgent care providers.
Continue Reading... -
1 The Perils of ‘Copy and Paste’ Within an EHR
Apr 26, 2010. Health Information Technology.A recent editorial in the American Journal of Medicine suggests that the copy and paste function of an EHR is a major concern for maintaining the credibility and accuracy of digitized patient data. The article states that the hazardous functions of copy-and-paste could include problem lists that do not change; copying of notes/errors by house staff; and the loss of the narrative in the patient’s chart documentation.
Continue Reading... -
0 Athenahealth Taps IBM to Streamline Back Office Processes, Improve Data Capture for Physicians
Apr 23, 2010. Press Releases.ARMONK, N.Y. – April 23, 2010 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has signed a business process services agreement with athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN) a leading provider of Internet-based business services for physician practices. The engagement will enable athenahealth to focus its resources on simplifying and improving administrative and reimbursement processes while reducing staff workload, allowing physicians to focus on delivering higher quality care to their patients.
As part of the agreement, IBM will provide voice, data and administrative support for athenahealth in the areas of revenue cycle management such as ensuring timely physician reimbursement for the services they provide, and clinical data management services including data entry processes for information such as lab reports and physician’s orders. IBM’s expertise in these areas, based on hundreds of client engagements with health insurance plans and healthcare organizations worldwide, makes it uniquely qualified to support athenahealth’s business processes and provide innovative tools and methods along with an expanded capability to scale in support of growing service demand.
Continue Reading... -
2 EHRs and Positive Effects On Healthcare: What Do Nurses Think?
Apr 22, 2010. Health Information Technology.With the federal government’s push for Health IT, the focus has largely been on physicians’ adoption of EHRs. While this is the target audience who must purchase and implement these systems, many other health care professionals will be using the systems and they often seem to be left out of the EHR discussion. We may have an idea of what physicians think about EHRs, but what about nurses? A new study shows RNs are on the fence about whether or not EHRs positively or negatively affect healthcare quality and patient safety. The study was conducted by AFT Healthcare, a subsidiary of the American Federation of Teachers.
Continue Reading... -
0 MEDecision Webinar to Examine How Health Plans Can Maximize Care Management Effectiveness with Predictive Modeling
Apr 21, 2010. Press Releases.Session Will Focus on Leveraging Clinical Intelligence and Analytics Resources to Improve Planning, Reporting and Other Processes
WAYNE, Pa. — April 21, 2010 — MEDecision, Inc., a leading provider of collaborative healthcare management solutions, will conduct a complimentary webinar called “Predictive Modeling’s Role in Maximizing Care Management Effectiveness” to discuss how the combined use of various technologies and predictive modeling continues to play an essential role in the care management process for health plans. The session is scheduled for Wednesday, April 28 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time; 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time.
Hosted by MEDecision Product Marketing Manager Michael Alterman and Technical Product Manager Gary Epstein, the webinar will illustrate the importance of effectively deploying clinical intelligence and analytics resources to support early identification and stratification and explain how health plans can optimally utilize these tools for planning, reporting and related purposes. Specific areas of discussion will include:
- How integrating external information such as health risk assessment data and clinical intelligence rules can both enhance clinical summary content and simplify program referrals from various data sources
- The benefits of identifying members whose health may be at risk due to poor medication adherence
- Using condition prevalence and cost profile reports to compare client populations and costs
- How health plans can utilize analytics to increase collaboration with patient-centered medical home programs
What: MEDecision webinar: “Predictive Modeling’s Role in Maximizing Care Management Effectiveness”
Who: MEDecision Product Marketing Manager Michael Alterman and Technical Product Manager Gary Epstein
When: Wednesday, April 28, 2010; 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time (9:30 a.m. Pacific Time)
How: Register for the webinar at http://bit.ly/9Q21t8.
For more information about MEDecision, please visit www.MEDecision.com. Follow the company on Twitter at @MEDecision and on Facebook at www.MEDecision.com/Facebook.
About MEDecision
MEDecision offers collaborative healthcare management solutions that provide a simple and smart way for payers and providers to harness the power of knowledge to enable the best clinical decisions and improve health outcomes. Designed around a patient-aware health management philosophy, MEDecision’s solutions include Alineo®, a collaborative healthcare management platform for delivering outcome-driven case, disease and utilization management, Nexalign®, a collaborative healthcare decision support service that fosters better payer-patient-physician interactions and InFrame™ a collaborative health information exchange service that connects care delivery organizations with one another and their patients. For more information, visit http://www.MEDecision.com.
###
Continue Reading... -
0 New Cancer E-Care Record Offered by the National Cancer Institute
Apr 20, 2010. Government Initiatives, Health Information Technology.A new cancer-specific electronic health record will be offered by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This EHR is designed to capture and exchange data specific to a cancer patient’s office visit, and will provide data on patient demographics, disease and treatment results.
The EHR is based on an early reference implementation of the Patient Outcomes Data Service, an open source “ultra-light record” derived from standards of NCI’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG). NCI is working with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Microsoft to complete this project. The specifications and the software are available now through the NCI site but will be made more accessible to providers and consumers within 60 days.
Continue Reading... -
0 PHRs and Advance Care Planning
Apr 16, 2010. PHR.Do you know what April 16th is? It is the day after Uncle Sam collects his money, but more importantly, it is National Healthcare Decisions Day. The formal designation of National Healthcare Decisions Day is the result of a major effort from the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) and other national, state and community organizations to communicate the importance of advance healthcare planning.
NHPCO is providing information and tools for the public to talk about their advance care wishes with family, friends and healthcare providers, and complete written advance directives. Advance directives allow you to document your end-of-life wishes in the event that you are terminally ill or critically injured and unable to talk or communicate.
The NHPCO has developed state-specific advance directive forms and information on advance care planning through the Caring Connections program. Additionally, Caring Connections and Google Health™ partnered last year to increase the availability and accessibility of advance care planning information and resources online through the Google Health PHR.
Continue Reading... -
0 Vanderbilt Research Identifies Algorithm to Protect Privacy of EMR Data Used in GWAS
Apr 15, 2010. Health Information Technology.Electronic medical records are being hailed as a tool to aggregate patient data and advance research, but questions remain about how the vast sharing and compiling of this critical medical/genetic information will remain de-identified to protect patients’ privacy and security.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found a unique algorithm to make electronic medical record information anonymous for genome-wide association studies (GWAS), according to a paper that recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Continue Reading... -
0 Would an EHR motivate you to hide medical information from your doctor?
Apr 14, 2010. Opinion.This is an interesting question, and one that seems to spark debate. According to the results of a survey by the California HealthCare Foundation, 15% of people would hold back medical information if the medical record system shared anonymous data with other organizations. An astonishing 33% of respondents were not certain, but would consider hiding information.
On a recent blog post at The Consumerist, this question was presented and brought in over 100 comments. As you can imagine, these comments varied from people expressing support for full disclosure and sharing of their medical information to those who convey great fear that their digital medical information could be used maliciously. This comment particularly struck me:
“What if you have a wrong or misdiagnosis which turns into a pre existing condition which in
turn [leads] to higher premiums. Or turns into a procedure that you did not need.”
This comment was so striking because it brings up an issue that contradicts the basic case for adopting EHRs: increased quality care and decreased healthcare costs. It also brings up ethical concerns and conflicts of interest between the use of medical information by healthcare delivery systems and insurance companies, as each are motivated by very different – and often conflicting- goals.
Patients/consumers are concerned they will be the people who are negatively affected in some way by this conflict between different parties or organizations that utilize medical information. To gain trust, I think the medical community must carefully and thoughtfully develop standards for how information is shared, and how much autonomy patients will have in deciding who has access to their medical information. If they do not include patients, fear will perpetuate and we will have more and more patients hiding health and medical information. This will certainly impede the success of making improvements in healthcare quality and cost reduction with widespread EHR adoption and medical information sharing.
Continue Reading...
