"In response to many questions about PHR use by adolescents, I asked Fabienne Bourgeois, the expert at Children's Hospital Boston, to write this guest blog post - As more and more practices and hospitals are making patient portals available to their patients, providers of adolescent patients are encountering a major hurdle: how to handle confidential adolescent [...]

"Since its passage three years ago, some in Congress have sought every opportunity to reduce funding related to the Affordable Care Act. It's no surprise that the recent round of sequester cuts have targeted elements of health care technology infrastructure, including the health insurance marketplaces that are meant to be online later this year. Congress needs [...]

"Along with federal mandates and pressure from insurers, consumers' views that doctors are not modern could be the push they need to implement health IT. Government and consumer demand for more modern physician practices could help spur the adoption of health IT such as electronic health records, according to a new paper from the Deloitte Center [...]

"Now that portions of patient EHRs and visit summaries are available via portals and meaningful use requirements, not only will the organizations’ internal users be complaining about system flaws, poor configurations or outstanding training issues — but so will the external users, the patients and recipients of the health information. It’s time our industry professionals address [...]

"The time may be fast approaching for researchers to take better advantage of the vast amount of valuable patient information available from U.S. electronic health records. Lian Duan, an NJIT computer scientist with an expertise in data mining, has done just that with the recent publication of "Adverse Drug Effect Detection," IEEE Journal of Biomedical [...]

"Picture a scenario where, by collecting the right data and using today’s sophisticated analytics, our health system could predict when a patient with chronic conditions might get very ill and require hospitalisation, and intervene before that happens, thus saving the health system millions, and improving the outcomes for patients. A pipe dream? No, it is [...]

"The American Medical Association (AMA) has released a report clarifying its position on the idea of skipping ICD-10 altogether and moving straight to ICD-11 when it becomes available in an unknown number of years. While the AMA has been protesting the implementation of ICD-10 for some time, and continues to do so, the report [...]

"All signs point to telemedicine entering the mainstream healthcare industry. Maybe it's fresh on my mind because the American Telemedicine Association's annual conference-which took place in Austin, Texas this year-just ended, but there's more to it than that. Since the beginning of the year, telemedicine has been a hot topic. More and more states are pushing [...]

"Telehealth holds enormous potential for transforming healthcare, but, to telemedicine pioneer Dr. Jay Sanders, the primary barrier is not financial. Instead, physician and patient attitudes about healthcare and health itself must change, said Sanders, who often has been called the father of telemedicine. “The critical issue is really not telemedicine,” Sanders said in an interview with [...]

"You’re not done once you’ve implemented your EHR. Whether you’re interested in joining a health information exchange or you’re shifting into accountable care, the EHR is simply the first piece in a complex web of information technology systems that will help your patients take charge of their own wellness, keeping your quality measures high [...]

"Will the use of the Direct Project secure messaging protocol for the exchange of health data end up killing off some struggling health information exchange organizations once HITECH Act funding for HIEs ends during 2014? That's a question some observers are asking. The Direct protocol offers a way to meet the secure data exchange requirements for [...]

"At the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Meeting in Chicago on May 11, Devin Carpenter, RN, assistant director of nursing at Parmer Medical Center in Friona, Texas, shared tips to follow for a successful electronic health record implementation. Parmer Medical Center is a critical access hospital about 70 miles outside of Amarillo, Texas; and, prior to [...]

"mHealth is on the rise, and it looks like usage of smart phones among physicians is following that same trend. A recent study shows that usage rose about nine percent in 2012, which shows that it is becoming more accepted in the medical world. It will be interesting to see if it increases even more [...]

Wanted in Healthcare: More Wireless Devices for In-Home Patients Electronic health records improve care, but don’t save money The Disparity Information and Communication Technology for Developing Countries has in the Delivery of Healthcare Information Government Should Slow Down Race To Implement Electronic Health Records DoD yanked from health records project Electronic Health Records Lead to Challenges AHIMA: EHRs can lead to [...]

"Researchers have found that this technology can be very helpful to people living in the slums of Rio. A study conducted in Rio de Janeiro has now shown that using mhealth technology for monitoring patients who are living in poor urban neighborhoods can help to increase the access that those individuals have to healthcare services while [...]

"The clinic, Continuum Care Centre, provides family physicians, specialists, health care professionals and home care services to 15,000 patients. It was a pioneer in adopting electronic medical records a few years ago and its most recent innovation, in late January, is an Internet platform called Health eGateway. The new technology, an innovation of Telus Health, [...]

"U.S. doctors have increased their adoption of digital health records and electronic prescribing at twice the rate of other countries, an Accenture survey revealed. U.S. physicians have shown a significant increase in accessing digital health data at double the rate of their global counterparts, according to a new report by IT consulting company Accenture." Article Brian T. Horowitz, [...]

"Ninety-three percent of U.S. doctors report actively using electronic medical records (EMR), and nearly half (45 percent) of doctors surveyed said they regularly access clinical data outside their own organization, representing a 32 percent annual increase, according to consulting firm Accenture. On behalf of Accenture, Harris Interactive conducted an online survey of 3,700 physicians across [...]

"A veteran observer of telemedicine says that it's time for the various technologies grouped under that rubric to be integrated with mainstream medicine so that patients can receive the appropriate care from the right provider at the right site of care, while reducing waste and duplication of effort. In a lengthy editorial in the publication Telemedicine [...]

“What’s in it for me?” isn’t an unreasonable question when it comes to healthcare information technology. Providers are being asked to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new IT systems, and finding the business case for these massive investments is crucial to spurring adoption and improving healthcare at its core. EHRintelligence.com spoke to Shahid [...]

"I have written a number of postings over the last year about various aspects of electronic health record (EHR) data, from the transition of the work of informatics from implementation to analytics to the problems that still prevent us from making optimal use of data, such as the difficulties of data entry. One of my [...]

"Almost 800 million prescriptions were routed electronically in 2012, 44 percent of prescriptions and up from 570 million in 2011, according to Surescripts' annual National Progress Report and Safe-Rx Rankings. More than 38,000 physicians (69 percent) used e-prescribing in 2012 and nearly half of all office visits (48 percent) resulted in electronically generated medication history requests, [...]

"In relatively few years, videoconferencing has advanced tremendously, from something that required expensive and complicated hardware setups to something most smartphone, tablet, and PC owners have easy access to. Using video for virtual visits in healthcare is a little more complicated — the connection has to be reliable and the service HIPAA compliant to protect [...]

"During our medical training, we’re taught to gather and use information from three sources: a patient history, a physical exam and lab tests. By far the most difficult to master is the physical exam. A good exam requires knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and awareness of normal variations that allow a doctor to recognize abnormalities. Technology [...]

"Federal agencies should align to Medicare pay so it supports interoperability seamlessly within paperless systems, the American Medical Association (AMA) plus other medicine groups have urged. If the USA is serious about achieving goals of an efficient and high quality health care system, it will need to improve health information exchanges and interoperability, AMA along with [...]

"SHM board member Eric Siegal, MD, SFHM, wasn't surprised by the findings in a new report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that found medical interns spent just 12% of their time in direct patient care and a whopping 40% of their time using computers. "There certainly are advantages to electronic health records (EHRs), but [...]

"Telemedicine must move to the forefront of medical efforts in the U.S. for domestic care efficiency and quality improvements to be considered anything better than "marginal," according to an editorial published this month in the journal Telemedicine and e-Health. Rashid L. Bashshur (pictured), director of telemedicine at the University of Michigan Health System and the commentary's [...]

"A panel of telemedicine industry executives took on the topic of user-friendly design Monday afternoon at the American Telemedicine Association's18th Annual International Meeting & Trade Show. Their conclusion: Healthcare needs to design new methods of care delivery that appeal to the consumer. "I think there's such an opportunity with consumers and what their demands are," said [...]

"Electronic health record adoption is on the rise. The number of hospitals using basic EHR systems tripled from 12.2 percent in 2009 to 44.4 percent in 2012, according to a report released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and CMS. However, the move towards efficient care coordination and care [...]

"Federal government has been urged to urgently develop and establish an effective strategy for the implementation of e- Health in Nigeria. President of the Nigeria Medical Association, NMA, Dr. Osahon Enabulele who made the plea in Lagos, regretted that Nigeria is yet to explore the many benefits of e-Health, which he described as a safe, secure, [...]

"Feel like you have a cold, or the blues and want to learn more? Or maybe you just want to keep better track of your calories or find out whether you’re really working out hard enough to get back in shape. It turns out there’s an app for that. All of that, actually, and much [...]

"On April 10, 2013, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) published parallel proposed rules revising, respectively, the Stark exception and Anti-Kickback safe harbor concerning electronic health record (EHR) items and services. Highlights of the proposed rules include: Sunset Provision. The EHR [...]

"Medical peripherals can combine with a smartphone to create the function of an ultrasound machine, an EKG reader, or an otoscope, to name just a few diagnostic devices. But without buying anything extra, nearly every consumer mobile device has a camera of some sort built-in. That means that when it comes to dermatology, most patients [...]

Recent and impendent changes resulting from the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) (part of Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) of 2009 and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2011 offer unprecedented potential for telemedicine to play a significant role not only in reforming [...]

"Studies continue to be released that decry the time physicians spend on computers rather than patients. These studies do our field a disservice because they don’t focus on the many ways EHRs have helped physicians do better for their patients. A few weeks ago I saw a patient Friday afternoon after 5 pm. It was unscheduled [...]

"Today's EHRs mostly don't live up to expectations and sometimes they simply don't work at a particular site. Others seem to work but produce insidious, harmful effects that are rarely traced back to their true source. There are other projects that are superficially similar in scope and objectives but are extremely successful. It is baffling to [...]

"A percolating problem is beginning to boil over: doctors and nurses really don’t like their new electronic health records systems. And, as EHR implementations increase ahead of government deadlines for incentive dollars, dissatisfaction among clinicians is growing. The problem might be that EHR implementation is treated as a purely technological issue when in reality it is [...]

"Where is most of your personal data stored? Think about it – who has the most critical, personal information about you? It’s not your bank, or your mortgage company or your Internet service provider. In fact, it’s a loosely connected network of healthcare entities: your doctor, the lab who does your tests, your local hospital [...]

"It has been a little while I know. Sometimes though the patient in me rears its ugly head again and I have to get out of blogger mode and in to being a bowel transplant patient. That is kind of a long winded apology but The Churchill Hospital, Oxford has seem a little too much [...]

"When used correctly, EHRs produce more accurate documentation leading to more complete coding, and ultimately, more accurate reimbursement claims, according to Sue Bowman, senior director of coding policy and compliance of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). Bowman presented during a listening session hosted by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the [...]

"Under a plan first endorsed by President George W. Bush and signed into law by President Obama, the health care industry in the United States has started to change one of the signature elements in doctor's offices — switching chicken-scratched hand-written notes and records to electronic forms. Supporters sold it as a time- and money-saving reform [...]

"NOTE: this post, being about minor matters like death and financial mayhem, is particularly and unusually [even for me] biting and lacking in euphemisms and political correctness. If you are easily offended and want the latter, and/or believe we all need to be 'nice' about banal issues like patient injury and death, fraud, [...]

"The health care industry is “not progressing at a suitable pace” to be ready for tens of thousands of new government-mandated “ICD-10” codes used to describe diseases and hospital procedures in the insurance billing process, a new analysis shows. Though the conversion to 140,000 new codes that medical-care providers will use in order to bill government [...]

"As we get increasingly digital and Internet-savvy, more and more healthcare patient portals are cropping up, and thus, medical patients now have greater access to their health information than ever before. Patients can also be hands-on in supplying, questioning and correcting their data, which can help improve the accuracy of the data. Patient portals are seeing [...]

"Dr. Steven Stack, American Medical Association board chairman, gave a spirited defense of physicians and a sharp, but balanced critique of electronic health-record systems at a federal “listening” session Friday on EHRs and their potential for use in billing fraud. The scheduled four-hour session was sponsored by the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator [...]

"After five years and an estimated $1 billion spent trying to build a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR) system with the Department of Veterans Affairs, defense health officials have been taken off the project, sources confirm. Wielding the hook was Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel who signaled disappointment with his management team to a House panel [...]

"Even before Congress passed “Obamacare,” there was a push to see more use of Electronic Health Records. Not every practitioner has signed on to EHRs – but advocates say soon all medical records will be accessible electronically by all doctors and hospitals. In this way, EHRs will benefit patients, providers and hospitals, such as providing lower costs. [...]

"A recent peer-reviewed article in Preventing Chronic Disease, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that an EHR-analyzing algorithm that went beyond parsing four-digit ICD-9 data was markedly superior to analysis based solely on those entries. The study was designed to identify and accurately categorize acute coronary heart disease and heart failure events [...]

"The Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) program is not the Department of Veterans Affairs' only lightning rod, but it is a major one. Officially in the works since 2011, the records-sharing program took root after 15 years of discussion and cooperation between the two agencies to share military members' health data. In 2012, however, cracks in [...]

"Regulatory compliance for the healthcare industry is a hot-button issue. The overriding compliance requirements that this industry faces are dictated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted by Congress in 1996. HIPAA was designed to protect the privacy of patients’ medical records and restrict who has access to them. The latest HIPAA standards [...]