May 2007
Raising Efficiency. Raising Capacity. Raising the Bar.
Planning, Early Support Keys to EMR Success, Execs Say
At last week’s HIMSS’s Virtual Conference & Expo, IT executives who have overseen successful EMR and other health IT projects offered tips for health care firms looking to implement such systems. “[The EMR] is a whole new application” for health care firms, said Detlev "Herb" Smaltz, CIO at the Columbus-based medical center. “They have been doing things with paper charts forever.”
Computerworld
Some 'Guardedly Optimistic' about New Health IT Bill
Stabenow and Snowe were back Wednesday announcing the filing of an updated version of their old legislation, now called the Health Information Technology Act of 2007. The money is the same—$4 billion over five years. The bill would provide money to fund IT acquisition grants to hospitals, long-term-care facilities, critical-access hospitals, federally qualified health centers, skilled-nursing facilities, community mental health centers, physicians and physician groups. It also would allow these organizations to accelerate depreciation of healthcare IT software and hardware for tax purposes and provide targeted Medicare payment boosts to providers that use IT to improve the quality of care to patients with chronic conditions.
Joseph Conn, Healthcare IT
State of Emergency for the ER
It’s a crisis that touches every community. And it’s far worse than you think. A three-part series probes an institution at the breaking point – and the best ideas for fixing it. To get a closer look at Grady's inner workings, a NEWSWEEK reporter and photographer spent five days in the ER. Such access is rare, and NEWSWEEK agreed not to publish the names of patients—or photograph them in identifiable fashion—unless they agreed to it and signed releases. The portrait that emerged was disconcerting.
Three-part series on Newsweek.com
Healthcare IT an Epic Challenge
As of 2006, fewer than 10 percent of American hospitals have implemented health information technology, according to the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy. Just 16 percent of primary care physicians use electronic medical records. The vast majority of health care transactions in the United States still take place on paper, a system that dates to the 1950s. Moreover, the health care industry spends just 2 percent of gross revenues on information technology – a meager outlay compared to the 10 percent average for other information intensive industries like finance.
Mike Ivey, The Capital Times
Self-service Technology Slowly Gains Foothold in Healthcare
While healthcare lags behind other industries in rolling out self-service technology, times may be changing. Very gradually, providers and health plans are launching self-service options, particularly kiosks, to streamline access to key information, following the lead of industries like retail and travel which have had them for many years. Right now, vendors are definitely ahead of providers when it comes to such technology, but their enthusiasm may help drive things along.
Cindy Atoji, Digital Healthcare & Productivity.com
HP Joins Medical Data Effort – Digital Records to be Linked across the State
Hewlett-Packard Co. has agreed to help develop a statewide health information exchange to give physicians, hospitals and patients access to secure electronic medical information, giving the ambitious project an important boost. HP will join other vendors selected by the California Regional Health Information Organization, a statewide collaborative project funded largely by health care organizations. The goal is to create systems that will allow as many as 78,000 physicians and 400 hospitals to share data, the largest such effort in the country.
Victoria Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com
TechLinks Interview with Praveen Chopra, Chief Information and Supply Chain Officer Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
I always want to be an early adopter, not a laggard. “Leading edge” is a business concept whereby I say, “This is good technology. How do I apply it? What does it mean? What does it impact?” I gather end users and make them business partners so they’re willing to test. Sometimes I receive good ideas from end users. Once we learn how it works, we do a big bang implementation. So, I keep my ears and eyes open to find out what’s interesting, what isn’t and where the leading edge is.
TechLinks
Nurses Bridge Gap between IT, Care
More and more nurses have been bridging the gap between information technology and clinical practice. And Mary Beth Mitchell, a registered nurse, finds herself happily positioned at these crossroads. "It is not enough to have programmers and engineers designing and implementing these systems," said Mitchell, director of clinical informatics at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas. Nurse-informaticists are needed as the advent of electronic health records ushers in a preference to go paperless.
Susan Kreimer, The Dallas Morning News
GAO Sees Need for Benchmarks on Pushing IT in Quality Efforts
The GAO took aim Friday at HHS and the CMS, saying the agencies have inadequate measures in place to gauge their own progress in promoting the use of healthcare information technology in collecting hospital quality-of-care data. While noting that HHS has issued numerous contracts to promote healthcare IT and that it has created the American Health Information Community to advise the department on IT policy, “HHS has identified no detailed plans, milestones, or time frames for either its broad effort to encourage IT in healthcare nationwide or its specific objective to promote the use of health IT for quality data collection,” according to the latest report from the federal watchdog agency. (may require registration)
Modern Healthcare
RFID Boosts Heart Facility's Care
Dallas-based Heart Hospital Baylor Plano has implemented an RFID solution that automates nearly all of the facility's inventory tracking, from the most expensive devices down to the number of sponges and syringes. "Hospitals are going to have to adopt this," said John Gavras, president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council. "I see it happening within the next two to three years, easily."
Victor Godinez, The Dallas Morning News
IBM Targets Healthcare Market with Grid Computing
Hospitals have unique and challenging storage needs because they are required to store every X-ray and medical record they create, and IBM is reaching out to that market with a system being unveiled Wednesday. IBM is using the concept of grid computing – many computers linked together to share processing power – to store and retrieve medical images and other records within a group of hospitals.
Computerworld
Healthcare Goes Horizontal
Systems developed in isolation within an area lead to fragmented environments lacking interoperability. Ask the folks at Ontario, whose healthcare network operated in silos -- until the Canadian province developed a unified healthcare system. Shifting from a vertical to a horizontal regional model is a major change for Ontario. Now over two years into re-organization along regional lines, the 14 fledgling LHINs must learn to speak with one voice and their systems must talk to one another. Their impact is being felt in many areas and will continue to grow as they integrate disjointed parts into a provincial system.
CIO India
StatCom Announces the Appointment of Vishy Narayanan as VP of Engineering
StatCom appointed Vishy Narayanan as vice president of engineering. Narayanan joins the company’s senior leadership team and will be responsible for streamlining engineering operations and managing product development, content development, and quality assurance. StatCom’s unique hospital-wide enterprise solution focuses on optimizing patient throughput and capacity by managing patient flow from admission to discharge.
TechLinks
AHA Leadership Summit
July 22-24, 2007 -- San Diego, CA -- Manchester Grand Hyatt
Visit StatCom at booth #609
Vision Center Allows Visitors to Experience Patient Flow Logistics and Tracking up Close
Equipped with everything from family waiting area displays, nursing unit area, bed management hub, ED facility, and an OR suite, this innovative facility was created to showcase the StatCom solution, the first enterprise solution of its kind which can manage patient flow logistics and tracking from admissions to discharge. In this state of the art facility potential customers can get a realistic feel for how the solution works. The facility is also used for customer users and StatCom staff training and testing, as well as a research laboratory.