News Clips
New Spike in EHR Replacement Activity Jars Larger Physician Practice Market, 2018 Black Book Survey
Highly functional, highly customizable integrated EHR, Practice Management, Revenue Cycle Management and ICD10/ Coding products are proving to be the sought after technology solution of choice for groups and clinics with 12 or more practitioners according to the nearly 19,000 total EHR users responding to the six month client satisfaction poll released today. Cloud-based mobile solutions for on-demand data with access to practice actionable insight into financial performance, compliance tracking and contractual quality goals received the top interest by groups in the replacement mode (93 percent), followed by Telehealth/Virtual Visit Support (87 percent) and Speech Recognition Solutions for hands-free data entry (82 percent).
Final Call for OSEHRA 2018 Summit Abstracts
The 2018 OSEHRA Open Source Summit is now 100 days away! This means the deadline to submit abstracts for consideration is [Wednesday, April 18, 2018]. All proposals are due by midnight EDT. All are encouraged to participate and share their advancements, findings, and experiences with the greater open source and health IT community. A list of proposed topics for submission can be found here, and may be submitted as one of the following session types...
Blockchain in Healthcare Today Debuts First Ensemble of Articles for Healthcare Industry
The online peer review journal, Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY), has published its first articles to augment the industry's knowledge-base. The announcement of the journal came last June, when the Founder of Partners in Digital Health, Tory Cenaj, announced the launch of a journal focusing exclusively on blockchain technology for the healthcare marketplace...Blockchain in Healthcare Today is an open-access publication that publishes methodologies, pilots, and scalable and sustainable blockchain deployments, exclusively, in the healthcare ecosystem. The Journal offers rapid, peer-review publication of research, commentary, and proof of concept for blockchain technology and related areas. No subscription fees are paid to view content or to subscribe/register with the journal.
OpenEMR Releases Medical Image Viewing Support
OpenEMR...announces support for a web-based medical image visualizer within a patient record. Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a de-facto standard for storing medical imaging data from MRI, CT, and X-ray systems. It is used in essentially all fields of medicine including radiology, cardiology, oncology, and dentistry and can be found in hospital, clinic, and laboratory settings alike. By using a capable open-source, web-based DICOM image viewer, OpenEMR provides clinicians a quick, secure, and robust view into patient images with windowing, panning, zooming, and filtering support.
Sidelined HHS Deputy Chief Information Security Officer blasts agency, claims cybersecurity center 'decimated'
After being abruptly placed on admin leave, Leo Scanlon opens up about his 150-day leave, “dirty politics,” and what it means for the future of the HCCIC cybersecurity initiative...HHS’ HCCIC had overwhelming support from Congress and industry leaders when it launched as part of a partnership with the National Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (NH-ISAC). It was designed to take a leadership role facilitating threat intelligence and other cybersecurity related information sharing and, in fact, played a pivotal role in fighting the global WannaCry attack in June of 2017.
Kaazing Unveils DisasterAWARE ENTERPRISE™ Real Time Risk Intelligence Platform For Businesses Worldwide
With new records being set each year for natural disaster losses, enterprises face an ever-increasing need to be prepared. For decades, DisasterAWARE has served the needs of top agencies worldwide, including U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security FEMA, the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and a variety of international humanitarian aid organizations. With over 1.7 million users of DisasterAWARE mobile app, Disaster Alert for the public, spanning 115 international organizations, Kaazing is helping to broaden the reach of this critical, life-saving technology to provide businesses with an enterprise-grade solution.
OSEHRA Releases Upgrade to popHealth for the 2018 Clinical Quality Measure Reporting Criteria
The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) announced today the release of the Version 5.1 of the popHealth® open-source clinical quality measure database and reporting engine. The new release maintains its 2015 Edition Health IT Module certification for Clinical Quality Measure (CQM) reporting criteria: (c)2-4, (d)1-3, (g)4, and (g)5 for the Calendar Year 2018 performance period. This release is the culmination of collaborative efforts by members of the OSEHRA popHealth Steering Work Group and the Developer Open Source Project Group. In particular, the Alabama State Medicaid committed significant development resources to achieve the attestation certification for the 2018 performance period.
Wyoming Department of Health Joins Forces with Medicity to Develop Statewide Health Information Exchange
Medicity, a leading expert in clinical data aggregation and interoperability, announced its partnership with the Wyoming Department of Health to form a statewide, medical community-owned health information exchange (HIE). Following a thorough assessment of the state’s health information environment, the Wyoming Department of Health (WDH) determined the need to establish a secure venue for providers to obtain patient information across the state. The Wyoming Frontier Information Exchange (WYFI), a centralized repository of clinical data for participating patients, will utilize Medicity’s data aggregation and interoperability capabilities to meet the needs of its population’s health, while improving quality of care.
OSEHRA to Host Innovation Webinar on VA's Lighthouse API Initiative
OSEHRA is pleased to announce that we have added a second Innovation Webinar to our March schedule. Register now and join us at 3:00PM EST on both March 20, 2018 and March 27, 2018 for two cutting-edge presentations. Many of you are already registered to hear DXC Chief Technologist and Strategist Bo Dagnall at 3PM on Tuesday, March 20 as he provides an overview of DXC Technology's Digital Health Platform. Patient health outcomes are sub-optimal when medical decisions are made based on incomplete, fragments and unstandardized data. DXC Technology has built a reference implementation of a digital health platform (DHP-RI) to demonstrate the strength of a brand-agnostic platform for accessing and analyzing healthcare data.
Amazon hires openFDA trailblazer Kass-Hout for healthcare project: report
Amazon has hired former FDA chief health informatics officer Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., CNBC reports. Kass-Hout led the groundbreaking openFDA initiative and rehabilitated the reputation of the FDA’s IT department during his three years at the agency. Details of what Kass-Hout will do at Amazon are scarce....during his time at the FDA, Kass-Hout lead the precisionFDA program that established a collaborative, open approach to genomic testing references. Across the initiatives, Kass-Hout deployed approaches that were established in tech circles but alien to the FDA prior to his arrival. Open-source projects that embraced the cloud, shared their code on GitHub and invited programmers to hackathons became commonplace.
ECRI Institute Committed to Building National Health IT Safety Collaborative
Building on the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative, ECRI Institute is now responding to the call for a national program focused on improving health IT safety. ECRI Institute, together with the Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS), the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the Pew Charitable Trusts, sent a letter to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) informing them of their shared vision for a national health IT safety collaborative. The letter includes the key characteristics needed for its success.
HLN Releases New Version of Award Winning Open Source Immunization Forecaster
HLN released a new version (v1.11.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) on March 9, 2018. ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support (CDS) for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems. The release includes support for Earliest Date and Overdue Date for immunizations that are forecasted. If enabled, ICE will output two additional forecast dates along with the existing Recommendation Date...
Calling all Abstracts - 2018 OSEHRA Summit
Plans for our 7th Annual Summit, The Open Road for Government Innovation, are well underway! This year's event will be held from July 18 - 20, 2018 and the Program Committee is looking forward to receiving an abundance of abstracts from the community. All are invited to participate and submit their proposals for presentation, poster, and/or roundtable discussion. All submissions are due no later than Friday, April 13, 2018.
Diagnostic Errors Top ECRI Institute’s Patient Safety Concerns for 2018
ECRI Institute names diagnostic errors the number one concern on its 2018 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations. Each year, approximately 1 in 20 adults experiences a diagnostic error, according to published studies. These errors and delays can lead to care gaps, repeat testing, unnecessary procedures, and patient harm. “Diagnostic errors are not only common, but they can have serious consequences," says Gail M. Horvath, MSN, RN, CNOR, CRCST, patient safety analyst, ECRI Institute. "A lot of hospital deaths that were attributed to the normal course of disease may have been the result of diagnostic error."
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'We took a broken system and just broke it completely’
President Donald Trump last year hailed a multibillion-dollar initiative to create a seamless digital health system for active duty military and the VA that he said would deliver “faster, better, and far better quality care.” But the military’s $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system has utterly failed to achieve those goals at the first hospitals that went online. Instead, technical glitches and poor training have caused dangerous errors and reduced the number of patients who can be treated, according to interviews with more than 25 military and Veterans Affairs health IT specialists and doctors, including six who work at the four Pacific Northwest military medical facilities that rolled out the software over the past year.