Electronic Health Record (EHR)

See the following -

The College of St. Scholastica Goes Live on iCare

Press Release | iCare | May 7, 2013

Over 17,000 nurses, allied health professionals and Health Information Management students to gain hands-on access to iCare for EHR training from the Center for Healthcare Innovation at The College of St. Scholastica Read More »

The Costly Darkside Of EMR Implementations

Edmund Billings | HIT Consultant | January 3, 2013

Dr. Billings explores the costly darkside of EMR implementations significant maintenance, development and consultancy costs after implementing an EMR system Read More »

The Direct Project in Action

Fred Trotter | O'Reilly Radar | February 24, 2012

Houston's healthcare community is deploying a Direct Project pilot.

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The EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup

John D. Halamka, M.D. | Life as a CIO Blog | November 8, 2011

Today, the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup, originally formed by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), will announce the collaborative work of seven states (California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon), eight EHR vendors (Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, e-MDs, Greenway, McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, NextGen Healthcare, Sage, and Siemens Healthcar Read More »

The Growing Legend of Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush

Stephanie Baum | MedCity News | January 15, 2016

Profane badass. Renaissance leader. Super hero. Those were some of the reactions on social media to a photo this week capturing athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush crouched over an unconscious man trying to save his life with a couple of construction workers. His act also underscored his status as a larger than life character across healthcare...He’s become the healthcare Chuck Norris. You can’t beat Jonathan Bush because he’s Jonathan Bush and no one messes with Jonathan Bush.

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The Growing OpenEMR Business Community

The OpenEMR community has been very active over this past year.  This 'open source' electronic medical record (EMR) system continues to be enhanced by developers around the globe, the number of healthcare providers that have installed and begun using the system (over 15,000 sites world-wide) continues to grow, and a fairly robust business community of companies offering services and support is now in place. Read More »

The Importance of a Nursing Data Framework for Clinical Data Exchange

With more than 4 million nurses in the U.S., nurses are the largest clinical segment of the U.S. healthcare sector. Nurses have indisputably demonstrated an ability to improve healthcare outcomes. We are just beginning to utilize data from healthcare information technologies and to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve patient outcomes. One of the key benefits of AI will be the ability to leverage the data from nursing care plans and nursing diagnoses to perform work load balancing for nursing staff. This is a key solution to future management of the problem of the shortage of nurses.

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The Importance of High Quality Data for Artificial Intelligence Reliability

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic right now in medical practice. Though there are many reasons why AI solutions have become so popular, one of the biggest reasons is that AI has the potential to reduce clinical burnout and fatigue by improving Clinical Decision Support in electronic health record (EHR) systems. To understand how this can be achieved, we must first understand what AI is and how it works...For Healthcare, AI and Machine Learning algorithms must rely on copious amounts of granular, high-quality data.

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The IT VistA Gets Larger

Joseph Conn | ModernHealthcare.com | January 15, 2012

The 24th meeting of the WorldVistA community wrapped up a three-day run Sunday at University of California Davis. WorldVistA is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2002 to promote the use of an open-source version of the VistA system outside the Veterans Affairs Department, where the VA has been developing the EHR for more than 30 years. Read More »

The New York State Office of Mental Health Selects Document Storage Systems, Inc. vxVistA as New Electronic Health Record

Press Release | DSS, Inc. | September 17, 2013

Implementation of vxVistA to improve care delivery, enhance patient outcomes for New York-based mental health care patients Read More »

The ONC 10 Year Vision

On June 5th 2014, ONC released  “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure." The plan is divided in 3 year goals, 6 year goals, and 10 year goals. Five specific tactics support the strategies. Below is a summary of the report and a few comments from my Massachusetts experience that support the reasonableness of the ONC goals.

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The Pentagon Contract That Could Shape EHRs For Years To Come — Epic Pays Out To Win Friends And Influence Congress

Arthur Allen | Politico.com | October 17, 2014

GENTLEMEN (AND WOMEN) START YOUR (INTEROPERABLE) ENGINES: The Department of Defense’s $11 billion, 10-year contract for a new electronic health records system won’t just shape military health for the next decade, reports Ashley Gold, it could very well predict the future of electronic health records and their handling of interoperability. Read More »

The Postmodern EHR: What are the Enablers?

Traditional monolithic EHR architectures focus on stability and standardization at the expense of agility. Along with innovation, cloud based deployment and integration of things, agility is the main differentiator when describing the requirements of application architecture for the Postmodern EHR. Achieving agility is impossible for the vast majority of healthcare applications today as they are an inseparable mix of code for user interface, decision logic, workflows and data definitions. New architectures promote agility and reuse by turning the applications inside out and layering the four types of programming into portals, rule engines, process engines and XML data. Let’s look at some examples, layer by layer:

The Postmodern EHR: The Data Layer

This second approach entails defining a data layer, which is the most important aspect of the Postmodern EHR architecture from my previous post. Why is this the most important layer? Most healthcare organizations are beginning to realize that their data is more valuable than their applications. Data has become a key asset, since good data is key to improving outcomes, managing chronic disease and enabling population health management. And it needs to be managed for the lifetime of the patient. Which application is going to last that long? What happens to health data when we switch applications?

The Postmodern EHR: What can Health IT Learn from the Evolution of the ERP Market?

It seems the pattern is clear. From best of breed to integrated (mega)suite to a new world of innovative, agile, mostly cloud based and multivendor solutions. This is what Gartner calls “Postmodern”. According to Christensen, disruption like this becomes possible when the established players start exceeding the requirements and expectations of their customers, providing only sustaining innovation – i.e. adding more and more features to their products. This is what was happening in the personal productivity space with the Office products. Similarly, the ERP market today has well defined requirements and this allows the newcomers to disrupt, meeting the base expectations and adding innovation and agility while lowering costs.