Electronic Health Record (EHR)

See the following -

The President’s Precision Medicine Initiative – The First Annual Check-Up

Antoinette F. Konski | JD Supra Business Advisor | January 27, 2016

Watching President Obama’s recent 2016 State of the Union Address reminded me that one year has passed since the President announced a new “precision” or personalized medicine initiative to advance personalized, effective therapies for the American public. It was during his 2015 State of the Union Address that the President stated:[1]
“[T]onight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier. We can do this.”...

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The Promise of Electronic Health Records

John Halamka | Government Health IT | December 5, 2011

Last week, Don Berwick completed his 17 month tenure as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid. The nation should be grateful that such a visionary was at the helm. The nation should be frustrated that he was never confirmed. Read More »

The Right Way to Modernize VA's VistA EHR: Shift Development to the Private Sector and the Cloud

While changes to VistA are warranted and necessary, trashing the entire system because one component may be flawed makes little sense from technological or financial perspectives. The VA scheduling scandal was the product of an agency overwhelmed by veterans returning from two theaters of war. In that scenario, the scheduling system became a scapegoat for organizational and human resources challenges that were bound to manifest in one way or another.The VA should not heed calls to replace VistA for these key reasons...

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The Road Not Taken: The Adventure of a Post Google Summer of Code Student

Suranga Nath Kasthurirathne | Open Source at Google | February 15, 2012

My association with OpenMRS brought me many noteworthy achievements over the past six months. These victories are priceless, and I wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of them if not for my decision to ‘stay on’ with the organization. It all goes to show that a little commitment and goodwill can take you a long way.

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The Staggering Cost Of An Epic Electronic Health Record Might Not Be Worth It

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | June 18, 2012

...[B]ecause it is no small task to deploy [Epic, Judith Faulkner] is there all the way to hand-hold jittery CIOs, and help them get millions of dollars in government subsidies by showing meaningful use of her EHR. Her not-for-profit clientèle will need every penny of those taxpayers’ dollars, but they won’t cover anywhere near the staggering cost of an Epic EHR. Read More »

The State of Health IT in America: Thinking About the Bipartisan Policy Center Report on Health IT

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn | Health Populi | February 2, 2012

Just how solid is political support for health IT these days, then? An important report, Transforming Health Care: The Role of Health IT, from the Bipartisan Policy Center Task Force on Delivery System Reform and Health IT published in January 2012, talks about the gaps and obstacles to achieving an interoperable, accessible health IT infrastructure.

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The Strengths and Weaknesses of the HL7 FHIR Messaging Standard

It has been several years since we reviewed the progress of the HL7 FHIR standards adoption rate. Health Level Seven's (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an emerging standard that has rapidly captured the mind-share of the Health Information Technology (HIT) standards community. FHIR is a standard that enables healthcare data sharing between systems in a manner that is more easily implemented and more expressive than previous HL7 standards such as HL7 Version 2, 3 and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). Regardless of the version of HL7 standard used, the purpose of these standards is to send clinical data in messages, whether to a party inside or outside your organization. HL7 devises flexible message formats so the receiver of the message can open it up, know who sent it and why, and break it down into understandable segments and data fields.

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The Top 5 EHR Usability Problems and How to Fix Them

This year at HIMSS in Las Vegas there was no shortage of talk about the “lack of usability” in EHRs. In the final HIMSS16 show daily (Thursday March 3, 2016) there were four articles (“When EHRs cause Harm,” “5 UX steps to Healthy Clinical apps,” “Nurse: We face severe IT usability problems,” and “The leading health IT issues? Poor usability and missing safeguards”) that addressed some aspect of EHR usability...Over the past few years we’ve worked with a number of EHR vendors on improving the usability of their solutions. We’ve noticed a number of items that seem to common to many of the systems, and this list contains some of the most common and highest priority usability issues that should be avoided in your EHR designs.

The VA Waitlist Fiasco: VistA Should Not be Thrown Out With the Bathwater

Without a doubt, the death of American veterans as a result of the VA waitlist debacle is tragic and unacceptable. The Obama administration must move quickly and deliberately to fix the underlying problems and restore faith in the agency. If these issues were common throughout the VA network of hospitals and clinics, it might make sense to consider dramatic, earth-shaking alternatives like moving veterans to private providers and shuttering the VA. But they are not common. Indeed, as Washington Monthly reporter Phillip Longman has documented, the VA’s challenges are regional, not pervasive. Read More »

Think!EHR Platform™ chosen by Hospital Sírio-Libanês, a top Brazilian healthcare provider

Press Release | Marand | August 17, 2015

Marand has signed a contract with Hospital Sírio-Libanês, one of the premier healthcare institutions in South America. Hospital Sírio-Libanês will use Think!EHR Platform™ as a vendor-neutral structured data repository as well as a foundation for the development of a suite of new clinical applications. Marand will also provide services including consulting, training and support. “Hospital Sírio-Libanês is already a HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6 hospital but in order to reach Stage 7, we have to provide additional clinical functionality in several areas. For this reason, we needed a solution to centralize and integrate all the clinical information in a vendor-neutral structured data repository, analogous to our PACS.

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This Is The Year Obamacare Takes On Out-Of-Control Health Care Costs

Rick Ungar | Forbes | January 19, 2012

Write down the date. 2012 is the year that some of the more ‘behind the camera’ aspects of the Affordable Care Act will begin to take effect—measures that are designed to primarily impact on the high cost of medicine. Read More »

Three More Hospitals in the United Kingdom Adopt Open Source EPR (EHR)

OpenMaxims, an electronic patient record (EPR) system developed in the United Kingdom (UK) and made available as open source software, is being adopted by three additional hospitals in the UK. The software solution is being implemented for the Blackpool Victoria Hospital, Clifton Hospital and Fleetwood Hospital, all three in England's northwest coast. The three hospitals form the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The Trust started implementing OpenMaxims in December.

Three Students Jump into Open Source with OpenMRS and Sahana Eden

We are three students in the Bachelor of Computer Science second degree program at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As we each have cooperative education experience, our technical ability and contributions have increasingly become a point of focus as we approach graduation. Our past couple of years at UBC have allowed us to produce some great technical content, but we all found ourselves with one component noticeably absent from our resumes: an open source contribution. While the reasons for this are varied, they all stem from the fact that making a contribution involves a set of skills that goes far beyond anything taught in the classroom or even learned during an internship. It requires a person to be outgoing with complete strangers, to be proactive in seeking out problems to solve, and to have effective written communication...

Time For Hard HITECH Reboot

John W. Loonsk | Healthcare IT News | May 29, 2014

...The Government Accountability Office reports that there is a lack of strategy, prioritized actions, and milestones in HITECH. HIT interoperability is recognized as being limited at multiple levels. And resultantly, the benefits of HIT that depend on a combination of adoption, interoperability, and health information exchange as table stakes are elusive...

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Tolven-The “Unified Platform” that Delivers All-in-One EHR/PHR/HIE

It is hard to miss the fact that the healthcare industry in the United States and other countries are finding that their existing health IT solutions are not interoperable and are simply unable to distribute, or even acquire, critical patient information. There are two fundamental approaches to fixing this problem. First try to bolt on capabilities that will create kludge systems that have partial interoperability capabilities, or start from scratch with a fully unified platform that has all the interoperability capabilities built-in from the ground up. That would be the Tolven Platform, and that is what this article examines. Read More »