medical errors

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Humetrix to Showcase Medicare Approved Blue Button 2.0 Mobile Platform at HIMSS19

Press Release | Humetrix | February 8, 2019

At HIMSS 19 February 11-15 in Orlando, Florida, Humetrix will demo its iBlueButton 8.0 mobile health platform approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to help millions of Americans covered by Medicare, Veterans, and military personnel in TRICARE receive safer and more cost-effective healthcare. A year after announcing the Medicare Blue Button 2.0 and MyHealthEData initiative at the HIMSS 18 conference, CMS Administrator, Seema Verma continues to emphasize the importance of "giving patients the necessary information they need to make the best decisions about their health care". Humetrix...has embraced this initiative from the start recognizing first and foremost that because Medicare beneficiaries are most at risk for medical errors and redundant tests across multiple providers they need to have access and use of their medical history wherever they receive care.

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Humetrix to Unveil Medicare Blue Button FHIR API Enabled iBlueButton Mobile Platform at HIMSS18

Press Release | Humetrix | March 1, 2018

At HIMSS March 5-8, Humetrix is proud to be part of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Blue Button® API program launch to enable Medicare beneficiaries to connect their Medicare claims data to the applications, services, and research programs they trust. Three-time award winner of the ONC Investing in Innovation competition for Blue Button, Humetrix has been a fierce advocate and a Blue Button technology industry leader from the start, providing Veterans, TRICARE and Medicare beneficiaries mobile access to their Blue Button data with the iBlueButton mobile platform.

Improving Healthcare Delivery: Data as Service Provider

We have all experienced, or know someone who has experienced, problems with our healthcare delivery systems. To be sure, there are commonalities among the issues that arise but each patient’s situation has unique, personal features.  These differences can lead to vastly different outcomes, including those affecting family caregivers. Consider a couple general examples. There can be a range of medical errors, whether caused by physicians or other medical personnel, some largely inconsequential and others leading to devastating outcomes; there can be discontinuity of care with siloed or non-integrative providers and procedures where each sector of the medical profession is working to solve the body part problem in their limited sphere and coordination is hard to achieve...

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Improving Quality Patient Outcomes A Money Loser For Hospitals

Evan Albright | Forbes | April 17, 2013

Surgical patients who have complications generate better margins for hospitals, a new study  in the Journal of American Medical Association has found. Cue the outrage from the consumer media about “profit-hungry hospitals.” Read More »

In Military Care, a Pattern of Errors but Not Scrutiny

Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew W. Lehren | New York Times | June 28, 2014

Since 2001, the Defense Department has required military hospitals to conduct safety investigations when patients unexpectedly die or suffer severe injury. The object is to expose and fix systemic errors, often in the most routine procedures, that can have disastrous consequences for the quality of care. Yet there is no evidence of such an inquiry into Mrs. Zeppa’s death.

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Institute Of Medicine Slams Sellers Of Electronic Health Records

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | November 8, 2011

The government-mandated push to implement electronic health records is supposed to centralize patient data, and reduce human medical errors in the process. [...] Read More »

Is DoD's EHR modernization bound to fail?

Jack McCarthy | Healthcare IT News | July 28, 2015

...some are saying the system, the most expensive EHR investment of its kind, is bound for failure, while others suggest the contract itself should be delayed pending further review. Thomas J. Verbeck, a CIO and a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, recently wrote that sharing data is essential for the DoD because it will speed healthcare delivery and save lives, as well as reduce healthcare costs, prevent medical errors and avoid unnecessary testing. "But the DoD's plan will fail," Verbeck wrote in The Fayetteville Observer. "That's because most of today's EHR systems, including the bidder finalists, are designed only to work within their own system.

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Is EHR “Mania” Hiding Serious Patient Safety Flaws?

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | February 20, 2013

A typo leads to the administration of the wrong medication.  A surgeon looking at a flipped image operates on the opposite side of a patient’s head.  An allergy warning is ignored after a clinician clicks away from an annoying pop-up reminder.  In the rush to adopt electronic health records and the race to achieve meaningful use, are potentially significant dangers to patients being ignored? Read More »

Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?

Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.

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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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IT Iconoclasts: Experts Offer Dissent On Policy Issues, Technology Implementation

Joseph Conn | Information Technology | January 28, 2013

Each month, more hospitals and office-based physicians buy and use electronic medical records and other health information technologies as the U.S. presses on toward achieving the goal first articulated by President George W. Bush in 2004: providing most Americans with access to an electronic medical record within a decade... Read More »

Joint Commission Warns About Dangers From Alarm Fatigue

Maureen McKinney | ModernHealthcare.com | April 8, 2013

The nation's largest hospital accreditation organization has issued a warning to hospitals about the dangers of alarm fatigue, which can occur when clinicians become desensitized to the incessant beeping of medical device alarms. Read More »

Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It

...The following year, researchers shook the profession with an article in Health Affairs entitled “‘Global Trigger Tool’ Shows that Adverse Events in Hospitals May be Ten Times Greater than Previously Measured.” Dr. David Classen, who did the seminal research for global triggers, served as lead author of the study, which looked at three mid-size to large (ranging from 550 to 1,000 beds) teaching hospitals associated with medical schools in the West and Northwest that participated on the condition of anonymity...When different detection methods were applied, global triggers found over 90 percent of events, the government’s Patient Safety Indicators (based on discharge summaries) found 8.5 percent, and voluntary reporting disclosed only 2 percent (afraid of censure and malpractice, doctors and nurses seldom willingly self-accuse). Classen, et al. warned: “reliance on voluntary reporting and the Patient Safety Indicators could produce misleading conclusions about the current safety of care in the U.S. health-care system and misdirect efforts to improve patient safety.”...

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Marin General Hospital Nurses Warn That New Computer System Is Causing Errors, Call For Time Out

Richard Halstead | Marin Independent Journal | May 15, 2013

Nurses at Marin General Hospital have asked administrators to put implementation of a new computerized physician order entry system on hold until glitches can be worked out and more training provided to nurses and doctors who use it. Read More »

Medical Boards Behaving Badly

Rats!  I was all excited to write about virtual reality -- what with the long-anticipated release of the Oculus Rift -- or about how perhaps augmented reality is going to be the new reality, as some experts predict.  Then Consumer Reports came out with a report that I had to write about: What You Don't Know About Your Doctor Could Hurt You. Long story short: chances are you don't know what you'd like to. Consumer Reports did a deep dive on the actions of the California medical board, obtaining their entire database of doctors on probation...

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