Feature Articles
Health eTime Scheduler: the Winning Solution
On October 3, 2013, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced the winners of its Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest. The Health eTime solution, developed by MedRed LLC, BT and VISTA Expertise Network, was named as 1st Place winner and awarded a $1.85 million prize. VA evaluators determined that Health eTime best instantiated their next generation scheduling requirements...What follows is a summation of the contest process, our efforts, as well as details of the emerging Health eTime solution. Read More »
Oroville Hospital’s Scheduler: a winning technology
On October 3rd, the winners of the US Dept of Veteran’s Affairs’ (VA) Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest were announced. In second place was the OH Scheduler, which was the submission from Oroville Hospital in California. I’d like to expand on their press release and provide some background to the technology that was used to develop their scheduler: it’s very much a case study of everything I’ve been talking about in my blog The EWD Files. As it happens, the OH Scheduler was first and foremost designed and developed for use at Oroville Hospital. However, since their Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) is based on the VA’s VistA system, Oroville Hospital believed that it should also meet many of the key requirements of the VA and therefore submitted it as a contender for the VA’s competition. Read More »
Darwinian Health IT: Only well-designed EHRs will survive
Myopic efforts to meet certification and compliance requirements have added functionality and effort tangential to the care of the patient. Clinicians feel like they are working for the system instead of it working for them. The best EHRs are focused on helping physicians take care of patients, with Meaningful Use and ICD-10 derivative of patient care and documentation. Read More »
Major Upcoming Open Source & Health IT Conferences – October 2013
There are a number of major upcoming conferences and events related to Open Source & Health Information Technology (HIT) our readers at Open Health News (OHN) might want to follow or attend over this next month. For example: Read More »
The Politics of the EHR: Why we’re not where we want to be and what we need to do to get there
By now, it seems abundantly clear that the vast potential offered by universal adoption of electronic health records (EHR) has not been achieved. Indeed, the fulfillment of that potential seems a long way off. Unsolved problems with interoperability, usability, safety, and security, to name a few, remain, and continue to pose barriers to universal adoption. There is ample evidence in the medical literature, of the unsolved problems of the EHR. Indeed, two recent reports that offer (probably inadequate) solutions highlight the difficulties that exist with the EHR. The proliferation of these problems has only increased with the increase in adoption of the EHR by physicians and institutions. The Texas Medical Association has asked the (at the time) ONC, Farhad Mostashari, MD, to establish a health IT patient safety czar.1 Read More »
Open Source & IT Procurement
Paul Matthews, Chief Executive of the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP) congratulated Commerce Minister Foss for listening to the IT industry and supporting the nearly unanimous passage of New Zealand's recent law banning software patents. Read More »
Cancer And Clinical Trials: The Role Of Big Data In Personalizing The Health Experience
Despite considerable progress in prevention and treatment, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States. Even with the $50 billion pharmaceutical companies spend on research and development every year, any given cancer drug is ineffective in 75% of the patients receiving it. [...] Read More »
Genomics And The Role Of Big Data In Personalizing The Healthcare Experience
Genomics is making headlines in both academia and the celebrity world. With intense media coverage of Angelina Jolie’s recent double mastectomy after genetic tests revealed that she was predisposed to breast cancer, genetic testing and genomics have been propelled to the front of many more minds. Read More »
Health IT Innovation? Not Without Open Platforms
The issue here is closed platforms, which enable most EHR vendors to position themselves as the single source of innovation. They also create dependent customers and glacial progress in two parallel areas of innovation—evidence-based medicine and information technology. No one company can keep up with the natural pace of advancement in either realm, let alone both. Read More »
Overview of Open Source and VistA in the UK's NHS
There is much widely publicised interest from NHS England in encouraging the development and implementation of open-source software in the National Health System (NHS) with the debate raging in a number of forums, notably on EHI where this article and the comments it has generated are vital reading for anyone interested in this issue. This debate has been fueled by the availability of NHS England’s £260 million Technology Fund which is actively soliciting open source projects include bids to implement an NHS VistA... Read More »
Guest Article: Shakespeare in Namespace, or why Blue Button took off as fast as it did
While Veterans Affairs was struggling with the nuances of the implementation of the Blue Button personal health record, and while the VA and the Pentagon are wrestling the Health Data Dictionary to the ground, we lived – and lived through – the hell of multiple rigid conventions described in [David] Weinberger’s book [Too Big to Know]. Read More »
VHA Providing EHR Training for Health Professional across the U.S.
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) currently operates more than 1,500 sites of care, including 152 hospitals, 965 outpatient clinics, and over 130 VA nursing homes. Last year, over 116,000 health professional trainees received some or all of their clinical training in these VA healthcare facilities. The VA has academic affiliation agreements with more than 1,800 colleges, universities, and medical schools across the U.S. All of the physicians and healthcare professionals that pass through the VA receive training in the use of the VistA electronic health record (EHR) system. Read More »
EHR Systems & Cost Transparency in the Healthcare Industry
Cost transparency is obviously a big issue in the healthcare industry. Whether it’s the amazing variation in costs hospitals charge patients for similar medical procedures, or the costs associated with acquiring and implementing an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system for a hospital - Why are all these costs often carefully hidden? Is there something special about the healthcare industry that says – "Let's not talk about how much things really cost." Apparently, many industry leaders must feel that hospitals boards and patients have no need to know this information. Read More »
Opening Up the FDA
The President's Executive Order on Open Government Data states, "Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable." Interestingly, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), has a tradition of expansive disclosure of information and/or data it generates or collects – contrary to current practices at the FDA. Hopefully, changes being made to 'open up' the FDA will start to accelerate. Read More »
Defense Probably Goes Commercial, Not Necessarily Proprietary
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s long-awaited (in health IT circles, anyway) decision on the Department of Defense’s core health IT system has been made. The VA’s VistA system is out as the preferred DoD solution - unless it’s not. I’ll explain. Read More »