Kaiser Permanente

Meet Judy Faulkner. She is the founder and CEO of Epic Systems Corporation in Wisconsin. She is also a member of the GAO Health Information Technology Policy Committee and an advisory board member of the Journal of Healthcare Information Management. She is also politically active...The $787 billion stimulus bill signed into law by President Obama in February 2009 included $19 billion for healthcare information technology (HIT), and created the Health IT Policy Committee, whose job it was to advise the federal government on spending the $19 billion allocation. The committee was to have one member responsible for representing information technology vendors. Judy Faulkner was designated as that member.

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As health care consolidation accelerates nationwide, a new study shows that hospital prices in two of California’s largest health systems were 25 percent higher than at other hospitals around the state. Researchers said this gap of nearly $4,000 per patient admission was not due to regional wage differences or hospitals treating sicker patients. Rather, they said California’s two biggest hospital chains, Dignity Health and Sutter Health, had used their market power to win higher rates...

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The Clinical Information Modelling Initiative (CIMI) group led by Dr Stan Huff (Intermountain Health, Utah) met here in London 29 Nov – 1 Dec to make a final decision on formalism, from the two remaining – openEHR archetypes and various forms of UML (previous posts on CIMI: DCMs & RM, on formalisms). Instead of simply choosing one, the group made a more strategic choice of designating openEHR ADL/AOM 1.5 as the core formalism, with a corresponding profile of UML being developed to enable the more numerous UML-based developers (e.g. VA, NHS etc) to use archetypes within their UML toolchains....

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The national Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) can look to Kaiser Permanente to see how comparative effectiveness research can enhance healthcare. Read More »

Judith Faulkner...has made a fistful. From her remote midwestern outpost, Faulkner, 68, has quietly built Epic, which sells electronic health records into a $1.2 billion (2011 revenues) business—double four years ago...Helping enrich Faulkner is also a piece of government legislation that subsidizes the adoption of electronic medical records, by paying millions to qualifying hospitals. Forbes estimates her net worth at $1.7 billion.

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Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is announcing the MyStudies app, a new mobile technology to foster the collection of real world evidence via patients' mobile devices. Real world data can be collected from a variety of sources, such as electronic health records, claims and billing activities, and product and disease registries, as well as from patient-generated data including in home-use settings, or from data gathered from other sources, such as mobile devices. As part of the agency's work to foster greater opportunities around real world evidence, the FDA partnered with Kaiser Permanente on a pilot study to measure the functionality and engagement of the MyStudies app.

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Healthcare providers are being pushed to deliver more cost effective medical care and to improve the health of not just individual patients but large populations. One key to carrying out both mandates is finding more clinically effective treatment options. Read More »