Editor's Note: Richard Sullivan is chief government and revenue officer for Medsphere Systems Corporation, the solution provider for the OpenVista electronic health record.Will information technology ever realize an imagined future where security is strong enough, reliable enough, secure enough to block any and all attacks?It’s a dubious proposition made more uncertain by the recent WannaCry ransomware incident that started a couple of weeks ago and continued around the globe for several days.
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
KLAS: 5 Crucial Factors to Consider When Choosing A Health IT Consulting Firm
Editor's Note: Warren Whitford is the Market Research & Sales Director at KLAS Research. His areas of research focus at KLAS include healthcare management consulting, HIT consulting and value-based care transformation. Many providers are reevaluating their EMR and other IT system options as they look to upgrade from solutions that are obsolescent or being phased out by the vendor, and to advance new capabilities like population health, business intelligence, and telehealth. Providers look to
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How can Health IT Improve Security and Restore Trust?
Editor's Note: John Smith is a Principal Solutions Architect at IT analytics company ExtraHop. Prior to joining ExtraHop, John was a Cloud Architect at both Philips and McKesson and was previously a Principal Architect at the Centers for Disease Control.Hardly a day goes by without news of a new cybersecurity threat or breach, and the healthcare industry is hit with more than its fair share. While unfortunate, it’s not hard to understand why. From personal health information (PHI) to insurance
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5 Reasons Why the VA Should Not Replace VistA With A Commercial EHR
This post is sponsored by Medsphere Systems Corporation, the solution provider for the OpenVista electronic health record.The VA waitlist scandal of a few years ago was a dark period in the agency’s history. Fallout from the scandal reverberated through the media and claimed the job of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.Now, three years on, the push to reform the VA and prevent a similar situation continues. Naturally, the healthcare information technology (IT) tools employees use, including the
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Chronic Care Management: Trends and Implications for Providers to Watch
Editor’s Note: Jas Grewal is the CEO of CareSkore, a population health management provider leveraging machine-learning to generate real-time predictive and prescriptive analytics to understand each patient risk profile for healthcare providers. Chronic care management (CCM), involving care for patients with 2 or more chronic conditions, is being thrust more and more into the spotlight due to evolving developments in reimbursements and changing demographics. While many services classified as CCM
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Optimizing Health IT Investments: The Key to Optimizing Care
Editor's Note: Dr. John Danaher is the President of Clinical Solutions at Elsevier, an information analytics company that helps institutions and professionals progress science, advance healthcare and improve performance. Prior to joining Elsevier, John was President of the Schools of Health Sciences and Nursing at Kaplan University. He brings a great depth of experience in digital media in health care and education from his time at Kaplan, Discovery Communications, and as executive vice
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Healthcare IT Pricing: Can A Commoditized Future Drive Down Costs?
Shopping for a laptop can be an extensive research project where the prospective buyer compares prices based on a host of features: Processor speed, monitor resolution, video card quality, etc.And when you go looking for a surge protector, do you engage in similar due diligence? Probably not. The differences between the various products are generally so minimal that price is the primary concern. The same is largely true for storage devices, monitors, random-access memory (RAM) and other products
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How Predictive Analytics Brings a Moneyball Approach to Improve Healthcare Financial Performance
Editor's Note: Paul Bradley, PhD, is the Chief Data Scientist at ZirMed, a company empowering healthcare organizations to optimize revenue and population health with an end-to-end platform of cloud-based financial and clinical performance management solutions. Predictive analytics – using data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data – has become a staple of many industries.Brick-and-mortar retailers use it to
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Why Clinicians Need The Freshest Data For Evidence-Based Outcomes
Editor's Note: Dr. Ross Ellis is the Medical Director at Zynx Health to help implement evidence-based care guidance across a broad range of health systems in the US, Canada and the Middle East. In his own practice in eastern Pennsylvania he has helped manage clinical decision support for EHR-based workflows. Dr. Ellis completed an MD degree, MPH degree and residency training at Columbia University in New York. He is ABIM-board certified in general internal medicine.Hospitals and health systems
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5 Basic Steps for Hospitals to Improve Their Data Security
If you’re a small healthcare IT operation, a simple spreadsheet might do the trick. If you’re larger, a not-so-simple spreadsheet might be in order.Regardless of how you do it, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare organizations must identify and monitor every single instance of computer network access. They’re called endpoints, says Larry Ponemon, founder of the security consulting firm the Ponemon Institute, and for you they exist as vulnerabilities.Your job is to eliminate them through a
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