A recent study of healthcare organizations showed that most are not prepared to deliver standardized longitudinal care across multiple provider systems. Shared care plans will be the centerpiece of coordinated care delivery, incentivized by the move from fee-for-service to value-based care. In 2015, Medicare unveiled its plan to transition to quality-based payments via the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which will sunset and subsume earlier quality-encouraging programs, and move
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Can We Balance Civil Liberties with Mental Health Treatment?
Editor's Note: Irv Lichtenwald is president and CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation, the solution provider for the OpenVista electronic health record.
In January of this year, political analyst Norman Ornstein lost his 34-year-old son, Matthew, to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. While Matthew’s death was a tragic blow to family and friends, it was not the kind of out-of-the-blue shock that comes with absolutely no forewarning. Matthew, as Ornstein says in a New York Times op-ed
Read More
EPCS and Prior Authorizations: Prescriptions for Better Patient Care
Editor's Note: Stephen Beck, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, currently serves as Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Mercy Health .
In 2010, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) revised regulations to give prescribers the option to write electronic prescriptions for controlled substances (EPCS) such as opioids and ADHD medications, while permitting pharmacies to receive, dispense, and archive these e-scripts. EPCS increases patient and community safety, too. Doctors document everything discreetly
Read More
Hospitals To Reap Millions in CMS Reimbursement Revenue
Like most hospitals, Good Samaritan in St. Vincennes, Indiana was struggling with the typical EHR interoperability plaguing most healthcare facilities in which multiple EHR system cannot share data. However the 232-bed community health-care facility not only solved this common interoperability, but used it to unlock a treasure trove of CMS funds while also improving patient care.
Middleware, used for years to integrate data in financial and retail organizations with its simple open
Read More
5 Hospital Considerations for Implementing an E-Prescribing Solution
Editor’s Note: D’Arcy Gue is one of the co-founders of Phoenix Health Systems, a healthcare IT consulting and outsourcing firm. In April 2015, Phoenix welcomed a merger with Medsphere Systems Corporation and now serves as the vice president of industry relations for Phoenix Health Systems, the health IT services division of Medsphere.
On the face of it, the use of computers to order prescriptions seems like a no-brainer. Who, after all, is capable of reading a physician’s handwriting?
But
Read More
Hospital Cyber-Attacks Could Be Mitigated through Higher Education
Editor's Note: J.A. Eve Krahe, Ph.D. is the dean of graduate programs for University of Phoenix School of Health Services Administration. Prior to joining University of Phoenix, she served as the director of health care innovation programs at Arizona State University.
In his comments to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in September 2015, Brian Dishman of Intel Corporation described the “constellation” of health data that surrounds each of us. From diagnostic,
Read More
Reimagining Aging: Designing Digital Health Products for Aging Boomers
Editor’s Note: Stuart Karten is the principal of Karten Design, a product innovation consultancy creating positive experiences between people and products specializing in health technology.
The number of adults aged 65 and older will double to nearly 90 million people by 2050. The baby boom generation — the largest in history — aren’t babies anymore. They are taking their unique perspective into their senior years, and that perspective will help shape healthcare for the next several decades.
Read More
Robotic Surgery Is the Future of Medicine
Editor's Note: Richard van Hooijdonk is a futurist and international keynote speaker on future technologies and disruption and how these technologies change our everyday lives. Van Hooijdonk and his international team research ‘mega trends’ on digital health, robotic surgery,drones, the internet-of-things, 3D/4D printing, Big Data and other how new technologies affects many industries.
The human body is a rather untidy place where your organs, bones, flesh, muscles, arteries
Read More
Can Mobile Health Apps Transform Mental Health Care?
Any conversation focused on what’s great about America usually includes a mention of optimism, hopefulness or some variation on the theme.
Americans generally still believe in a brighter future, and especially the ways in which technology can enable that future. But that sense of optimism contains a kernel of potential disappointment when we ask technology to do too much.
Consider the case of mental health care, a profession that faces massive budget shortfalls.
According to Robert
Read More
4 C’s of the Quantified Doctor-Patient Relationship
So far the doctor-patient relationship escaped rigorous quantification, because “relationship” is largely a nostalgic quantity, and because “communications” was deemed to be a reasonable substitute. There are various tools and instruments for subjective measurement of communications with one’s doctor, with the most common being the ubiquitous patient experience survey. However, if we accept a broader definition of the doctor-patient relationship, such as the 6C’s proposed by Dr. Emanuel, a more
Read More
