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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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
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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Why Data Block Is the Leading Cause of Death for Digital Health Startups
Editor's Note: Buff Colchagoff is the CEO of RosettaHealth, a cloud-based health messaging and exchange platform. Colchagoff has over 16 years of Health IT experience with large projects, including building the VA’s PHR MyHealtheVet, as operations manager for the Nationwide Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) which grew into the Sequoia Project, the Direct Project. Follow him on Twitter at @BuffColchagoffYou’re the leader of a digital health startup born in 2015, ready, willing, and eager to
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EHR Optimization: Necessary Because EHRs Are Never “Done”
Regardless of how well or poorly your EHR was installed, EHR optimization ensures that your healthcare organization's EHR is changing with it.Why, if over 95 percent of hospitals have implemented EHRs, are so many planning to invest in improvements or replacements this year? A new Healthcare IT News survey of hospital executives showed that 24 percent are conducting a major EHR system upgrade, and 21 percent are replacing their EHR at one or more sites. KPMG’s survey of CHIME members last month
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5 Ways Effective Healthcare IT Can Reduce Hospital Costs
The focus of federal efforts to incentivize healthcare IT adoption has primarily been on electronic health records (EHRs), which are oriented around hospitals and physician offices. Moving forward, EHRs will remain the anchor technology as data from other devices and applications flows in and becomes both available and comparable.It’s become readily apparent that healthcare IT is much broader than EHRs alone. Increasingly, healthcare IT is a web of interconnected devices and applications that
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