Editor's Note: Salo Fajer is the Chief Technology Officer at Digital Guardian. He is responsible for driving the company’s strategic vision and core innovation efforts while also overseeing product management, product marketing, and product content development.
It is well known that cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) technology brings many benefits to healthcare firms, including improved mobility, immediate access to information and streamlined record keeping. Unfortunately, these
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Achieving HIPAA Compliance as a Business Associate
Editor’s Note: This post is co-written by David Wong, Managing Director of Bulger Partners, an advisory firm that specializes in healthcare IT and Mike Kavis, VP/Principal Architect for Cloud Technology Partners.
In 2009, the HITECH Act mandated that not only covered entities but also business associates would be subject to periodic audits as a means to ensure that both are complying with HIPAA Rules. The first phase of these audits, taking place between 2011 and 2012 and involving 115
Read More
Interoperability Will Define Health IT Vendors In 2016
For the last five years I have witnessed at length the bold predictions of how many startups and app focused companies will revolutionize healthcare as they did the consumer industry. I was always a skeptic and viewed the 'evangelizing' of healthcare apps as being wishful thinking rather than being based on any evidence.
Don't get me wrong, apps are a critical component of clinical IT systems for patients and clinicians but they're just that - one component. A gateway to much more important
Read More
In Retrospective, Meaningful Use was Meaningless
We don’t win anymore in health care. After repeatedly drilling in our heads that America’s sick care system is a disaster, that those who care for the sick are incompetent and stupid, and that the sick themselves are losers, Meaningful Use was advertised as the means by which technology will make health care great again.
The program has been in place for 5 years and the great promise of Meaningful Use is just around the same corner it was back in 2011. The only measurable changes from the
Read More
“Data as a Drug” Will Define The Next Decade of Medicine
Editor's Note: Michelle Longmire, MD is a Stanford-trained physician-entrepreneur and the CEO of Medable Inc., an app and analytics platform for healthcare. Reach her at @LongmireMD.
Medical science is now producing gene-editing technology, implantables, and pills with digestible microchips. The plethora of technologies will sense our body signals and can help predict and prevent illness. Increasingly, humans are becoming machines. We already have wearables, but we will soon have a
Read More
EHRs are Oppressive Straitjackets for the Practice of Medicine
Editor's Note: Margalit Gur-Arie is the founder, BizMed. She writes regularly about the intersection of healthcare & technology on her site: On Health Care Technology. Follow her on Twitter at @margalitgurarie
It was a dark and stormy night. My computer didn’t catch fire while typing the previous sentence. No alarms were triggered warning me about the quality of such opening. I wasn’t prompted to select subjects and predicates from dropdown lists. I typed the entire sentence, letter by
Read More
7 Factors Influencing How Consumers Will Dictate the Doctor Experience in 2016
Editor's Note: Jim Prendergast is a digital health entrepreneur, and the CEO and Co-Founder of HealthiestYou, a telehealth and wellness delivery innovator. Jim recently led the company through a $30 million round of growth funding from Frontier Capital.
The healthcare industry is experiencing a new driver at the wheel. In 2016 this will become more apparent than ever. It’s you. And, it’s me. It is in fact, all of us who want less-hassle healthcare access, cost containment and a complete
Read More
Why Shared Care Plans Is the Future of Care Coordination
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
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
