Exclusion from federal funding makes no clinical, economic or policy sense
A show of hands: Who believes depression or bipolar disorder have no impact on the severity and treatment of a patient’s diabetes and COPD?
It’s an idea no practicing physician would support. Yet time and again, we act as though mental illness and care can be kept separate from physical ailments.
Take Meaningful Use (MU), for example. The federal government believes healthcare must move into the digital age and is
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Standardization vs. Personalization: Can Healthcare Do Both?
Usually when personalization is mentioned in the world of healthcare thoughts jump to genetics and personalized medicine with custom cancer drugs and medical devices. However, there is another type of personalization that can be applied to healthcare, to make each patient feel like an individual, rather than just "one of the masses."
The world of ecommerce discovered the value of personalized online experiences a decade ago and the additional revenue/branding/loyalty that can be
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Rise of the “Internet of Healthy Things”
People are embracing connected objects that are actively caring for them.
As the decades have gone on, we’ve seen everything around us advance technologically at a rapid pace. Looking at Moore's law, you can see the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This in turn has allowed faster innovation in technology in every sector, from social networks, search engines and banking, to name a few. Despite all of
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How Will The Primary Care Model Evolve in 2015?
You may not be ready to admit it even to yourself, but you know it’s changing. Permanently. Some say it’s for the better. Others say it’s for the worse. Most don’t really care much one way or the other. After all, health care has been evolving and changing over thousands of years, and the experts best positioned to evaluate the health care turmoil of our times are yet to be born. Those of us who are now in the eye of the storm have an understandable tendency to analyze high velocity changes,
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Real-time Health Monitoring Will Revolutionize Patient Home Care in 2015
Founder and CEO, Robert Herzog of eCaring describes how tailoring programs for special patient populations will improve patient home care while reducing risks of hospital readmissions.
Real-time health monitoring including the patient's home continues to gain importance as pressures come from a variety of sources to reduce risks and costs of readmissions and hospitalizations. The Centers for the Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), enforcing the 2012 Medicare Readmission
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JASON Report: The Great American Experiment
The distinguished JASON group of anonymous scientists and academics that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense science and technology, just published a sequel to the 2013 best seller, “A Robust Health Data Infrastructure”. The new report is titled “Data for Individual Health”, and it has two purposes. The first and foremost purpose is to backtrack on the searing criticism leveled at government efforts to promote health information technology, which evoked much
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Can Public APIs Unlock True Health IT Interoperability?
Do we finally have the spark?
Interoperability is the current health IT buzzword because it’s the essential ingredient in creating a system that benefits patients, doctors and hospitals. Almost everyone in healthcare is pressing for it and is frustrated, though probably not surprised, that Meaningful Use did not get us there.
The ONC says within three years we’ll have a roadmap for providing interoperability “across vendor platforms,” which should probably elicit a collective groan.
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EHR Usability for Ongoing Optimization
Dr. Stephen Beck, CMIO at Mercy Health (formerly Catholic Health Partners) discusses how his organization is approaching EHR usability to deliver improvements in efficiency, care quality and provider satisfaction.
Nearly every day I read a new article about physician dissatisfaction with EHRs. There seems to be many reasons for this attitude. Part of it is the need for better data collection tools to ensure ongoing optimization to keep pace with changing regulations. For example, an October
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6 Ways Digital Health Transformed Healthcare in 2014
Fard Johnmar, founder of Enspektos describes 6 major gifts digital health has granted doctors, patients, caregivers and others during 2014.
There's a lot of skepticism about the potential of digital health tools and technologies to transform health and medicine. A lot of it is warranted. We're still waiting for robust studies that help to prove that tools such as mobile applications and wearables can actually improve health and change behavior. The ones we have today are
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Google Glass in Healthcare Is Here to Stay
Kyle Samani of Pristine shares his insights on the state of Google Glass in healthcare and why its demise is an exaggeration.
In the past couple of weeks, a number of press outlets have announced what is amounting to the death of Google Glass (see here and here, for example). These reports cite lack of consumer adoption and the fact that consumer-facing software companies (i.e. Twitter) have dropped support for Glass. Following this logic, Glass must be just as dead for professionals
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