By Matt Patterson MD – In May, The Joint Commission announced that it was changing its five-year-old ban on texting, stating that effective immediately health care organizations may now allow orders to be transmitted via text message. The topic of ‘secure messaging’ has long been a polarizing topic within the health care industry.
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By William Hersh – Raising a number of caveats about the enthusiasm for leveraging the growing volume of patient data in EHRs and other clinical information systems for so-called re-use of secondary use, such as clinical research, quality improvement, and public health.
By Ashish Jha – Get a group of health policy experts together and you’ll find one area of near universal agreement: we need more transparency in healthcare. The notion behind transparency is straightforward; greater availability of data on provider performance helps consumers make better choices and motivates providers to improve.
By Mary Hatcher – Last year I heard former president George W. Bush speak about his 2004 vision for healthcare, which included electronic health records centered around a single patient identifier. He provided a clear example for this vision that resonated with me. He asked us to imagine someone had been in a terrible accident.
By Hitender Soni – Chronic diseases and conditions—such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, arthritis—are among the most common, costly, and preventable of all health problems. In the past, Medicare has only approved incentive payment for non-face-to-face chronic care management.
By Thomas Mason MD – Playbooks Aren’t Just for Sports Teams: Clinicians and other health care providers practice medicine with the noble goal of improving patient outcomes. The day-to-day considerations in treating patients are complex, which is where technology can be leveraged to streamline and better inform the patient-provider interaction.
By Jordan Rau – Over the past decade, the federal government has publicized 115 different ways to measure medical quality in hospitals, from assessing wait times in emergency rooms and noise levels outside hospital rooms to tracking blood clots in surgical patients. But the latest effort, to combine dozens of metrics into one patient-friendly quality indicator, has proven the most contentious.
By John Halamka MD – Earlier this week, the American Medical Association CEO called digital healthcare products modern-day “snake oil”. As a provider and a technologist, I think we need a deeper dive to understand the issues, avoiding the kind of hyperbole that’s so common in politics today.
By David Squires & David Blumenthal MD – There’s a lot to absorb in the proposed rule for implementing “MACRA”—the sprawling, bipartisan law passed in 2015 aimed at moving Medicare physician payment from rewarding volume to rewarding value. One question attracting scrutiny is whether the reforms will favor larger practices at the expense of smaller ones.