By John Halamka MD – As we gather together stakeholders for strategic planning of next year’s priorities, what are we hearing and what we have learned? With these observations, what are we planning to do in FY16? Over the next month, we will present a 5 page list of “bottom up” stakeholder enumerated high priority projects, categorized as core, advanced, and innovative.
Read More
By Edgar Wilson – Discussions of the benefits, potential, and future of EHRs trumpet the advance of personalized healthcare built on the intersection of patient history and genetic data. President Obama has advanced a program to integrate genomics data into both research and treatment, known as the Precision Medicine Initiative.
By William A. Hyman – Interoperability in the context of EHRs is much discussed, but remains somewhat loosely defined. According to the ONC definition, adopted from IEEE, interoperability is “the ability of systems to exchange and use electronic health information from other systems without special effort on the part of the user”.
By Shannon Larkin – Patients, payers, employers and lawyers will have medical record inquiries years after a physician retires, dies, relocates or goes out of business. So, who will retain the records and release the information?
By John Halamka MD – Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised hospitals not to use Hospira’s Symbiq infusion system, concluding that a security vulnerability enables hackers to take remote control of the system. The agency issued the advisory some 10 days after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of the vulnerability in the pump.
By Steve Spearman – Conventional wisdom says that you’re trying to work with a patient’s health care analytics, you’ve got to use “clean data”. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “clean data” is personal data your patient has generated on social media, but with all of the irrelevant or contradicting data removed in an attempt to make get the most accurate health information possible.
By Terry Edwards – Nowadays, there are a dozen different ways we can communicate with one another. We can stop by in-person and talk face-to-face, or pick up the phone and chat. We can use Facebook to ‘Like’ life updates, email an interesting article, text to say we’re running late or use Instagram to share a memory.
The “Coding Flexibility in Healthcare Act of 2015’’ or the ‘‘Code-FLEX Act of 2015’’ was recently introduced in Congress. The Code-FLEX Act requires that Medicare allow claims to be submitted in either ICD-10 or ICD-9 for the 180 days following the implementation of ICD-10.
By Connie Chitwood-Vu – Many Americans fail to realize that diabetes is the seventh deadliest disease with 29.1 million Americans currently living with this condition. Despite the severity of diabetes, the general population has a striking knowledge gap when it comes to understanding the causes, impacts, costs and treatment options for this all-to-common disease.