By Irv H. Lichtenwald – Naturally, most of what you hear from healthcare IT companies about their products is going to be upbeat, designed to create a sense of potential and promise. I mean, I can easily extol the virtues of the company I lead and the products and services we sell.
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By Irv H. Lichtenwald – Mathematically, the gap between $3.6 million and $17,000 is a chasm. This is something you know well if you’re Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, which paid the latter number to unlock patient data held hostage by malicious hackers using ransomware.
By D’Arcy Gue – In a world where only the wealthy suffered from addiction, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about the effectiveness of treatment or who was going to pay for it. But most people don’t live in Malibu or have access to Betty Ford, so efficacy matters.
By Irv H. Lichtenwald – Imagine you’re living in Brooklyn and you have a medical emergency. If the hospital nearest you, say Lutheran Medical Center, were to close, you could go to Maimonides or New York Methodist a short taxi or ambulance ride away. Not so in rural US.
By Irv H. Lichtenwald – Not that long ago, healthcare worried mostly about the physical loss of personal health information (PHI) by way of a lost thumb drive, a stolen laptop, some misplaced paper files. These were the primary concerns in HIMSS initial 2008 security survey.
Five years later, the largest healthcare security breaches came from cyber attacks not lost or stolen devices.
By David Macfarlane – Maybe the initial challenge of population health is deciding exactly what that phrase means. Well before it became a catchphrase in health IT, population health was the province of academics who devised predictably academic definitions.
By D’Arcy Gue – On the face of it, the use of computers to order prescriptions seems like a no-brainer. Who, after all, is capable of reading a physician’s handwriting? But if we set aside clichés, there is still this question: Does e-prescribing provide distinct benefits over handwritten patient prescriptions? With acknowledgement of some drawbacks, it would seem the scales tip decidedly toward e-prescribing as a net positive.
By Irv H. Lichtenwald – Any conversation focused on what’s great about America usually includes a mention of optimism, hopefulness or some variation on the theme. Americans generally still believe in a brighter future, and especially the ways in which technology can enable that future. But that sense of optimism contains a kernel of potential disappointment when we ask technology to do too much.
By Irv H. Lichtenwald – Context and perspective matter. And it’s often both context and perspective that are lacking from the daily snapshots we get of health information technology, meaningful use, interoperability and the progress we are either making or not making, depending on your perspective.