Quiet ORs Better for Patient Safety
This article appears in HealthLeaders Media, May 16, 2013 Music at loud decibels can contribute to miscues among surgeons and nurses in the operating room, raising the risk of medical error, researchers say. Operating rooms are noisy places. There’s mechanical noise from whirring drills, beeping and humming from vital sign monitors, and whooshing sounds from [...]
Read moreAccess to EHR Notes Lauded by Patients, Providers
From article in in the May issue of HealthLeaders magazine. In a pilot, a system which permits patients to view all the notes in their electronic health records was such a hit with hospital patients and physicians that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Geisinger Health System are dramatically expanding their OpenNotes programs. Possibly [...]
Read moreAn End to Medical-Billing Secrecy?
Article By Steven Brill From Time Magazine, May 08, 2013 Our hospital bill is about to get a thorough examination. Acting on the suggestion of her top data crunchers at the department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released an enormous data file on May 8 that [...]
Read moreCleveland Clinic app helps connect patients, doctors, trials
Posted on MibiHealthNews April 15, 2013 Cleveland Clinic has built an app to help both physicians and patients find cancer clinical trials. The app, available for free from the iOS AppStore and the Google Play store, allows users to search the Cleveland Clinic’s the 130 active clinical trials by disease, phase, hospital location, or doctor. [...]
Read moreAdministration pushes toward electronic medical records
Article first posted on TheHill.com – April 8, 2013 The Obama administration is moving to ease the national transition from paper to electronic health records through a pair of proposed rules to be published this week. The rules, to hit Tuesday’s Federal Register, would update and extend existing regulations surrounding the sharing of patient electronic [...]
Read moreCan Twitter help predict epidemics?
From article posted in The Salt Lake Tribune – March 6, 2013 Twitter users send around 500 million tweets a day, an endless fire hose of information about how people feel, what they’re doing, what they know and where they are. For epidemiologists and public health officials, it’s a potential gold mine of data, [...]
Read more5 Ways To Improve Healthcare Information Exchanges
From article posted on HealthInformation – HealthCare February 19, 2013 Recent comments made by a number of leaders throughout the industry show clear discontentment with the state of health information exchanges. As William Yasnoff, MD, PhD, president of the Health Record Banking Alliance, recently pointed out, the current nationwide network of health information exchanges is [...]
Read moreHIPAA Changes Could Create New Bureaucratic Burdens
From January 23, 2013 article by Michelle McNickle, Associate Editor of InformationWeek Healthcare Modifications to HIPAA may take the focus off patients and pile on administrative work. Changes coming to the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rule mean added administrative work, and they could mean additional reporting, said Lisa Sotto, head of Hunton & Williams’ global [...]
Read moreHIPAA Final Rule Raises Fines for Non-Compliance
By Dom Nicastro, HealthLeaders Media, January 22, 201 The HIPAA omnibus final rule released by the Department of Health & Human Services January 17 will cost hospitals some time and money in regulation analysis, training, and policy revision, but shouldn’t break the bank, healthcare leaders and privacy and security experts say. The HIPAA “mega rule,” [...]
Read moreWhen it comes to patient records, doctors guilty of the old copy-paste
January 10, 2013 article on CNET.com by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore A new study finds the majority of doctors copying potentially out-of-date information from previous notes and other documents and pasting them into patient progress reports. Ah, the old copy/paste. Such a handy keyboard shortcut for such a wide range of applications. But would you want [...]
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