If this were a business concerned with bottom lines, cash flows and sustainability, this would be a good time to begin planning one of those posh executive retreats to evaluate current strategy. People would be feverishly working on pulling data for PowerPoint presentations, summarizing market research and deciding whether to select the vegetarian meal or not. If this were a better …
My wife Elaine was hospitalized for 6 days recently with an array of ailments related to her advancing cancer, so diagnosing and addressing her problems required a multidisciplinary approach. In addition to the nursing and support staffs, she was tended by an emergency physician, two hospitalists, three gastroenterologists, a pulmonologist, an infectious disease physician and an interventional radiologist. With the exception of one specialist who had performed a procedure on …
As physicians, we know that no matter what care we provide, Medicare and private payers are going to do what they can to reduce payouts. For the health of the nation, healthcare spending simply cannot continue on its current trajectory. Reform measures such as accountable care organizations, bundled payments and penalties for potentially preventable complications and readmissions may help reduce expenditures, …
There has been an explosion in health apps. Patients are using them for weight loss, calorie counting, exercise monitoring, ovulation calculation and for many other health needs. But to truly integrate the concept of health apps in the health care system healthcare providers will need to get involved. There is discussion in the health IT world lately regarding physician adoption of …
I have used the electronic medical record (specifically EPIC) since 2004. I have grown accustomed to its nuances, benefits and quirks. There are parts about it I really like. There are parts of it I’d like to do without but accept that they are necessary evils in our current health care climate. I know that there will always be parts of any modified …
Your child has a rash and is acting a little sick. You reach for your phone–not to call the doctor, but to look up rashes on Google or your symptom checker app.
This, according to the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, is the direction we are moving. As a doctor, I think it’s great.
It is no news a lot of doctors like to stick up a rather snotty nose to EMR. The defenders of the EMR tend to label such doctors as archetypal Luddites, sticking to their archaic ways and unbecoming of change and the new times. But as is usually the case with any two heated but opposite arguments, the truth likely lies …
Insurers will also play a pivotal role in the development and adoption of patient-focused mobile health (mHealth) technology adoption for wellness as well as for the management of chronic diseases.
1. Payers hold the purse strings. Insurers will be the ones paying for the use of mHealth for chronic disease management for the vast majority of patients. They have a vested interest …
Warning! I am a practicing doctor who sees real patients using an electronic medical record (EMR). My sole agenda is to provide the best patient care. I have no financial stake in information technology (IT). However, unlike the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Stephen Soumerai of Harvard or Mr. Ross Koppel of the University of Pennsylvania, I have actually …
I was skeptical about the iPad Mini. I’ve used my Retina display iPad (3rd generation) for the past six months and been satisfied with the experience.
I’ve used it in the hospital setting during rounds, and even while talking to patients in the ER. I’m able to easily pull up Epic’s EMR using the Citrix app, and I can easily store the iPad …
Every time someone publishes an article or a paper or a blog post that has anything remotely to do with electronic health records (EHR), there is usually a flurry of reactions in the comments section, now available in most publications, and these always include at least half a dozen anonymous statements, usually from clinicians, decrying the current state of EHR software, best summed up by a commenter on THCB: “It …
You’re using an EHR. You’re e-prescribing. You’ve eliminated pulling the old paper chart (most of the time!). That’s good.
But how about those orders?
Are you still writing on the bottom of your fee slip or encounter ticket that you want the patient to be scheduled for a test or with another physician? That’s not good.
Get the order in your EHR.
Instead of taking the time to write on paper, keep your hand …
Venture capitalists (VCs) … are a combination of professional gamblers and loan sharks. The secret to success is pure luck and ruthlessness, and when the combination works and the ball lands on the exact number on the spinning roulette, venture capitalists make lots of money.
-Margalit Gur-Arie, via KevinMD.com
The tone of this article, Why venture capitalists shouldn’t try to solve health care, exemplifies what is wrong with healthcare. In …
Imagine this scenario: A CEO stands in front of the board at a crucial juncture in corporate history, and says:
Members of the board, as you can see from the financial statements before you, we have had a reasonably good year. What!? You don’t have the financial statements in front of you? I have them here. I mean, I think I have them here. Where are they? Let me check with …
Healthcare innovation companies are just beginning to understand technology challenges that come with engaging patients with chronic diseases in care management and care transition. Many of healthcare IT vendors assumed that a simple access to portals with half-baked information and fragmented medical records will do the trick. Boy… were they wrong!
For the past twenty years, the HIT industry has focused on developing software solutions exclusively for healthcare providers. These companies …
As medicine moves forward in its most technologically advanced era yet, we continue to struggle with basic concepts such as record keeping. The medical record is vital to the care of the patient. It tells the story of each patient’s journey through the medical system. The idea of centralizing all pertinent medical information is, in theory, a step in the right direction. In utopia, there would be one medical record …
Not long ago, Secretary of Health and Human Services Sibelius and US Attorney General Holder issued a stern warning to healthcare providers who are using electronic health records (EHRs). The federal officers maintain there has been an alarming increase in the charges to Medicare in institutions where EHRs have been implemented, and they warn that those behaviors will be treated as “fraud,” an illegal gaming of the system to increase …
Does your doctor use a computer instead of a paper chart?
Chances are that she does. The rate of adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) over the last three years has been very steep.
The main driver of this is a government subsidy from a part of the 2009 Stimulus Act (called the HITECH Act) that incentivizes doctors and hospitals to make the conversion to electronic record-keeping.
The electronic medical record (EMR) is here to stay. Its adoption was initially slow, but over the past decade those hospitals that do not already have it are making plans for implementing it. On the whole this is a good thing because the EMR has the ability greatly to improve patient care. Physicians, as well as all other caregivers, no longer have to puzzle over too often barely legible handwritten …
