Health Data Management articles from February 2009

Health Data Management archives from February 2009

School's always in.(Editor's Notes)(Editorial)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Gary Baldwin, Editorial Director It's fair to say, I think, that the health care industry now "gets" the value of I.T. That was not always the case, of course, and providers still cast a skeptical eye on many new purchases. But...

HIMSS sends blueprint to Obama.(Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society)(Newsline Digest)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society is calling on the Obama administration and Congress to invest at least $25 billion in health care information technology. Those funds, according to the...

AHRQ to Assess Value of HIE.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will conduct a study of the point-of-care clinical exchange system of the Colorado Regional Health Information Exchange. Clinicians at four participating...

New CEO At Siemens.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff Germany-based Siemens AG has named Hermann Requardt as CEO of the worldwide Siemens Healthcare Sector, which includes a major facility in Malvern, Pa. Hermann, who also will remain chief technology officer,...

FUJIFILM Buys RIS vendor.(radiology information systems)(Newsline Digest)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA has acquired radiology information systems vendor Empiric Systems LLC for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition gives Stamford, Conn.-based FUJIFILM its first proprietary RIS. The...

St. Joseph to Test I.T. Subsidies.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff St. Joseph Health System in Orange, Calif., will subsidize up to 85% of the costs of implementing practice management and electronic health records software for 100 affiliated physicians. The 14-hospital delivery...

Medicare Selects PHRs for Pilot.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has selected four personal health record vendors to participate in the Medicare PHR Choice pilot project in Arizona and Utah. The pilot program, which will begin in...

Group Advocates EHR Templates.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The Department of Health and Human Services should support creation of standardized, structured templates to ease the collection of regulatory data via electronic health records, according to an advisory group....

Google Client Teams with HealthVault.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The Cleveland Clinic will test connecting its personal health records software with Microsoft Corp.'s HealthVault consumer health portal to enable the exchange of data collected from home-based medical devices....

Indy HIE expands services.(Health Information Exchange)(Newsline Digest)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The Indiana Health Information Exchange has launched its Quality Health First disease management and preventive health services notification program. The QHF program uses claims data and other information from...

Motion Computing Gets Funding.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff Motion Computing, best known for its Tablet PCs, has received $6 million in funding for expansion in health care and international markets. The funds come from New Enterprise Associates, an investor in Motion's...

Wireless Networks Now Are Mature Enough To Support Virtually Any Use In Health Care Environments.(Readers' Perspective)
February 1, 2009... AGREE Della Lowe Senior Director of Corporate Marketing AirTight Networks, Mountain View, Calif. "The networks are mature enough, but the attention to security is not. The only way to develop a 'wireless' or 'no wireless'...

GE collaborations bear fruit.(Newsline Digest)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff Waukesha, Wis.-based GE Healthcare has introduced three new information technology service offerings that it developed with clients. The company's Digital Day One service is a remotely hosted and scalable version...

HL7 issues four guides.(Newsline Digest)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff Standards development organization Health Level Seven has released four new guides for implementing its Clinical Document Architecture in specific settings. The architecture from Ann Arbor, Mich.-based HL7 is a...

Standards sought to support research.(Newsline Digest)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The American National Standards Institute in New York has formed a work group to prioritize work on information technology standards that support clinical research. Rebecca Kush, president and CEO of the Clinical...

Mediware Grows Through Acquisition.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff Mediware Information Systems Inc., Lenexa, Kan., has acquired Hann's On Software, a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based vendor of pharmacy information systems. Mediware, which sells pharmacy, blood bank and medication...

Stretching your dollars; making information technology funding go farther is imperative. Here's how to do it.(Cover Story)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Gary Baldwin, Editorial Director This is part one of a three-part series on the top issues faced by executive leaders involved in I.T.-enabled projects. Part two, on leading cross-functional teams, will appear in the April issue....

Surveys: Recession Hampering I.T. Spend.(Cover Story)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Joseph Goedert Two small surveys indicate the financial crisis and recession are having an adverse effect on hospitals' new information technology initiatives. The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives,...

Lessons from the HIE Front; Organizations share lessons learned in the effort to develop health information exchanges and regional health information organizations.(Feature Story)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Joseph Goedert, News Editor This is the first story in an in-depth, four-part series on information exchange issues that Health Data Management will present during 2009. We will offer six other series throughout the year covering...

Lessons from the Veterans.(Feature Story)(Report)
February 1, 2009... The initial services of a health information exchange can dictate whether the initiative will succeed, executives at two veteran HIEs contend. And when Cincinnati-based HealthBridge and the Indiana Health Information Exchange in...

Hospitals Tune Up Cart Strategies; Providers use the devices to save nurses steps, improve efficiency.(Feature Story)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Howard J. Anderson, Executive Editor Hospitals are having a tough time recruiting and retaining nurses. So they're on the lookout for ways to improve nurses' efficiency. One important step involves cutting the time nurses waste...

Tune-up advice from the front lines.(Feature Story)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... The secret to a successful cart implementation, many adopters say, is to enable nurses to test-drive the hardware. In this way, the nurses can determine if they carts are easy to push from room to room, notes Bill Siebert, technical...

Emdeon leads effort to measure EDI adoption.(Closer Look)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Howard Anderson, Executive Editor, and Joseph Goedert, News Editor Emdeon Business Services is spearheading early efforts to measure the progress of the health care industry in adopting electronic financial and administrative...

Announcing the 2nd Annual Editors' Choice Awards Winners.(Editors' Choice)(Awards list)
February 1, 2009... Health Data Management's Editorial Director Gary Baldwin announced the five winners of its second annual Editors' Choice Awards at the fourth annual World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress in Washington last December. The awards...

Merging Interests; Can newly linked Allscripts-Misys find a market?(Corporate Strategy)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Gary Baldwin, Editorial Director Glen Tullman, CEO of what used to be known as Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, is no longer seeing red. The Chicago-based EHR company, which sported a bright red corporate color scheme, recently...

Simply Operational; Surgical productivity at Lahey Clinic gets a boost from business activity monitoring and role-based dashboards.(Hospitals)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Jim Ericson Organizations that are capital investment or service intensive have a special interest in resource utilization. Consider what happens to an airline every hour its planes sit on the ground. Consider what happens to a law...

A Go-Slow EHR Approach; A surgical group that spent six months phasing out paper is reaping tangible savings.(Group Practices)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Howard J. Anderson, Executive Editor An electronic records system is paying for itself in benefits at a surgical group practice that gradually phased out paper and phased in automation. Western Surgical Group began implementing...

Winning over a Skeptic.(Group Practices)
February 1, 2009... Vascular surgeon John Hansen, M.D., was one of the skeptics when Western Surgical Group in Reno, Nev., took the electronic records plunge. Hansen was very reluctant to give up dictating his notes for transcription. "Electronic records...

Emergency Healer.(Executive Session)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Gary Baldwin Trained in emergency medicine, Brian Patty, M.D., knows stress. So when he inherited a failed inpatient systems deployment, the chief medical informatics officer at St. Paul, Minn.-based HealthEast Care System didn't...

Open Source Advocates Have a New Task.(Newsline)
February 1, 2009... The Open Health Tools Foundation has approved in principal the development of server-based technology to create interoperability among disparate information systems. The goal is to develop open source applications that lower the cost to build...

Joint Commission issues I.T. alert.(Newsline)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... The Joint Commission has issued a Sentinel Event Alert to warn provider organizations that some uses of information technology may jeopardize the safety and quality of care. For instance, root cause analysis of errors shows that use of...

PHR to Push FDA Safety Alerts.(Newsline)
February 1, 2009... ActiveHealth Management will disseminate safety alerts from the Food and Drug Administration through its personal health records software. A decision support application within the vendor's ActivePHR product currently notifies users about...

GAO: redesign of BioSense flawed.(Government Accountability Office)(Newsline)(Report)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Redesign of the federal BioSense electronic syndromic surveillance system is hampered with poor planning and an unreliable budget, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO is a congressional...

Blues Plans Ready Consumer Cost Data.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff WellPoint Inc. is rolling out a Web-based provider cost comparison service to consumers across its health plans, which include Blues plans in 15 states. The Indianapolis-based insurer also is working to help...

Social Security to Use NHIN.(Newsline Digest)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Compiled by Staff The Social Security Administration will be the first government agency to use the national health information network. The agency will start in early 2009 by electronically receiving medical records for some...