By Shingai Samudzi – As the healthcare tech market matures, the focus of consumer oriented weight management products will shift from merely data gathering and generic weight loss plans to applied analytics for building successful personalized plans for change resistant users.
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By William Hyman – Computer Decision Support usually takes the form of software generated patient specific recommendations based on patient attributes in the EMR. A recent study takes a somewhat different approach by using EMR data to identify hospital patients who are at risk of death, but offers no treatment suggestions, it just says the patient has an elevated risk of dying.
By Jeremy Guttman – In almost every speech given this year, Andy Slavitt, the Acting Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has emphasized the priority of closing referral loops to strengthen patient care coordination.
By Jordan Rau – The federal government paid bonuses to 231 hospitals with subpar quality because their patients tend to be less expensive for Medicare, new research shows. The bonuses are small, generally a fraction of a percent of their Medicare payments. Nonetheless, rewarding hospitals of mediocre quality was hardly the stated goal…
By Karen DeSalvo MD & Lisa Lewis – We have witnessed dramatic changes in the adoption and use of health IT over the past decade. The nation has transformed from paper-based record keeping into an environment where nearly all of the nation’s hospitals and three-quarters of the nation’s eligible providers are using certified health IT.
By John Halamka MD – On May 19th, I spent the day in Washington with a group of government, provider, and developer stakeholders convened by the IHI. We operated under Chatham House Rules, so I can summarize the discussion but not identify any of the participants or their specific statements. Here are three questions we discussed and the observations we made.
By Brian Mack – A colleague’s family member was recently admitted to the hospital after experiencing dizziness and disorientation. The person was transported by ambulance to the nearest emergency room, which was unfortunately not affiliated with their regular health system. At first, this was disconcerting for my colleague.
By Susannah Fox – Every spring, our team in the HHS IDEA Lab gears up for our biggest event of the year: the Health Datapalooza. It’s an annual celebration of the power of data that was started by my predecessor, Todd Park, in 2010. This year, we were honored to hear from an extraordinary lineup of leaders from private industry, academia and the federal government, including Vice President Biden.
By Keith Boone – This is definitely one of those cases that most people will likely miss unless it is explicitly called out, so here I go. Within the recently released MIPS/MACRA proposed regulations (which I call NuMu for reasons that should be readily apparent), CMS indicates that the legislation (law not regulation!) says: