By John Halamka MD – Would you buy an iPhone if the only apps that ran on it were written by Apple? Maybe, but the functionality would not be very diverse. The same can be said of EHRs. Athena, Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and self developed EHRs such as BIDMC’s webOMR are purpose-built transaction engines for capturing data.
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By Mary Hatcher – Last year I heard former president George W. Bush speak about his 2004 vision for healthcare, which included electronic health records centered around a single patient identifier. He provided a clear example for this vision that resonated with me. He asked us to imagine someone had been in a terrible accident.
By Marlowe Greenberg – For the last several years, Foothold Technology has participated in the InterSystems Global Summit. It’s an invitation-only event where leaders convene to discuss and learn how to tackle healthcare IT challenges. Like previous years, we participated in two tracks at the conference.
For the first time in history, clinicians are able to capture patients’ heart and lung sounds and integrate them into the electronic health record (EHR). This milestone represents a groundbreaking advance in longitudinal patient care.
By William Hyman – Users of software such as EHRs are sometimes presented with jargon laced responses that may be unique to the software world. For example, as I may have noted here before, I have long been fond of the term “upgrade” when used to mean fixing something that was never right in the first place.
By Shefali Luthra – In a perfect world, patients with advance directives would be confident that their doctors and nurses, no matter where they receive care, could know in a split second their end-of-life wishes. But this ideal is still in the distance. Patients’ documents often go missing in maze-like files or are rendered unreadable by incompatible software.
By Mark Menke – Last year, we witnessed a number of data breaches occur within hospital networks, health insurers, physicians’ offices, and much more. In fact, Community Health Systems, Premera and Anthem were just some of the bigger names who made cybersecurity headlines in 2015, resulting in more than 94 million records exposed.
By Robert Rowley MD – The way we pay for healthcare is changing. The transition from fee-for-service (“fee for volume”) to value-based care is beginning to take shape, and will do so increasingly in the next few years. Federal pressures as well as private industry pressures are driving this change, as reviewed nicely in a white paper by Houlihan Lokey, “Value-Based Care.”
lifeIMAGE, a medical image exchange platform across health care networks, providers and patients, announced it has joined CommonWell Health Alliance, an industry consortium of health information technology-focused companies that use their diverse, collective experience across the care continuum.