By John Halamka MD – In many previous posts, I’ve written about the importance of enabling infrastructure to accelerate interoperability. The standards are not the rate limiting step, but the lack of a provider directory, patient identifier, and consent registry are.
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By Erica Galvez – Recent ONC analyses from a nationwide survey of non-federal acute care hospitals conducted by the American Hospital Association (AHA) highlight the near universal adoption of EHRs by hospitals and significant increases in hospitals’ electronically exchanging health information with outside providers compared to past years.
By Edgar Wilson – Discussions of the benefits, potential, and future of EHRs trumpet the advance of personalized healthcare built on the intersection of patient history and genetic data. President Obama has advanced a program to integrate genomics data into both research and treatment, known as the Precision Medicine Initiative.
By William A. Hyman – Interoperability in the context of EHRs is much discussed, but remains somewhat loosely defined. According to the ONC definition, adopted from IEEE, interoperability is “the ability of systems to exchange and use electronic health information from other systems without special effort on the part of the user”.
Since 2013, eHealth Initiative and Premier have surveyed public and commercial accountable care organizations to better understand how ACOs are leveraging health information technology to achieve cost savings and quality improvement.
By Brian Edds – Thanks to some technology incentives from the government over the past several years, electronic health records (EHRs) have permeated the U.S. healthcare industry very quickly. Fewer than two out of 10 physicians used EHR systems in 2001.
By Edgar Wilson – Achieving interoperability is not just a technical hurdle: it is a challenge to the thinking of medical professionals. With all the current burdens how to get an already overburdened professional class to provide more collaborative care?
In collaboration with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) unveiled a roadmap for the development of standards to support information governance (IG) in healthcare including national and international efforts to ensure interoperability among health information systems.
In recommendations submitted to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) identified several solutions for improving patient care delivery and supporting the nation’s transition to electronic health records.