The former CMS administrator and Harvard professor explained that even Massachusetts healthcare system is "not going to be sustainable without major changes and improvements," and that will be part of his political platform.
Amid a fifth IT revolution and the rise of mobile health, the federal government is working to reform the U.S. healthcare market while digitizing medicine, doing so slowly but steadily.
The future of healthcare depends on data and the technologies to make use of it, experts said at the Government Health IT Conference last week. And while it won't happen overnight, a fistful of current trends are driving the industry in that direction.
Facing ongoing and intense public scrutiny about its joint iEHR with the VA, more recent decisions to evaluate commercial options, and perceived absence from similar projects, such as Healtheway, OSEHRA and VLER, the top tech officials discuss challenges of balancing legacy systems with modernization.
Declaring the dynamic duo of username and password to be broken, James Sheire of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace explains how the a trusted ID ecosystem could enable HIE while making patient data more secure.
Acting CIO Stephen Warren discussed the "tremendous value" that engaging the opens source community has for the VA, and what it plans to give back in the near future.
Finding the right technology for patient segments, "beer and pretzel" communication and explanation of consent forms from trusted clinicians are three engagement strategies that worked for some Beacon Communities.
The ONC's director of the Office of Science and Technology told the Government Health IT Conference to consider how technical standards can help solve future healthcare challenges, such as boosting EHR use in clinical research.
At the Government Health IT Conference, executive vice president Carla Smith foretells a new offering HIMSS plans to launch next month that measures the ROI of health IT investments, considering more components than just the financial.
Previewing his session at the Government Health IT Conference, Tuesday and Wednesday, Siemens Health Services CEO John Glaser discusses IT ramifications in the era of accountability, patient engagement, and what he learned in a clinical trial.
Data accuracy is a major area of focus for most organizations. Despite the overall advances in analytics and business intelligence, most agencies struggle with data accuracy. According to a 2013 Experian QAS survey, 94 percent of organizations believe there is some level of inaccuracy within their systems. To prevent inaccuracies in improve database performance and reporting, it's more important than ever for agencies to monitor data quality.
As healthcare providers implement health IT to comply with federal mandates and participate in quality of care programs, VNA solutions can play a critical role in helping them meet their needs today and in their future IT initiatives. Forward-thinking healthcare providers around the world are already successfully meeting this challenge with VNA. Download this Healthcare IT News eBook to learn how VNA enables exchange, supports data consolidation and IT simplification.
In this one hour webinar, Thomson Reuters and Verisys will outline several key areas of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and screening requirements. An overview of available public records data as well as strengths and weaknesses of various datasets will be discussed. We invite an open discussion to elaborate on the efficiencies that can be seen when the correct data is applied to the compliance workflow.
The current agenda is clear: wherever possible, reduce costs and
improve quality-of-care services. These directives are in perfect
alignment with the role of virtual and cloud computing infrastructure
technologies, which help to lower costs and increase clinician
productivity while future-proofing IT investments. As healthcare
reform deadlines rapidly approach, choosing the right information
technology (IT) platform will be critical to the success or failure
of new services and exchanges. It will determine the ease or
di!culty of updating existing applications and managing new
ones. It will also serve as a foundation to help ensure that all
healthcare services are secure, accessible and easy enough for
citizens to access and use.
This report provides information on some of the challenges PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) and RIS (Radiology Information System) end-users face in the healthcare space, and how virtualization and point of care solutions can help address those challenges. In this paper, we discuss what the challenges are and present a strategy of utilizing architecture for PACS/RIS client access, which supports the needs of end users and makes it easier for IT staff to manage applications and desktop environments.
The healthcare sector is adopting enterprise hybrid cloud across the provider, payer, and life sciences segments with the goal of improving the quality of care, reducing costs, and increasing responsiveness to risk. This industry brief goes over some results of the CIO Global Cloud Computing Adoption Study, a recent survey by IDG Research, and outlines the common hybrid cloud use cases for healthcare organizations. It also details a real-world example of how cloud computing is being used to achieve greater business agility.
Healthcare is dominated by the need for the sharing of detailed patient information as a result of today's information age. But it's also the focal point of the debate of how information is shared versus protecting the need for privacy, security and confidentiality. Data protection is paramount in today’s virtual environment and implementing a Secure Information Exchange (SIE) now will help organizations save both themselves and their patients down the road.
If Hospitals and Providers are the body of the healthcare industry, Healthcare Electronic Data Interchange is the heartbeat. This whitepaper compares the different solutions and costs for achieving HIPAA-compliant EDI, explains the specific technical challenges in the way of successful implementations, and explores new avenues for bridging the gap to an in-house implementation.
Medicare Advantage (MA) plans are private health plans that have contracted with Medicare to receive a fixed monthly fee in exchange for providing comprehensive healthcare to plan members. In order to provide appropriate care to beneficiaries with varying medical conditions, plans are paid according to the Risk Adjustment Factor (RAF) score of each patient. Insufficient documentation of chronic conditions can be an obstacle to MA reimbursement. However, even when a condition has been properly documented by the provider, it is often not coded and submitted to Medicare. Read this white paper to learn how to take the complexity out of MA reimbursement.
A recent survey of IT executives found nearly 90% see business value in transitioning to Cloud computing, but only 20% have a plan to get there. Healthcare Cloud solutions require Compliance, Security, Privacy, Redundancy, and Scalability, so choosing the right path from on-premises servers to the Cloud can be daunting. Learn how to chart a quick and affordable course to healthcare Cloud Computing and how to choose the right Cloud services partner.
In January 2010, QualSight - the nation’s largest LASIK manager serving over 75 million health plan members - was informed that a hack attempt had been made against their infrastructure. They were concerned that a repeat occurrence could take place and wanted to take a pro-active role in eliminating any future occurrence. QualSight began searching for a better solution for its secure Web hosting and online data storage. The company had stringent requirements for both HIPAA and PCI compliance, and could not find a hosting provider with a fully managed solution that took into account both of those high industry standards, while also providing top performance. Download this case study to find out how QualSight finally found a solution that offered complete HIPAA compliancy.
This Week in Government Health IT ... DoD's VLER and HIE challenges ahead, how iEHR is like eating an elephant, and feds on the hunt for public feedback.
The time has come to tackle integrity of health information, not just the technical and operational mechanisms for the sending and receiving it, particularly as EHR kinks get ironed out both among internal users and the patients they serve.
This week in Government Health IT: Reports expose state and local governments as ill-prepared, whether that be for Big Data or cyber-attacks. Also, think tanks talk patient-centered care for cost-savings.
In the coming months, the ONC Standards Committee is going to hear updates from workgroups on a variety of software and policy standards for issues like structured data, genomics representation and modular application integration.