Mobile Technology in Healthcare: Can You Hear Me Now? Mobile technology, and specifically the mobile phone, has become the new global platform of computing.
This is creating significant sociological changes that will greatly impact the practice of healthcare. The unprecedented computing power available to billions in their coat pockets can be leveraged to improve medical practice and consumer health. Trending Topics in the Acute Care Continuum. I try to make it a point to find medical blogs that stay up to date on the latest emergency medicine developments.
Compliance Risks Don’t Increase With Medical Scribes. Recently, the Report on Medicare Compliance (from Atlantic Information Services) published an opinion article about the use of scribes in healthcare.
The premise of the article was that hospital executives and physicians should re-examine the benefits of scribes because compliance risks grow when scribes are allowed to make entries into electronic health records. Furthermore, the article questioned the gains in physician productivity from scribe utilization. Are these authors practicing physicians themselves? Do they understand the growing clinical pressures and demands placed on healthcare providers today? ‘A’ is for Apple, ‘H’ is for Healthcare?
Scribes: A Brief History, Current Boom and Impact on Acute Care Metrics. By Jim Strafford Scribing, particularly in Emergency Medicine (EM), has been something of a phenomenon during the past decade.
Scribes are typically employed by third party vendors such as Scribe America as well as directly by provider groups. Scribe America has experienced phenomenal growth and now employs over 2500 scribes; physician group CEP America employs over 600 scribes for their ED and Hospitalist Practices. An EHR System Without Scribes Is Like a Jaguar Without Tires. By Jason Ruben, MD.
An EHR Workflow Analogy. COMMENTARYWilliam A.
HymanProfessor Emeritus, Biomedical Engineering Texas A&M University, w-hyman@tamu.eduRead other articles by this author A theme I and others have addressed is the impact of EHRs on workflow, and whether having to adopt the workflow to the EHR is always the optimum thing to do. Associated issues are whether the designers actually knew anything about clinical workflow, and whether if they had such knowledge did they use it well, or at all, in creating the system.
Patient Portals and EHRs: Generating Reports. Some of the details of Meaningful Use Stage 2 are proving to be quite tricky.
This week we’ll be going over how to handle reporting when a practice employs custom solutions for their patient portal. When the software that patients engage with isn’t supported by the EHR, figuring out the right figures to report for each measure can get complicated quickly. Let’s dig in a little deeper to see what’s the best course of action. My practice uses a patient portal, not associated with our EHR. Electronic Health Records Linked to Improved Care for Patients With Diabetes. Study part of Kaiser Permanente’s ongoing work to better understand how EHRs affect clinical care The use of electronic health records in clinical settings was associated with a decrease in emergency room visits and hospitalizations for patients with diabetes, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers examined the medical records of 169,711 diabetic patients over 1 year of age in the Kaiser Permanente diabetes clinical registry before and after the implementation of Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect®, the organization’s comprehensive EHR system. They found that patients visited the emergency room 29 fewer times per 1,000 patients and were hospitalized 13 fewer times per 1,000 patients annually after the implementation. Researchers found that annual emergency room visits declined 5.5 percent, from 519 visits per 1,000 diabetes patients before electronic health records to 490 visits per 1,000 diabetes patients afterward. Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority Examines EHR Errors Related to Default Values. Data Analysis Shows How to Avoid Certain Types of Errors When Using EHRs.
Who Will Rescue Healthcare and Solve The EMR Debacle? We Need Another Steve Jobs. Today we announce the third most popular blog of 2012.
We congratulate Jason Ruben, MD. Steve Jobs knew that the key to Apple’s success was simplicity. Apple products are painstakingly designed for simplicity. Updated Apple products are always better than their predecessor. If you question this, visit an Apple store at the release of the next iPhone or iPad. Data Capture: Devil in the Details Confronting All Meaningful Users in 2014. By Robin Raiford and Anantachai (Tony) Panjamapirom, iHealthbeat.org To meet many of the meaningful use requirements, providers must capture, store and share clinical data mostly in a specified electronic, structured and coded format. Having undergone a major ramp-up data capture in Stage 1, providers will continue to experience the increased pressure and intensity in both quantity and quality of required data elements.
Providers should view this mandate, as an opportunity to transform their data collection process and develop plans to sustain providers’ agility needed to successfully demonstrate meaningful use as the future stages will only bring additional data elements and more complex requirements. Getting More Health Out of Health IT. COMMENTARYby Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Twitter: @healthpopuli How can we get more health out of health IT? Getting more patients involved in their own health will help maximize providers’ investments in health IT. Responsive Web Design Patterns. Responsive Patterns A collection of patterns and modules for responsive designs. Submit a pattern Layout Reflowing Layouts. The Case for Agile in Healthcare Software.
Healthcare Experience Design.