How Restyling the Mundane Medical Record Could Improve Health Care. The results of a contest sponsored by the White House shows how powerful a dose of design can be in treating what ails our medical system.
Electronic medical records (EMR) are extremely useful tools and can help improve patient care and reduce costs — if designed and used properly. Unfortunately, good design is hard to come by in this market. Health IT data standards, privacy laws, and impenetrable health systems complicate an already challenging design process and usually lead to lackluster products. One of the glaring problems is that it can be difficult for patients to gain access to their medical records. In an effort to combat this problem, the U.S. The program has been a huge success since its launch in August of 2010, with over 500,000 patients in the VA system using the service. Only one problem: Its output looks horrible. "We have assembled a showcase of the top entries that challenged the status quo for the entire health community to be inspired by and learn from," he explains.
The White House Reveals A Redesigned Electronic Medical Record. There are 315 million “patients” in America, and only 1 million physicians.
Keeping track of their histories is a gargantuan task, and many doctors have turned to the Electronic Medical Record, a computerized list of everything from allergies to addresses, to keep up. But despite being a huge improvement from paper records, the EMR is in desperate need of a graphic and technological overhaul. Doctors often don’t have time to sift through dozens of printouts before they see a patient, and even if they do, the record might not be comprehensive or up to date. These are, essentially, design problems--at least according to Ben Blumenfeld, the force behind the Health Design Challenge, a design competition to overhaul the EMR.
As the son of a doctor and the director of Designer Fund, an “angel fund of designers” that helps fledgling tech startups, Blumenfeld saw an opportunity to use design to improve the quality of patient care. So what does the future of the patient record look like? M.ed (Preview) - By Josh Hemsley. Health Design Challenge: d+collab // THE PATIENT RECORD. The White House Reveals A Redesigned Electronic Medical Record.
Online health records: Can integrity be maintained? By David Downing, Health Specialist, SAS UK A new NHS mandate was published yesterday, and part of the plan included operating increasingly at the forefront of new technologies.
Nuance creates voice-powered EHR interface. By: Waqaar Khawar Nuance Communications, Inc. has developed a way for customers using Epic electronic health records (EHR) to capture data via voice on the iPhone and iPad.
Using Haiku for the iPhone or Canto for the iPad allows physicians to efficiently input data without the interruption of having to sit at a computer. By connecting Nuance users to the already existing cloud, customers are able to enter histories, physical exams, and progress notes by taking advantage of available medical vocabularies and user-defined shortcuts. Personal speech profiles are automatically updated to continue to improve the capability of the software. Time saved and the ability to increase focus on patients instead of EHRs provides a clear benefit to any physician. Dr. Patient Portal Isn't Only Road To Meaningful Use - Healthcare - The Patient. Personal health records and health information exchanges offer alternatives to meet Meaningful Use mandate of giving patients access to their data.
Uncle Sam Shares 12 Top Health Apps (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Hospitals and physicians will need patient Web portals to meet the view/download/transmit requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 2, according to a recent article in American Medical News, a publication of the American Medical Association. But there may be viable alternatives to having a portal that's linked to a particular electronic health record (EHR), said Jim D'Itri, a partner in the healthcare group of the CSC consulting firm, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. Your Child's Medical Records At Your Fingertips. MotherKnows Creates iPhone-Accessible Health Records For Your Children. Consumers Still Wary of Electronic Health Records - Healthcare - Electronic Medical Records.
Patients have strong concerns about privacy, security, complexity related to ditching paper for digital health records, Xerox survey shows.
(click image for larger view) Slideshow: 17 Leading EHR Vendors Barely a quarter of U.S. adults want medical records converted from paper to electronic, and 85% of the public expressed concerns about electronic health records (EHRs), according to a recent Harris Interactive survey conducted on behalf of a Xerox subsidiary. Furthermore, just 40% of the 2,147 people interviewed in May said that EHRs would help doctors deliver better, more efficient care, down slightly from 42% in 2011. This is the third year that the Breakaway Group, which offers EHR simulation training to help clinicians through the transition to electronic records, has commissioned the survey. These findings seem to contradict the views of physicians in a study released last month by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Blue Button Goes Viral. I've described the stages of interoperability as functional, semantic, and process corresponding to the ideas of viewing unstructured text, pushing structured data from point to point, and pulling structured data as needed from any site of care in real time.
BIDMC does all 3 but its efforts over the past year have focused on universal viewing of records for providers and patients. (Next year will be the year of statewide pushing of structured data). On July 5, UnitedHealthcare announced that its 26 million patients (of which 20 million already access personal health records at www.myuhc.com) will have access to view/download their health data using the Blue Button approach - a PDF or text file containing information from various sources, such as claims data, health screenings and self-entry. From the press release The Department of Veterans Affairs launched the Blue Button in 2010 to allow simple exchange of a patient’s personal health data in a standard, consistent format.
5 ways device integration increases the value of data in an EMR. It's no secret EMRs hold numerous benefits, such as enabling physicians and caregivers to make clinical decisions based on the data in the system. But issues arise and dangers are seen when the data in that EMR is incorrect – something that happens all too frequently thanks to the view/write/transcribe mentality of entering data. "The old way of entering data into a record is looking at it in a monitor, writing in on a clipboard, and later transcribing it into the record. It's of great concern because it isn't timely and there are chances it can be inaccurate," said Sue Niemeier, chief nursing officer at Capsule, which develops connectivity technology. "But when you introduce device integration into the picture, that goes away," she continued.
"You also increase the direct patient care interaction, and you automate the recording of patient data. Niemeier expands on five ways device integration increases the value of data in your EMR. 1. 2. Patient tracking solution improves care at Western Sussex Hospitals. Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust has deployed a solution from Patientrack that will help the trust more quickly identify patients whose conditions are worsening.
The solution was deployed on all 38 wards across the trust’s two hospital sites, allowing more than 2000 nurses, doctors and staff to electronically record observations at the bedside. Observations are recorded using handheld devices connected to the trust’s upgraded wireless network, before automatically calculating National Early Warning Scores (NEWS). “With Patientrack, NEWS calculations are 100 percent accurate, compared with no more than 80 percent when recording observations on paper,” said Leo White, ward manager at Western Sussex. “It takes less time to capture observations and calculate scores using Patientrack with our previous approach, which was based on calculating scores manually from observations on the paper chart.”
Productivity gains from health IT must await bigger health system changes. Public release date: 13-Jun-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Warren Robakrobak@rand.org 310-451-6913RAND Corporation Productivity gains that can be achieved by widely adopting health information technology are likely to come from the reengineering of health care and may require new measurement tools to accurately gauge their impact, according to a new analysis from RAND Corporation researchers.
While debate remains about whether electronic health records and other health IT investments will deliver promised improvements, RAND researchers suggest that existing administrative data used to measure productivity gains may be unable to detect the effects of health IT. Their analysis is outlined in a commentary published in the June 14 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. Health - David A. Shaywitz - Is One Company About to Lock Up the Electronic Medical Records Market? Will Silicon Valley lead health care's next revolution -- or miss it?
Reuters. (Editor's Note: the following commentary was co-authored with Tory Wolff, a founding partner of Recon Strategy, a healthcare strategy consulting firm in Boston.) Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors have never quite been able to figure out health, and they know it. For years, the clever technology fixes dreamed up by engineers have largely failed to take hold, their well-conceived rationality no match for the complexity of medical care, the persistence of clinical habit, and the counter-intuitive impact of existing incentives.
Many of the Valley's most audacious VCs have become leery of the space, electing instead to pursue innovation elsewhere. The new battlefield is on the technologists' home turf: information systems for electronic medical records (EMRs). Study Ranks EHRs for Small Practices. Study Names 4 EHR Vendors That Are Good Bets. Top EHRs of 2011 Report Has New Leaders. Patient Advocates Urge Fast Access To Hospital Data - Healthcare - The Patient. American Hospital Association's call for 30-day waiting period to access electronic records would harm patients, according to Society for Participatory Medicine. 9 Health IT Tools Patients Should Understand (click image for larger view and for slideshow) An organization aimed at promoting collaboration among patients, medical professionals, families, and other caregivers is fuming about an American Hospital Association (AHA) recommendation that hospitals be given 30 days to release data in electronic health records (EHRs) after patients request access.
"Perhaps the most important time for patients and their chosen caregivers to have access to their electronic medical record is during a hospitalization and in the week following discharge--particularly access to information involving the medications. The health toll of medication errors during and shortly after hospitalization is considerable," Dr.
In comments submitted to the U.S. More Insights. HIMSS Analytics Europe to launch EMR Adoption Model in UK. HIMSS will collaborate with BCS, the British information technology trade group, on a project to introduce HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Records Adoption Model (EMRAM), which gauges hospitals' health IT adoption, to the United Kingdom. "We’re delighted to be working with HIMSS Analytics Europe on this project," said Matthew Swindells, chair of BCS Health. "We believe information and technology are crucial to the challenge of transforming our healthcare service. The HIMSS Analytics EMRAM model will enable hospitals to measure their progress in the implementation of health IT and benchmark themselves against the rest of the NHS and internationally. " 7 attributes next-generation EHRs will need to support.
EHRs Often Lack Clinical Best Practices - Healthcare - Clinical Information Systems. Warwick to use iPads for patient records. 14 March 2012 Chris Thorne South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust has signed a five-year contract with Kainos to digitise all of its patient records and make them available to staff on iPads. The trust hopes to give staff mobile access to its systems by the end of the year, using Apple iPad devices. The iPads will give staff the ability to access and update a patient’s record at the point of care during a clinic, or a visit to a patient’s home.
The trust published an ICT strategy for 2011-14 in June last year, which said it wants to create a paper-light environment and improve mobile working, especially among its community staff. It has now signed a contract with Kainos for Evolve, a document management system that automates the creation, capture, handling and distribution of notes and other records, which it hopes to deploy by July this year. Electronic health records mean fewer tests: study.
Integration of EHR into user work practices. Research article Kathrin M Cresswell*†, Allison Worth† and Aziz Sheikh† * Corresponding author: Kathrin M Cresswell Kathrin.Beyer@ed.ac.uk † Equal contributors Author Affiliations eHealth Research Group, Centre for Population Health Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK For all author emails, please log on. When EHR Critics Jump To Bad Conclusions - Healthcare - Clinical Information Systems. Evidence-Based Medicine in the EMR Era. 6 golden rules of EMR implementation. A few months ago, we chronicled the 7 most deadly sins of EMR implementation. The 7 Deadly Sins of EMR implementation. Congratulations! 6 reactions to '10 things you hate about your EMR' Back in October, we asked industry professionals and our readers to share some of the things they hated most about their EMRs. Since then, comments, questions and disagreements have sparked a lively conversation, prompting a look back to our original article.
Online guide helps health organizations adopt electronic health records. The Perfect EHR. I support over 3000 clinicians in heterogeneous sites of care - solo practitioners, small offices, multi-specialty facilities, community hospitals, academic medical centers, and large group practices. Giving Office-Based Physicians Electronic Access To Patients’ Prior Imaging And Lab Results Did Not Deter Ordering Of Tests. E-Health records don't always equal reduced costs. Contrarian Study Disputes EHR Savings Wisdom - Healthcare - Electronic Medical Records. Health Affairs study contradicts conventional wisdom that EHRs will save big bucks by cutting down on needless lab and imaging testing. New Study Challenges Whether Electronic Records Cut Health Costs. Two Factor Authentication. 5 simple ways to realize ROI from your EHR. EMIS National User Group - Welcome. Improved Patient Problem List Enhances Diagnoses - Healthcare - Electronic Medical Records.
The Top 20 Most Popular EMR Software Solutions. Patient Partner Voice Connect. Better together - The RN and the EHR. Can electronic health records erase disparities? EMR Electronic Medical Records. Free iPad EHR / EMR — Electronic Medical Records. Electronic Medical Records for Genetic Research: Results of the eMERGE Consortium. E-health records should play bigger role in patient safety initiatives, researchers advocate. Microsoft's PHR goes mobile with iTriage. 5 reasons EHRs need to 'grow up' GE - Mobile Access to EMRs. 12 EHR Vendors That Stand Out. The Promise of EHRs. The challenges in making electronic health records accessible to patients.
Patients Want Electronic Link To Doctor's Notes - Healthcare - The Patient.