Key Articles in Health IT from 2017 (Part 1 of 2)

This article provides a retrospective of 2017 in Health It–but a retrospective from an unusual perspective. I will highlight interesting articles I’ve read from the year as pointers to trends we should follow up on in the upcoming years. Indubitably, 2017 is a unique year due to political events that threw the field of health care into wild uncertainty and speculation, exemplified most recently by the attempts to censor the use of precise and accurate language at the Centers for Disease Control (an act of political interference that could not be disguised even by those who tried to explain it away). Threats to replace the Affordable Care Act (another banned phrase) drove many institutions, which had formerly focused on improving communications or implementing risk sharing health care costs, to fall back into a lower level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, obsessing over whether insurance payments would cease and patients would stop coming. News about health IT was also drowned out by more general health topics such as drug pricing, the opiate crisis, and revenue pressures that close hospitals. Key issues But let’s start our retrospective on an upbeat note. A brief study summary from January 4 reported lower costs for some surgeries when hospitals participated in a modest bundled payment program sponsored by CMS. This suggests that fee-for-value could be required more widely by payers, even in the absence of sophisticated analytics and care coordination. ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Clinical Decision Support Connected Health Digital Health Healthcare Communication Healthcare Devices Healthcare Interoperability Healthcare Reform Meaningful Use Medical Devices Value Based Reimbursement FHIR Meaningful Use Certific Source Type: blogs