Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Blogs This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Practicing Medicine While Black (Part II)
By KIP SULLIVAN Managed care advocates see quality problems everywhere and resource shortages nowhere. If the Leapfrog Group, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or some other managed care advocate were in charge of explaining why a high school football team lost to the New England Patriots, their explanation would be “poor quality.” If a man armed with a knife lost a fight to a man with a gun, ditto: “Poor quality.” And their solution would be more measurement of the “quality,” followed by punishment of the losers for getting low grades on the “quality” report card and rewards for the winners. The ob...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 27, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized CMS Kip Sullivan value-based care Source Type: blogs

Reporting an elderly doctor. And suffering from snitch guilt.
He struggled to hear when people talked to him. He asked the same questions over and over. He fell asleep when really important conversations were going on around him. But it wasn’t until he missed an emergency call that I knew I had to act. I spoke to a higher-up about this elderly doctor out of concern for patient safety, and for several weeks the guilt tested my dual loyalties — one, to the people in my profession, and two, to my patients. On one hand, it didn’t feel right throwing another doctor, especially one of color, under the bus. After all, we are few and far between and need to support each other. But on t...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 21, 2017 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/jennifer-adaeze-okwerekwu" rel="tag" > Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Geriatrics Hospital-Based Medicine Source Type: blogs

EMRs are robbing physicians of their writing skills
Many physicians have become world famous writers, and in Greek mythology, Apollo was the god of both poetry and medicine. I can personally think of many prominent physician writers I have come across in my reading over the years: There was the 12th-century rabbi Maimonides, Copernicus in the 15th century and the poet John Keats in the 1700s. In the late 1800s to early 1900s, there were Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and William Somerset Maugham. Examples from our time (or at least mine) are A.J. Cronin (Dr. Finlay) Robin Cook (Coma), Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning), Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park), the ...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 21, 2017 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/a-country-doctor" rel="tag" > A Country Doctor, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Health IT Primary Care Source Type: blogs

Digital Health Supports The Fight Against Opioids
The widespread U.S. opioid & overdose crisis is an ever-increasing tragic concern for everyone: writhing victims, family members being fain to see their relatives suffer or die, doctors prescribing opioid pain-killers what they thought before as safe, and regulators imposed to handle a tough situation. Addiction. It’s painful to even read about the skyrocketing numbers of people suffering, thus we decided to map how digital health could help tackle the opioid crisis. Why is it so difficult to deal with the opioid crisis? Once you become addicted, it sticks with you for a long time, if not for life, just as a chronic...
Source: The Medical Futurist - November 14, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Bioethics Mobile Health Virtual Reality in Medicine AI artificial intelligence data data analytics drugs future gc3 Innovation opioid opioid crisis pharma technology wearables Source Type: blogs

Want a simple and easy-to-use EMR? Well, you can have it for free.
You may have heard of open-source software. When it comes to open-source, “free” has two meanings. First, you can download open-source programs at no cost. Second, “free” means freedom. The software is free in the sense that it belongs to you as much as it belongs to anyone else. If you download an open-source program, you can use it in any way you choose. You can use it forever as-is, you can modify it, or you can decide to update or not update. It’s your choice. If the organization who makes the software shuts down or goes in a new direction that you don’t agree with, there’s not...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 13, 2017 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/mark-leeds" rel="tag" > Mark Leeds, DO < /a > Tags: Tech Health IT Primary Care Source Type: blogs

Reducing Opioid Abuse, A Quick Guide to Internet Resources
By DAVID HARLOW, MD The opioid crisis has been upon us for years now, and we are now seeing the problem become more pervasive, with more than 90 deaths per day in the U.S. due to this scourge. The president recently said he would be declaring a public health emergency (which would free up some funds) but has not done so as of this writing. The public health threat is so persistent that it calls for responses on many levels, and those responses are coming. Some have been in place for a while, some are more recent. These responses may be broken down into a number of different categories: Broader availability of naloxone (an...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 1, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Charlie Baker Harlow Internet Massachussetts Opioid Opioid crisis Source Type: blogs

Technologies Change Health Insurance: The Most Innovative Ventures
The accumulation of medical data enables health insurance companies to move from the 100-year-old concept of reactive care to preventive medicine. The future points to simple, fast and highly personalized insurance plans based on information from the healthcare system and data from health sensors, wearables, and trackers. Here is the changing health insurance scene and its most innovative solutions! Health insurance systems are unsustainable partly due to costly chronic diseases According to OECD predictions, exceeding budgets on health spending remains an issue for OECD countries. Maintaining today’s healthcare systems...
Source: The Medical Futurist - October 31, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Future of Medicine Healthcare Design big data chronic illness digital digital health gc3 health data health insurance healthcare data technology trackers wearables Source Type: blogs

Researchers Suggest The Value In Hospital System Implementations Is Hard To Pin Down And Failures Are Common!
This appeared last week:The impacts of eHealth upon hospital practice: synthesis of the current literature17 Oct 2017Deeble Institute for Health Policy ResearchCREATORSRebekah Eden, Andrew Burton-Jones, Ian Scott, Andrew Staib, Clair SullivanThe aim of this brief is to provide policy-makers with an analysis of current literature relating to the effects to be expected from hospital implementation of eHealth technologies.Description To increase value from health-care expenditures, governments worldwide are increasingly adopting (or planning to adopt) eHealth technologies (e.g. Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Computer Provi...
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - October 27, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David More MB PhD FACHI Source Type: blogs

Super Macranomics
By KIP SULLIVAN This is the second of a two-part series on MedPAC’s October 4 decision to recommend the repeal of the MIPS program. In Part One , I gave the MedPAC staff credit for urging the commission to support repeal of MIPS, and I criticized their irrational proposal to replace MIPS. I said MedPAC is stuck in a vicious cycle – they recommend “reforms” without evidence, and when the reforms don’t work, they recommend evidence-free tweaks that don’t work either. I referred to this vicious cycle as a “tar pit.” In this essay I attempt to explain how MedPAC created this intellectual tar pit. I begin by des...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 26, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized CMS MACRA Source Type: blogs

Professionalism And Choosing Wisely
The US health care system is plagued by the use of services that provide little clinical benefit. Estimates of expenditures on overuse of medical services range from 10–30 percent of total health care spending. These estimates are typically based on analyses of the geographic variation in patterns of care. For example, researchers at the Dartmouth Institute focused on differences in care use between high-spending and low-spending regions with no corresponding reductions in quality or outcomes. An analysis by the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation (formerly known as the New England Healthcare Institute) ident...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - October 24, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Michael Chernew and Daniel Wolfson Tags: Costs and Spending Quality Choosing Wisely inefficiency overuse of medical services Source Type: blogs

Consumers Still Seem To Be Confident Their Doctors Who Are Technology Enabled Will Improve Their Care.
This appeared last weekConsumers Optimistic that EMRs will Improve Patient Care October 9, 2017 by Rajiv Leventhal About three-fourths of consumers in a recent survey believe that electronic medical records (EMRs) will improve the quality of healthcare in general.The research from The Physicians Foundation, an organization seeking to empower physicians to lead in the delivery of quality and cost-efficient healthcare, included responses from more than 1,700 consumers. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they believe EMRs either help patient care a great deal (42 percent) or help somewhat (43 percent). Six percent of con...
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - October 20, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David More MB PhD FACHI Source Type: blogs

Ascom Digistat Vitals: A New Offering to Record Patient Information at Bedside
Ascom, a Swiss firm, is releasing a new product designed to improve how clinicians record patient information into electronic medical records (EMR). The Digistat Vitals system relies on the dedicated Ascom Myco smartphone, or certain compatible Android phones, as the interface for data entry. A special app is used at the bedside to save vitals and other clinical data, which is automatically transferred to the in-clinic EMR without having to do any manual data management and avoiding transcription. To speed up visits with patients, the app provides automatic clinical calculators and scoring templates that make it easy to ...
Source: Medgadget - October 9, 2017 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Editors Tags: Cardiology Critical Care Medicine Surgery Source Type: blogs

Interview with Paul Black, CEO, Allscripts
Paul Black is CEO of Allscripts and he’ll be with me at Health 2.0 on October 1-4. Paul has been CEO of Allscripts for about five years, taking over from Glen Tullman who grew the company aggressively by acquisition over the previous decade. Paul has been steering Allscripts through a pretty big transformation for the past few years, and they’ve been the major EMR vendor that has most aggressively reached out to the startup tech community. This is an edited transcript of an interview we had in late August. — Matthew Holt Matthew Holt: Paul thanks for talking with me today, but also we’re going to have ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - September 25, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Matthew Holt Tags: Health 2.0 Matthew Holt Tech Allscripts FHIR Paul Black Source Type: blogs

More Dumb Things Leaders Say About Health Policy
These days, legislative efforts to change US health care, especially to " reform and replace " the Affordable Care Act [ACA or " Obamacare " ] seem to inspire displays of jaw dropping ignorance by political and sometimes business leaders on behalf of " reforming " health care. We lastposted examples on July 7, 2017. Now there is a new game afoot to reform and replace, and it is generating new - not to put too fine a point on it - foolishness.So herein is a roundup of a two more examples from July after our last post, plus two more revently " ripped from the headlines, " actually ripped from relatively obscure m...
Source: Health Care Renewal - September 22, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: Aetna Donald Trump health care reform ill-informed management managerialism ppaca Source Type: blogs

Clinical registry solution market heads toward $2 billion
Specialty medical societies such as the American College of Cardiology and American College of Surgeons sponsor clinical registries that collect observational data on patients with specific conditions or procedures, such as heart failure or joint replacement. This “real world” evidence helps hospitals improve quality of care, meet state and federal reporting requirements, and achieve pay-for-performance bonuses. Q-Centrix, which provides technology and services that enable hospitals to participate in registries, commissioned Health Business Group to conduct a market sizing and growth study. We found that the ma...
Source: Health Business Blog - September 20, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: dewe67 Tags: Announcements Hospitals Research clinical registries Q-Centrix Source Type: blogs