Tag: Electronic Health Records EHR

A ransomware attack discovered by St. Joseph’s/Candler earlier this summer has compromised the records of 1.4 million patients.   The Savannah, Georgia-based health system published a notice this month about the incident, which took its network offline for multiple days.   “Through SJ/C’s investigation it was determined that the incident resulted in an unauthorized party

Photo: Oscar and Associates for HIMSS Media. It’s hardly controversial that hospital information technology has a lot of room for improvement. But despite widespread consensus on the need for interoperability, better usability, and better patient experience, change continues to come slowly or not at all. That’s down to a combination of inertia, misaligned incentives and

Photo: Southwest General Health Center The National Cancer Institute predicts nearly 40% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes. Ohio’s Southwest General Health Center is working to revolutionize cancer care through improved chemotherapy infusion efficiency, after transitioning from paper records to Cerner’s electronic health record technology. THE PROBLEM “The biggest

Electronic health records have come a long way – but for many users, they have a long way yet to go. Physicians and nurses who are tasked with using the complex tools day in and day out have usability issues that stand in the way of spending quality time with their patients. They often ask,

The U.S. Department of Justice announced this week that electronic health record vendor athenahealth had agreed to pay $18.25 million to resolve False Claims Act violation allegations. The federal government alleged that the company had paid illegal kickbacks – including inviting prospects and customers to all-expense-paid sporting and entertainment events – to generate sales of its

SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, has 35 operating rooms across multiple locations including academic and community facilities. As with most traditional perioperative departments, it was facing three major issues. THE PROBLEM First, low OR utilization despite demand for time. SUNY Upstate was not hitting its desired utilization targets and did not have

Northwest Medical Specialties is a physician-owned, community oncology practice with five sites in the Tacoma, Washington, area. NWMS is dedicated to providing compassionate, high-quality cancer care, and takes part in several cancer care quality initiatives and value-based care programs, such as the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s Oncology Care Model, American Society of Clinical

Provider of digital care software, Servelec has announced that Kent Community Health NHS FT has gone live with its EPR software, Rio. The trust is also in the process of implementing Servelec’s cloud-based interoperability platform Conexes, which enables secure data sharing between systems to deliver an integrated approach to patient care. WHY IT MATTERS A

Machine learning-based clinical decision support can be an effective way to review the accuracy of medical prescription orders, a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association shows. According to the Paris-based research team, a CDS tool trained on data from 10,716 patients was more accurate than existing techniques at

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate challenge for Baltimore-based Kennedy Krieger Institute was shifting an almost-100% onsite outpatient workforce to an almost entirely remote one. (Its hospital has remained open, serving inpatients throughout the pandemic.) THE PROBLEM Kennedy Krieger has had a small tele-behavioral health program for military families for four years.

As restrictions begin to ease across parts of the UAE, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) is now in the process of implementing a new plan to “gradually welcome” patients back to its hospitals and health centres, it has been announced. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in the emirate, the DHA had temporarily suspended non-urgent healthcare

In a letter sent to Sen. John Boozman, R-Arkansas, chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert L. Wilkie said the COVID-19 pandemic “has shifted the overall priorities” of the VA – and that the department would delay its ongoing EHR modernization as a result. “Our

New Jersey’s Hackensack Meridian Health has been forced to pay up following a ransomware attack, the health system said on Friday, according to a report in the Asbury Park Press. WHY IT MATTER The undisclosed sum paid out by the health system, one of the state’s largest, is covered by an insurance plan that helps

Pembroke Pines, Florida-based Primary Care Offices was facing a few administrative challenges, and it knew it needed solutions to these problems if it were to most efficiently operate its clinic. THE PROBLEM The first problem the three-physician, primary care practice faced was that it had a tedious, error-prone and inefficient referral authorization process. There is

The Federal Health Architecture and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT ended federal support for the decade-old CONNECT data exchange project on September 6. WHY IT MATTERS CONNECT is an open source software and community project, jointly developed 10 years ago by FHA and ONC as another way to harness the expertise

Georgia Hospital Health Services, a subsidiary of the Georgia Hospital Association, is working with Allscripts subsidiary CarePort Health to improve transitions of care. WHY IT MATTERS As they work to improve care coordination and boost quality outcomes for post-acute care management, hospitals across Georgia will have access to a range of technologies from CarePort to

Oklahoma Heart Hospital Physicians had long ago implemented an automated appointment reminder system, but the no-show rate had reached a seemingly impenetrable floor. THE PROBLEM The existing system had its share of difficulties. For instance, it consistently mispronounced physician names, leading to patient confusion. Furthermore, making changes and applying corrections was untimely, inconvenient and frustrating

Interoperability is at an intriguing intersection right now. In one corner are the people suggesting that despite some $35 billion and 10 years of work since the HITECH Act under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act kicked off the widespread digitization of healthcare very little actual progress has been achieved in terms of making data

EmblemHealth and its subsidiary AdvantageCare Physicians in New York announced that they are integrating a clinical artificial intelligence tool made by startup HealthReveal into ACPNY’s Epic electronic health record. HOW IT WORKS HealthReveal’s aim is to address a basic question, HealthReveal CEO Dr. Lonny Reisman told Healthcare IT News: “Is the patient actually getting the right

[Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article said the Epic deployment would result in 1,650 displaced employees. This version is now corrected. We regret the error.]  Trinity Health on Friday said, despite earlier reports that its enterprise Epic rollout would mean job changes or relocation for 1,650 employees, it is making workforce changes. “It’s