Federal Policy Front Policy is literally on FHIR! The acronym (pronounced “fire”) is HL7’s new HIT framework, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. The alliance behind this initiative is comprised of major industry players calling themselves the Argonaut Project. The group includes five leading EHR vendors (athenahealth, Cerner, Epic, MEDITECH and McKesson) as well as four leading…
Patient-centric alerts close ‘prevention gaps’ According to a new study in Telemedicine and e-Health, sending alerts to patients was more effective than telephone or snail mail reminders for getting patients to schedule follow-up care. The study enrolled 584 patients with high cardiovascular risk from 73 different primary care practices into an active PHR that provided…
Big HIT Changes May Be Coming Soon IDC Health Insights published their annual FutureScape predictions looking at the health information technology industry. They predict that by 2020, 80% of healthcare information will have passed through the cloud. But keep in mind, with the continued expansion of cloud computing comes an increase in cyber-attacks. IDC Health…
Recently issued NHS England’s “Five Year Forward View” shows promising strides towards patient engagement in the United Kingdom. With about eight years of patient engagement solutions experience in the U.S., Get Real Health is excited about expanding their reach in the United Kingdom and around the globe. Andy Payne, Manager of European Operations at Get…
UT’s New Medical Center Aims to Boost Patient Education Last week the University of Tennessee Medical Center held a ribbon cutting ceremony debuting its new health information center in Knoxville. The center aims to teach patients, who are often overwhelmed by the complexity of doctor-delivered medical information, about their conditions to decrease unnecessary trips to…
Study: “Team” Approach to Portal Promotion Boosts Patient Engagement The Annals of Family Medicine published a study this week which showed that physicians can increase patient use of portals by taking a “team” approach to notifying patients about the portal. This can be achieved by ensuring that the portal includes important health information like lab…
National Health IT Week is upon us! September 15 through the 19 is filled with events, panels, webinars, and activities surrounding healthcare information technology. One of the events includes the annual HIMSS Public Policy Summit. The “Congressional Asks” are a part of the summit each year where a group of HIMSS volunteers compiles a list…
ONC Decides Against Adopting 2015 ‘Voluntary’ EHR Certification Criteria The ONC decided against adopting the 2015 voluntary edition of the EHR certification criteria. Instead they folded some of the proposed voluntary criteria into the new, more flexible final rule for the 2014 edition certification, which is now being called “2014 Edition Release 2.” The ONC…
1. White House appoints new CTO, deputy The White House officially announced the new national Chief Technology Officer this Thursday via blog post. Former Google Executive, Megan Smith, will succeed Todd Park as CTO with former Twitter General Counsel, Alexander Macgillivray as her deputy. Smith served as a seasoned executive at Google where she…
Patients Have Difficulty Understanding Health Records According to Zikmund-Fisher, “Improving how we show people their health data may be a simple but powerful way to improve health outcomes.” Having the ability to check your health records electronically sounds like a beneficial tool for someone to possess, but a recent discovery by a team from the…
A recent healthcare shift from a fee-for-service payment model to pay-for-performance focuses on value instead of volume, as doctors are paid based on patient outcomes as opposed to the number of patients a physician treats. Get Real Health Board of Director member Farzad Mostashari, M.D. believes pay-for-performance has profound implications for the future of healthcare…
We’ve seen continuous challenges across the industry to produce valid C-CDAs to send to patients. Good news – it might not be as difficult as you thought to send both inpatient and ambulatory summaries to patients. On August 26, CMS helped to clarify any misunderstanding and confusion by publishing an FAQ stating that the same…
