e-CareManagement blog

Chronic Disease Management • Technology • Strategy • Issues and Trends

HIT Policy Committee Recommends “Minimum” Certification of EHRs

At last Friday’s meeting, the HIT Policy Committee adopted the recommendations of the Certification and Adoption Workgroup.
Between the initial recommendations in July and the adopted recommendations in August, one critical word was added to the definition of “certification”.  That one word is “minimum” — and this one word expresses the correct approach and philosophy for the government’s role in [...]

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Adieu, LifeCOMM

“Qualcomm pulls the plug on LifeComm”  announced Brian Dolan of mobihealthnews recently. 
As demonstrated by e-CareManagement blog readership, there has been a lot of interest in LifeCOMM.  My first blog post on LifeCOMM in 2007 has been single the most commented on post and the second most widely read blog post.
It’s taken me a while to sift through [...]

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Geek Wisdom: “Interoperability” Must Include Process Collaboration

I know — you’re thinking that using “geek” and “wisdom” in the same sentence is an oxymoron. Bear with me — I’m trying to make a really important point in today’s posting.
Interoperability has multiple dimensions — and I’d bet that most of us have never thought of interoperabilty as involving “process” — people working together and [...]

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Is the Health Data Liquidity Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

What a difference in attitude! Compare two press announcements from April 5:
1) CCHIT:  Interoperability Isn’t Doable With Today’s Technology .
Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), Interoperability: Supplying the Building Blocks for a Patient-centered EHR , April 5, 2009
This report…(is)  also an attempt to inject a dose of reality into the discussion of interoperability [...]

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Dogged Optimism: Five Innovative Aspects of HITECH

If you’re a dog (an innovator), what’s there to smile about over HITECH?  Quite a bit.
In the first post of this series, I suggested that HITECH favors cats by about 60/40 and noted that the single most cat-like feature of HITECH is providing incentives for physicians and hospitals to acquire and implement EHRs  — [...]

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New NRC Report Finds “Health Care IT Chasm,” Seeks New Course Toward Quality Improvement and Cost Savings

by David C. Kibbe, MD MBA

Like the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 2001 counterpart report, "Crossing the Quality Chasm," a new report from the National Research Council of the National Academies is complex, full of new ideas assembled from multiple disciplines, and is likely to have seminal [...]

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An Open Letter to the Obama Health Team on Health IT Spending

By David C. Kibbe, MD MBA and Brian Klepper, PhD
It seems likely that the Obama administration and Congress will spend a significant amount on health IT by attaching it as a first-order priority to the fiscal stimulus package. We take the President-elect at his word when he recently said:

"…we must also ensure that our hospitals [...]

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Picturing the PHIN as One Interoperable Network

Will the Microsoft HealthVault, Google Health, and Dossia personal health information (PHI) platforms be able to exchange data?  In our introductory essay announcing the Birth of the Personal Health Information Network (PHIN), Dr. David Kibbe and I posed a critical question:
What will the PHIN look like?  Will there be multiple, non-interoperable, competing networks or just one interoperable [...]

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CCHIT Should Support BOTH the HL7 CCD and the ASTM CCR for PHRs.

The federal government sponsored Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT ) is undertaking a certification process for personal health records (PHRs) . The CCHIT PHR Work Group has invited public comment on the First Draft of the PHR Certification Criteria .
The current draft of the PHR Certification Criteria specifies use of the HL7 Continuity [...]

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