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Information & Communication Technologies (ICT)
Health Plan Strategy Options in Two Sentences
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“If you’re a health plan, you either become a care delivery system or an information services company,” said David Brailer, a former George W. Bush administration health official who now leads an investment firm. “The traditional business is dead.”
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Read more at Kaiser Health News.
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The Crucial Distinction Between “Accountable Care” and ACOs
While in Philadelphia earlier this week, my colleague Dr. David Nace presented me with a print copy of McKesson Relay Health’s newest whitepaper — Providing Accountability: Accountable Care Concepts for Providers.  I felt honored as he handed it to me and confided that it was one of only six copies in print. I took time to read it carefully on the long flight home.
The whitepaper is a great overview of accountable care and ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations). It’s a quick and easily digestible read.
However, there is one […]
Electronic Health Information Exchange — Way More Complicated Than Getting Money from an ATM
“If banks can exchange funds electronically through the ATM system, why can’t my doctor and hospital exchange information electronically?”
Keith Boone’s concise article “A Doctor is Not a Bank” explains why this conclusion about healthcare interoperability is overly-simplistic.
…and Keith’s article reminded me of an even deeper explanation presented in the National Academies’ Frontiers of Engineering series — Why Health Information Technology Doesn’t Work, by Elmer Bernstam and Todd Johnson. The table below summarizes the differences between health data and banking data.
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Top 20 iPhone Medical Apps: No Connection to EHRs…Yet
iMedicalApps recently published its list of Top 20 Free iPhone Medical Apps for Healthcare Professionals.
What struck me about the list is that the state-of-the-art is stand alone applications — I didn’t see any that had any connection to an EHR (electronic health record). Here’s the top 5 to give you a flavor of what’s on the list:
Medscape
Micromedex
New England Journal of Medicine
Epocrates
Free Medical Calculators
I expect that this list will begin to look very different in coming years as EHRs continue to […]
Doctors Love iPads. What Does it Mean? What Does it Mean?
After attending the largest annual health IT conference of the year — HIMSS 11 – John Moore reported that “nearly every EHR vendor has an iPad App for the EHR [electronic health record], or will be releasing such this year.”
Doctors love iPads…not surprising? But, how might you explain this?
There are at least two different possibilities:
Coincidence Theory
Conspiracy Theory
The Coincidence Theory
So doctors want to access EHR software through the iPad…what’s the big deal?
Apple has built a great new hardware platform with the iPad. […]
Direct Project: Revisiting the Innovative Power of Push
Last May Fred Trotter wrote a brilliant blog post entitled The Power of Push. His essay described the latent power of the Direct Project (known then as NHIN-Direct).
At that time, the Direct Project was still being incubated and was not widely known or understood. Since then, it’s gone from being an idea to a project in full-speed implementation.
The simplest conceptualization of the Direct Project has been as a secure email alternative to medically-related transactions that today typically occur by fax, e.g., […]
Getting DIRECTly to the Point: The Role of the Direct Project in Fast-Tracking Health IT Interoperability
By Rich Elmore and Arien Malec. Rich Elmore is the Direct Project Communication Workgroup leader and Vice President, Strategic Initiatives at Allscripts. Arien Malec is ONC’s Coordinator, Direct Project and Coordinator, S&I Framework.
A patient’s health records are no longer confined to a doctor’s office, shelved inside a dusty file cabinet. With the advent of the Nationwide Health Information Network, a framework of standards, services and policies that allow health practitioners to securely exchange health data, medical records digitized to be easily […]
10 Reasons Why an Open IT Platform Strategy is the Right Long-Term Choice for an ACO
Many Physicians and Clinical Service Providers Will Not Be In Your ACO Contracting Network.
Expect Significant Patient Leakage (Migration) Out of Your ACO Network
Expect Patient Demands for Sharing Records.
Minimize Anti-Trust Concerns.
Expect Continuing Government Pressure for Broad Data Exchange.
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