Pine Tree Watch
Mike Miliard
Editor, Healthcare IT News
Also: Contributing Writer, Pine Tree Watch
Former: Staff Writer, Boston Phoenix
Also: Contributing Writer, Pine Tree Watch
Former: Staff Writer, Boston Phoenix
Pine Tree Watch
No matter what your opinion of Paul LePage is, it's safe to say that his two terms as governor have added up to a contentious tenure. As Attorney General Janet Mills gets set to be Maine's first female governor, Pine Tree Watch examines LePage's run.
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Most hospitals use analytics to improve quality and drive cost efficiencies, but some leverage data in more innovative ways than others. In Boston this week, leaders from Partners HealthCare showcase the creative use cases for number-crunching.
Michael Rogers is a self-described "practical futurist." He's "not interested in flying cars," he explained. "I'm interested in things that will actually happen." (True, flying cars could still happen too - "but we've been promised them since 1958," he said).
It's an inconvenient truth that much of healthcare still runs on legacy software. Whether it's operating systems or medical devices, the security implications of depending on vulnerable and unsupported technologies are serious, putting HIPAA compliance and patient safety at risk.
Healthcare is complicated. There's no getting around it. Which is why hospital leaders should be extremely skeptical of individual technologies that say they can fix it, says Lynda Chin, MD, executive director for real-world education detection and intervention at The University of Texas System and professor at Dell Medical School.
As the opioid crisis continues to spread nationwide, it's requiring an all-hands-on-deck effort to turn the tide. Health information technology - electronic health record customizations, predictive analytics algorithms, e-prescribing tools - is proving to be a valuable weapon in the fight.
NYU Langone Health oversees a clinically integrated network that covers some 375,000 attributed patients. As such, it depends on a strong care coordination effort to help manage the health of its high-risk patients and steer them to the appropriate care venues.
The HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model has long been a valuable methodology for hospitals and health systems to assess their implementation and use of information technology. More and more providers have matured in their capabilities in recent years, and now hospitals are routinely reaching Stages 6 and 7, the top rankings of the framework.
When Justin Aronson takes the stage at the HIMSS Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum on October 23, he'll be the youngest-ever speaker at one of our events -- a feat that only makes the 16-year-old high school junior's accomplishments all the more impressive.
The variety of potential blockchain deployments in healthcare is getting wider. When ONC put forth its call for white papers in its blockchain challenge, for instance, it received more than 70 submissions earlier this year, exploring everything from medication reconciliation to alternative payment models.
Dave Baumgardner, chief information officer at Dover, Ohio-based Union Hospital, said there was one primary driver for the decision to link the hospital's 160 or so smart infusion pumps with its Meditech electronic health record system. "First of all, for patient safety and quality," said Baumgardner. "Those were the main drivers.
Two new studies from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory shed light on ways machine learning can improve electronic health records and predictive analytics to help physicians make more informed decisions. As doctors grapple with a profusion data across multiple systems, with charts documented in varying degrees of consistency, the challenges of putting it all to use for real-time decision-making is acute.
As Amazon's Alexa makes "herself" comfortable in more and more homes, she and similar artificial intelligence technologies could soon be having an impact on hospitals. AI-based virtual assistants are evolving quickly, and more and more effort is being put into making them emotionally intelligent - able to pick up on subtle cues in speech, inflection or gesture to assess a person's mood and feelings.
Two technology titans are in a verbal sparring match about the perils and promise of artificial intelligence in healthcare and beyond. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has recently been on a " billion-dollar crusade to stop the AI apocalypse," advocating for proactive regulations on a technology he seems to see as something of a Pandora's box.
One of the frustrating challenges in putting precision medicine to work more widely for clinical care is integrating complex and voluminous genomic data into the EHR. Instead, in most cases, "we use a very highly interoperable standard for such material called 'PDF,'" joked Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka, MD, when he spoke at the Healthcare IT News Precision Medicine Summit in Boston earlier this month.
It may seem overhyped at the moment. And its technical and clinical complexities are certainly way beyond the grasp of most hospitals. But precision medicine has enormous promise - more than we may yet even realize - for transforming the way care is delivered to patients.
Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, MD, said he was speaking as a physician when he said choosing Cerner to replace VistA was "the right thing to change veterans' healthcare."
Attorney Sharon Klein first started thinking seriously about blockchain's implications for healthcare about 18 months ago. And she's hardly the only one. Blockchain has been attracting a lot of attention in healthcare, with many technology stakeholders excited about the potential the new data storage paradigm could hold for cybersecurity and interoperability.
Like all healthcare CIOs, Joel Vengco, chief information officer at Springfield, Massachusetts-based Baystate Health, has no shortage of pressing projects competing for his attention. Whether it's working to drive operational efficiencies across the $2.5 billion health system, improving the usability of an array of applications for clinical end users, spearheading community engagement and patient outreach for population health management or working on analytics and "knowledge management," it...
Speaking at HIMSS17 this past month, security consultant Kevin Johnson made the point that far too many health organizations still "don't truly understand" the array of security threats they face. It's not just nefarious hackers, he said. The privacy risk posed by negligence from trusted third-parties such as vendors and other business associates is "astronomical."
ORLANDO - In a joint appearance at HIMSS17 on Thursday, former Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Democratic former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell took part in a lively back-and-forth discussion about the future of the Affordable Care Act, the value of health IT and the prospects for Donald Trump's presidency.
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In many client-adviser relationships, portfolio management takes precedence over genuine financial planning - to the detriment of actual outcomes and, as a result, the length of such relationships.