What’s cloud got to do with it?
With the passage of the HITECH Act in 2009, the race to modernize the healthcare ecosystem began, and with it came the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and increasing digital capabilities. Over the past thirteen years, as technologies have grown and evolved, the variety, velocity, and volume of data have grown exponentially. By […]
Elevating the power of the shared patient record
Data exchange exists on a continuum. At the most basic level, data exchange might mean a patient carries a physical CD of an X-ray from their PCP’s office to the orthopedic surgeon’s office and rehab clinic. It’s neither efficient nor patient-centered, but healthcare organizations still use this type of data exchange when there are no […]
Essential ephemera: The sad, over-too-quickly life of a wearable datum
A few months ago, I wrote about “homeless data.” I posited that as we continue to generate information about ourselves, we’ll quickly fill up electronic health records (EHRs) with petabytes of data, but precious little knowledge. Some obvious sources of this voluminous information are genomic data that are newly available from your friendly corner laboratory […]
De-implementation: “Just say no” isn’t enough
How interoperability can support value-based care
The healthcare industry continues to move away from the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) payment model and toward value-based care (VBC). The 2021 Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network (LAN) report found that 40.9 percent of U.S. healthcare payments were tied to value-based reimbursement models, nearly doubling since 2015, when only 23 percent of payments were […]
User-centered system design can help save lives
In my previous blog post, I wrote about the Nashville, TN nurse RaDonda Vaught who was convicted last month of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult after a medication error contributed to the death of a patient in 2017. In it, I described some of the circumstances leading up to the death […]
It takes a system to keep us safe
Last month, a jury convicted Nashville, TN nurse RaDonda Vaught of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult after a medication error contributed to the death of a patient in 2017. Nurse Vaught was not accused of ill will or malevolent intent toward 75-year-old Charlene Murphey. However, the jury found that she was […]
“Clickbusters” can bust more than clicks
I was fascinated by a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) titled “Clinician collaboration to improve clinical decision support: the Clickbusters initiative.” The paper describes how a group of clinicians, informaticians, and researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) developed and executed a design to “improve safety and quality […]
Guidelines will rule the world
Everyone knows medicine is an art not a science. Sure, fine, perhaps everyone doesn’t know this, but it’s an accepted fact. Ok, maybe it’s not a fact, per se, but lots of people think it, so its veracity should not be questioned. Geez, people, here’s my final statement: some people sometimes say that medicine is […]
Houston, we have a data problem
Last year, Nordic’s CEO Jim Costanzo wrote about “healthier data, healthier people.” He noted that our electronic health records (EHRs) are missing essential information about what’s going on between infrequent visits to the clinic or emergency department, and he wrote about how this lack of data negatively affects patients. But it’s not just too little […]