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November 18, 2013 | By Gienna Shaw
I recently moderated a panel discussion on one of the most intractable problems in healthcare today: the ability–or lack thereof–to seamlessly share data across organizations, systems, platforms, devices and more. The live and online event on interoperability was hosted by West Health, a research organization that focuses on technologies to reduce healthcare costs.
Interoperability is an issue that the health IT community has been talking about for so many years–and yet solutions are tantalizingly out of reach. This despite the fact that there are enormous incentives to get it done.
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The discussion kicked off with an arresting image–a photo of a patient in an intensive care unit room chock full of medical devices and a menagerie of carts and monitors. A jumble of wires completed the vision. You could barely see the patient and the clinician in the middle of it all. Different medical devices and systems look different, of course, but what struck me was that each monitor display also had a different look and feel.
The picture is a good analogy for interoperability itself–it’s an intensive, mission-critical mess that the industry must address.
“When you look at that photo, it’s hard to imagine that is the standard of care for patients in the intensive care unit in this country. There’s something like 10 or 12 devices trying to maintain the care and wellbeing of her father in this most dire time,” said Nick Valeriani, chief executive of the San Diego-based West Health. “And none of those devices talk to one another. None of those devices share information to enhance both his safety, the quality of his care and the cost of that care.”
Because panelist Jeff Balser, M.D., vice chancellor of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, has spent a lot of time in ICU rooms during his medical career, and he gave the audience some specifics about what is wrong with that ICU picture.
“One of these devices … opens and shuts a balloon to assist the heart in beating. So you can just imagine the timing of that pulsation would need to be synchronized with the EKG,” he said.
“Way back here is the electro-cardiogram being recorded off the chest. And those two devices have to talk to each other or nothing works. I used to spend about an hour … fighting with those two machines to make them talk to each other,” he said. “Instead of taking care of the patient, I was making those devices talk to each other. It still doesn’t work.”
The thing about interoperability is that success in this area will not only lead to better patient care but is also good business.
There’s a human element here, the panelists said.
“The data that I carry as a patient belongs to me. It’s not a vendor’s data. It’s not my hospital’s data. It’s not my doctor’s data. I want my data to flow where it needs to be when I’m receiving any kind of healthcare,” said Michael Johns, M.D., chairman of West Health’s newly-formed Center for Medical Interoperability and former chancellor of Emory University in Atlanta and CEO of its Health Sciences Center. “The way information and data flows is a real detriment to the quality of patient care.”
At Vanderbilt, Balser conducted a survey asking patients what is important to them. There were 40 things on the list, from free parking to knowing that all of their providers have access to the same information.
“One of the things on the list was knowing all of my providers have access to the same information. “I thought people would pick that–it came in No. 1 … It even beat parking,” he said. “People know immediately when we don’t have our act together. They get it. And we don’t have our act together.”
As for the business side of things, integration is especially critical in an era of accountable care, which has changed the provider landscape. “Hospitals come together and form health systems and networks that get bigger and bigger … physicians come from groups of twos and threes to groups in the fifties and hundreds and join up with the health systems,” Johns said. “The business model is that if we could [achieve interoperability], we would create tremendous efficiencies … we can do more throughput, we can have physicians and nurses taking care of people, talking to people, listening to people rather than sitting at the machine trying to find the data from the last visits and logging in from one web page to the other web page to try to get the lab data and imaging data and patient history.”
Balser agreed. “We’re spending an enormous amount of money hiring really highly-trained people to waste their time doing useless work,” he said. “It’s costing us a fortune.”
West Health’s mission is research to reduce the cost of healthcare, noted Valeriani. And interoperability is a ripe environment for cost reduction. Analysis by West Health found the healthcare industry could save roughly $30 billion if it fixes the interoperability problem, including $12 billion in savings when highly trained people are providing care instead of transcribing data from one device or system to another.
There was a lot more to discuss–more than I can fit in a single column. You can find a video of the full event and the photo of the ICU room that I described here. And you can follow the Twitter conversation during the event here.
By the way, FierceHealthIT has just published our latest free eBook, Interoperability: The Path To Management and Standardizing Health Data. Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think about how we can move interoperability out of the intensive care unit–or into it, as the case may be. – Gienna (@Gienna and @FierceHealthIT)
Read more: Interoperability: A critical mess – FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/interoperability-critical-mess/2013-11-18#ixzz2lCU247NN Subscribe at FierceHealthIT
Rob Tholemeier, Director, Chilmark Research, co-authored this post.
Article link: http://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/whos-data-it-anyway
A common and somewhat unique aspect to EHR vendor contracts is that the EHR vendor lays claim to the data entered into their system. Rob and I have worked in many industries as analysts. Nowhere, in our collective experience, have we seen such a thing. Manufacturers, retailers, financial institutions, etc. would never think of relinquishing their data to their enterprise software vendor of choice.
It confounds us as to why healthcare organizations let their vendors of choice get away with this and frankly, in this day of increasing concerns about patient privacy, why is this practice allowed in the first place?
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released a report this summer defining EHR contract terms and lending some advice on what should and should not be in your EHR vendor’s contract.
The ONC recommendations are good but incomplete and come from a legal perspective.
As we approach the 3-5 year anniversary of the beginning of the upsurge in EHR purchasing via the HITECH Act, cracks are beginning to show. Roughly a third of healthcare organizations are now looking to replace their EHR. To assist HCO clients we wrote an article published in our recent October Monthly Update for CAS clients expanding on some of the points made by the ONC, and adding a few more critical considerations for HCOs trying to lower EHR costs and reduce risk.
The one item in many EHR contracts that is most troubling is the notion the patient data HCOs enter into their EHR is becomes the property in whole, or in-part, of the EHR vendor.
It’s Your Data — Act Like it Prior to the internet-age the concept that any data input into software either on the desktop, on-premise or in the cloud (AKA hosted or time sharing) was not owned entirely by the users was unheard of. But with the emergence of search engines and social media, the rights to data have slowly eroded away from the user in favor of the software/service provider. Facebook is notorious for making subtle changes to its data privacy agreements that raise the ire of privacy rights advocates.
Of course this is not a good situation when we are talking about healthcare, a sector that collects the most personal data one may own. EHR purchasers need to take a hard detailed look at their software agreements to get a clear picture of what rights to data are being transferred to the software vendors and whether or not that is in the best interests of the HCO and the community it serves..
Our recommendation: Do not let EHR vendor have any rights to the data – Period!
The second data ownership challenge to be very careful of is the increasing incorporation of patient generated health data into the healthcare delivery system. We project an explosion in the use of biometric devices, be it consumer purchased or HCO supplied, to monitor the health of patients outside of the exam room. Much of this data will find its way into the EHR. Exactly who owns this data and what rights each party has is still debatable. It is critical that before HCOs accept user data they work out user data ownership processes, procedures, and rights.
If the EHR vendor has retained some rights to data the patients need to be informed and have consented to this sharing agreement. In our experience this is rarely if ever explicitly stated. HCOs need to be careful here as this could become a public relations disaster.
We are not lawyers, we are offering our advice and experience to HCO CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, from the perspective of business risk and economics. At Chilmark we have deep experience in best practices used in other industries with regards to data use and sharing agreements. We have also spent significant time reviewing the entire software purchasing lifecycle and culture, and are here to help HCOs in reviewing these contracts.
11/15/2013 09:05 AM
EHR integration with Box suggests a trend: cloud services for care coordination and one-stop patient record access.
Patient portals attached to EHRs are spreading rapidly, mainly because of the Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirement that providers share records electronically with patients. According to a new Frost & Sullivan report, 50 percent of hospitals and 40 percent of ambulatory physician practices already have such portals. But it’s unclear whether this kind of patient portal has the functionality required in the long run for patient engagement and collaboration among unrelated providers.
One recent development shows the possibility of an alternative path. The cloud-based file-sharing vendor Box announced that a link to its service has been embedded in the cloud EHRs of Dr. Chrono and CareCloud. Physicians using these EHR systems can easily transfer patient records to Box, where patients can securely download them or transfer them to other providers.
Theoretically, if Box or some other cloud service provider persuaded enough EHR vendors to sign on, patients with multiple providers could download and aggregate all their records in one place. Instead, they must now access their records on multiple portals attached to the EHRs of different practices and hospitals. According to a recent KLAS report, just 14 percent of EHR-tethered portals included information from health information exchanges (HIEs), and 11 percent included data from other EHRs.
Albert Santalo, president and CEO of CareCloud, told us that it decided to embed Box because it is ubiquitous and easy to use. “While CareCloud also has the ability to share records through our own portal, we feel that Box is a more widely used platform.” Also, patients want to download records from multiple providers. “Sometimes they want to go beyond a patient portal, so Box facilitates that.”
Santalo believes that patients should be able to access all of their records in one place. “Patients should be in control of their records, it should be easy to get to, and it should be a byproduct of what the doctor does. The patient shouldn’t have to do a lot of work to populate their personal health records. That’s why other initiatives have failed, like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. They put too much burden on the patient.”
Microsoft, which still operates HealthVault, has long tried to get providers to send patient records to HealthVault, so they can be stored in patient-controlled personal health records (PHRs). Its website says “a growing list of labs, pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics” will send patient records to HealthVault upon request, but it hasn’t made any big announcements about this in years.
The Meaningful Use regulations allow providers to send records to PHRs to meet the record-sharing requirement. So Microsoft has applied for certification of HealthVault as EHR technology that can be used to show Meaningful Use in Stage 2. Missy Krasner, managing director of health and life sciences for Box, said it is considering whether to seek Meaningful Use certification.
However, Femi Ladega, global industry technologist for healthcare and life sciences at the consulting and research firm CSC, told us the ability to help providers achieve Meaningful Use is secondary to the other advantages of a cloud-based patient portal. The care delivery model is shifting toward “a shared accountability with the patient,” and this requires the capability to create two-way online communications between patients and all their providers.
To do that, he said, providers must create an infrastructure that goes beyond the EHR of an individual practice or hospital. “A health information exchange may be part of that infrastructure, and its dataset may be part of that ecosystem. But you need to pull data together from multiple sources.”
A cloud-based portal will be needed to serve as a central point for patients to aggregate their medical records and forward them to their providers. However, such a portal must be able to “provide the right infrastructure for the associated data governance while assuring the data can be relied on and trusted.” The portal also must show where each piece of information came from and enable providers to understand the context of the data “to drive the right interventions.”
This kind of cloud-based portal can co-exist with EHR-related portals, Ladega said, but it must be able to give patients all the information they need to manage their own conditions, including educational materials, care alerts, and other self-management tools. And it must provide the capability for bilateral communications between patients and providers across care settings.
“That’s why you need an ecosystem that enables effective data sharing, underpinned by this infrastructure that allows you to trust the information that is being shared and allows you to act effectively on it,” he said.
November 8, 2013 | By Susan D. Hall
Interoperability issues continue to stifle health information exchange (HIE) organizations’ ability to connect, and sustainability remains a struggle, according to the eHealth Initiative’s 2013 Health Data Exchange Survey.
A mix of community data exchanges (90 organizations), statewide efforts (45) and healthcare delivery organizations (50) were among the 199 entities that completed the survey, now in its 10th year, according to an announcement. Eighty-four organizations have reached advanced stages of operation, sustainability, or innovation as defined by the eHealth Initiative’s developmental framework. Most took one or two years to become operational.
The report says exchanges are maturing rapidly, yet calls interoperability “a great hurdle with little relief in sight.” It adds that now is the time for exchanges to demonstrate their value as vehicles for population analysis.
Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2 pm ET / 11 am PT
In this webinar, participants will hear from providers who have successfully implemented data analytics into their everyday processes. They’ll discuss the ways in which they’re using such tools, as well as the clinical and financial results reaped from those efforts. Register Now!
Among the findings:
In a University of Michigan study, 74 percent of the exchanges reported that they’re struggling to develop a sustainable business model. Yet federal backing for HIEs ends in January, leaving organizations still dependent on that funding scrambling.
The eHealth Initiative respondents still expect hospitals will be the most important source of funding in the future, but also expect a greater role for private payers, and less government money available, such as that recently offered to rural Arkansas hospitals.
To learn more: – find the report – here’s the announcement
Related Articles: HIE grants offered to rural Arkansas hospitals Michigan HIEs set to exchange data HIEs struggle to develop sustainable business models Beacon program success highlights HIE value HIE execs’ squabble leads to ban on connectivity fees
Read more: HIEs still struggle with interoperability, finances – FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/hies-still-struggle-interoperability-finances/2013-11-08#ixzz2kk9F4f00 Subscribe at FierceHealthIT
VA, DoD climb the stairs to interoperability together
Leaders in the healthcare community are thinking of ways they can use data to improve the quality of health care. The departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense have joined forces to create VistA Evolution, a system that allows the exchange of electronic health records information between the two.
Dr. Theresa Cullen, chief medical informatics officer at the Veterans Health Administration and the head of this initiative, discussed the next steps in this process in an interview with Federal News Radio’s Emily Kopp at AFCEA Bethesda’s sixth annual Health IT Day.
“We have to have data standards that are consistent and integrated into the system,” said Cullen, who until recently was the acting deputy director of the DoD/VA Interagency Program Office. “We have to have messaging standards that enable us to go send data back and forth.”
She described that process as a stair step.
“Most public and private partners are starting up the stairs,” she said. “We’re pretty early in this. I always say to people … it’s really hard work. It’s not very sexy. It’s really hard work to figure out does this data set, this data name, mean the same as it does over here.”
Making matters more difficult is the fact that the entire U.S. healthcare arena is switching over to the 10th version of the International Classification of Disease (ICD-10), which most of the world is already using.
“That’s about nomenclature and standards applied to what we have traditionally known as diseases,” Cullen said, adding that ICD-10 gives medical professionals more granularity when it comes to classifying diseases. “If you had one word to name ‘heart attack,’ you may now have 50 words, because now it’s a heart attack with cough, or a heart attack with congestive heart failure or a heart attack with chronic kidney disease. So, you now know a lot more about what’s wrong with this patient because you have more granular and specific data.”
The standard to date has been ICD-9, which is what the U.S. health care industry has been coding in. Another classification system, SHOWMED-CT, is even more granular and that’s where Cullen says the healthcare profession should be heading.
“We have lots of competing priorities and a need to converge,” she said. “The beauty of what the DoD and VA is doing, in my opinion, is that we are at the sharp end of the stick. We are out there trying to make this work. We have separate domains right now that we’re sharing information in. They’re the typical domains — medications, allergies, vital signs, — things that you think are critical to the healthcare delivery space. If we figure it out and we figure out how to do that well, efficient, effective, consume that data and integrate, it benefits the entire health IT space. Its benefit is far beyond just the federal community.”
Cullen said VHA is committed to interoperabiity. “We’re committed to sharing our records with DoD, working closely with DoD in the interoperability program office (IPO) space still, around interoperatiliby, around data, around data sharing, figuring out health for both of us,” she said. “We will consume data from external partners.”
A lot of the work VHA is doing recognizes a continuum of care that is critical for VA’s patients.
“We’re going to improve our usability, which means for the end user of this system,” she said. “Our end users aren’t just clinical. They’re patients because they use Blue Button, they use our personal health record, and they’re using our mobile apps. Caretakers of traumatically injured patients have an application on an iPad now to take care of that person. So, our usability is really about anything that somebody else touches. It’s not code in the back. It’s what I see when I’m there.”
RELATED STORIES:
DoD chooses interoperability over integration for new e-health record system
Zack McCartney, Contributing Writer
[See also: Docs ‘stressed and unhappy’ about EHRs.] and [EHRs at risk of becoming irrelevant.]
The issue may not be so much the failure of EHRs, as their falling short of unduly high expectations — expectations not only from the people who use them, but also the vendors themselves.
“I think it’s a myth that EHR vendors are going to be able to provide everything. Every other industry has proven this wrong, says Joanne Rohde, CEO of Axial Exchange, in an interview with Healthcare IT News.
Rohde, an exponent of open source philosophy — she was the COO and director of Health IT strategy at Red Hat prior to Axial — contrasted open source design with EHR vendors’ current design approach, suggesting that large, branded EHR vendors have made the mistake of dictating users’ workflow rather than providing them with software that actually complements how they normally work.
“There’s no question that modular design, open source practices, iterative design would do a much better job in ending up with things that people want to use…[Epic’s] approach is exactly the opposite, and their approach is that we’re going to tell you how this works, you have to change your workflows to match our system, and then and only then are you going to get benefits from this system”
This domineering EHR design approach, while perhaps expedient for expanding a company’s market share, could backfire with the progressive consumerization of healthcare IT. The question, then, is how to begin to amend this approach in light of this trend.
“I think the [EHR vendors] that will be successful,” said Rohde, “are going to be the ones that don’t try to hold on to what they have, look at it with a clean slate, and say ‘alright, we need to engage the patient; how do we do that?’ and then secondarily ask ‘how does this integrate with the software we already have?’”
More and more, healthcare professionals are talking about patient engagement, though it can be difficult, as with all buzz words, to parse what that means in practical terms. mHealth has grown extremely popular as a patient-centric, healthcare model, and Axial Exchange, billing itself as patient engagement software, has successfully deployed mobile applications for Parrish Medical Center in Florida, the Colorado Medical Group, and several others, following a patient-centric design strategy that offers a health information library, along with numerous health trackers for blood glucose, migraines, pregnancy, and even mood. In other words, letting patients learn about themselves, to engage in their own care.
Patient engagement, as the phrase’s ambiguous grammar suggests, goes both ways. HIT solutions, like Axial’s, allow the patients to learn about and monitor their care so that they can bring more actionable information, and not just numbers or vague descriptions of their issues to physician visits. But, as Rohde said, Axial is “committed to not only the patients knowing themselves, but the hospitals knowing their patients.” Axial has also complemented its mHealth work with a provider-side tool for engaging patients, a blind analytics service that allows hospitals to see what health issues their patients are researching.
[See also: 5 ways Cleveland Clinic improved its patient engagement strategies.]
Still, the lack of interoperability amongst healthcare IT systems, even the multiple ones deployed in a single institution, could hamstring however much progress is made toward engaging patients in their own care. More-informed patients and providers can’t overcome the technological isolation of medical records.
November 11, 2013 | Lloyd McCoy, Market intelligence consultant with immixGroup
Article link: http://www.govhealthit.com/news/do-dod-changes-signify-last-nail-iehrs-coffin-VA
Seismic shifts in defense healthcare policy are complicating the government’s plans for portable and comprehensive electronic patient health records, with a rift forming between the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Veterans Administration (VA) over the right way to move forward.
Cruise on over to the Interagency Program Office’s web site, in fact, and you’ll encounter an interesting greeting:
The Interagency Program Office (IPO) site is no longer available. Additional information regarding the future of the IPO will be forthcoming. Thank you.
Sounds foreboding. The Interagency Program Office is a joint DOD/VA operation established to oversee, as the name suggests, the initiative of sharing health data between the departments, otherwise known as iEHR.
Signs now point to the IPO essentially being mothballed until further notice, with only lip service paid to its continued relevance.
[Related: DoD gives glimpse of imminent EHR expecations.]
Of note is that in addition to DOD dismantling the Military Health System earlier this year, leading to the creation of the Defense Health Agency (DHA) formally established October 1, the Department recently created the DOD Healthcare Management Systems Program Executive Office (PEO DHMS), whose main purposes are overseeing the replacement of the military’s legacy electronic health record system and adding another layer of IPO oversight, further weakening that office. This PEO lies outside of DHA’s purview, answering directly to the Pentagon’s acquisition czar. Given the high profile nature of the iEHR program, that will likely remain the case.
Defense health officials hope that DHAs shared services model, which merges functions such as Health IT under a common roof, will enable the military to stem increased healthcare costs (the Department spends as much on salaries as it does on health benefits). DHA officials estimate the new agency can save over $250 million in its first year through portfolio consolidation.
Despite this move to streamline operations and improve healthcare services, the changes spell an uncertain future for the integrated electronic health record (iEHR). The goal of the iEHR program (originally known as the “EHR Way Ahead Program”) was to create a comprehensive electronic health record, shared by the DOD and VA.
In February, VA and DOD ostensibly went separate ways, DOD choosing instead to replace its own legacy healthcare IT system. Technology challenges and skyrocketing costs were blamed for the failure of the joint interoperable iEHR effort. Since then, there have been conflicting messages on the status of the iEHR – and, by extension, the IPO.
By May, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel seemed resigned to having each department develop its own systems, then trying to figure out a way to make the two systems talk. In late October, the Pentagon hosted a week of vendor demonstrations for a replacement to its electronic health record, indicating that DOD is indeed moving in its own direction. Furthermore, speakers at a recent TechAmerica conference pronounced the IPO effort as all but dead, revealing that much of the IPO funding on the VA side was being reprogrammed to the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), which is that agency’s native electronic health record program.
And the 2014 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Bill gives Congress power to withhold all but 25 percent of funding for iEHR until the DOD and VA can show progress. Perhaps that’s driving the Pentagon’s recent award via the IPO to incumbent Systems Made Simple to continue providing ”systems integration and engineering support for executing the iEHR initiative,” which on the surface seems to the support the notion that the iEHR effort still has some momentum.
The VA, for its part, is hoping the Pentagon will adopt its legacy system, particularly after planned upgrades. This would theoretically make interoperability much easier. So far though, the Pentagon appears content with pursuing alternate, commercial alternatives.
So, what’s the fate of iEHR? Despite a push from both Congress and the VA to jumpstart the iEHR effort, all parties seemed resign to waiting until the Pentagon replaces its legacy systems before taking on any further work on an interoperable system. One can only hope — for the sake of our military men and women — that the replacement effort moves forward quickly.
Lloyd McCoy is a market intelligence consultant with immixGroup, which helps technology companies do business with the government. He can be reached at Lloyd_mccoy@immixgroup.com.
Related articles:
ONC reveals Blue Button codeathon winners
Source: Tom Sullivan Date: Nov 7, 2013
Article link: http://www.hiewatch.com/news/commonwells-top-3-hie-challenges
As it nears the launch of its interoperability pilot project, officials from the CommonWell Health Alliance used AHIMA’s annual conference to outline some of the toughest health information exchange challenges facing vendors and providers today.
“If you want to share information with 5 organizations, you need 10 contracts,” Dan Schipfer, senior vice president at Cerner said Monday morning, explaining that regional HIE is happening, but thus far it is limited to local exchange.
“We EHR vendors have not made it easy for you to interoperate,” within the nomenclature and the organization, he said. “It’s a big deal, it’s something you believe in, we believe in, but there are challenges.”
Joining Schipfer on stage, Patrice Wolfe, senior vice president of McKesson’s RelayHealth unit, outlined what she see as the top 3 challenges.
Considering the pilot as infrastructure that would enable HIE, Wolfe said that we as a nation have to be able to pull data nationally, not just regionally.
That’s why CommonWell is creating a database of consenting patients, which Wolfe was careful to explain is not a central repository of clinical information, to address business deterrents that Schipfer rattled off, including cost, competition, complexity, and consent.
Wolfe added that CommonWell is working to deliver a handful of tasks such as registering organizations, enrolling people, matching patients, and querying documents.
“We think we have a better mousetrap,” Wolfe said. “Let’s let the basic plumbing get done once and share it across the vendors.”
The ECRI institute released its top 10 health technology hazards list yesterday, bringing to attention that with new innovation comes great responsibility–for training, implementation and day-to-day use.
“All of the items on the list represent problems that can be avoided or risks that can be minimized through careful management of technologies,” the report states. “For this Top 10 list, we focus only on what we call generic hazards–problems that result from the risks inherent to the use of certain types or combinations of medical technologies.”
The top 10 include:
Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2 pm ET / 11 am PT
In this webinar, participants will hear from providers who have successfully implemented data analytics into their everyday processes. They’ll discuss the ways in which they’re using such tools, as well as the clinical and financial results reaped from those efforts. Register Now!
With alarm hazards topping the list, ECRI points out that excessive numbers of alarms lead to fatigue and ultimately, patient harm. Just last week, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association reported that providers override about half of the alerts they receive when using electronic prescribing systems. Furthermore the study found that only about half of those overrides are medically appropriate.
And in respect to the No, 4 risk–data integrity failures in EHRs and other health IT systems–just yesterday, two health IT experts contended in an article published by the Journal of the American Health Information Management Association that health information exchange organizations (HIOs) routinely put data security at risk through five risky practices.
There is ample evidence that No. 9 on the list–robotic surgery due to insufficient training– is risky. It seems new reports wanring of the danger is released every month For example, complications from robotic surgery are widely underreported, according to a study published in August in the Journal for Healthcare Quality. In March, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said that robotic surgery for hysterectomies should not be a first or even second choice for women undergoing routine procedures, due, in part, to the learning curve associated with the robotic system.
ECRI points out that there’s currently no widely recognized requirements for robotic surgery training and credentialing programs.
To learn more: – see the report (registration required to download)
Related Articles: 5 HIO practices that put data integrity at risk Providers tout robotic surgery, but fail to mention risks Study: Half of CDS prescription alert overrides are inappropriate
Read more: Alarm fatigue tops health technology hazards list – FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/alarm-fatigue-tops-health-technology-hazards-list/2013-11-06#ixzz2kXpmhFy5 Subscribe at FierceHealthIT
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