by medicaltechont | Mar 19, 2010 | Healthcare, Technology
Mar 17, 2010
Stuttgart, Germany – Manufacturers of modern medical instruments and implants are faced with enormous challenges. Structures are becoming increasingly smaller, yet demands for the highest quality and accuracy are still expected to be met. This means flawless, smooth surfaces without any residue. “Laser micro processing is the best option here as it removes material without any contact. Furthermore, excellent beam quality and accurate control prevent the spreading of heat or the occurrence of material damage,” explains Mandy Gebhardt, head of marketing at 3D-Micromac.
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by medicaltechont | Mar 15, 2010 | Healthcare
The folks at Medsphere, which licenses hospital software based on the VA’s open source VistA system, has launched aStimulus ROI Calculator, a handy way for evaluating its software based on that sweet, sweet stimulus cash, and of getting your hospital on its radar.
It’s a good thing.
But if you’re looking at health IT, especially if you’re a clinic, a stimulus calculator is not the first place you should be looking.
During the HIMSS show I got this clue in the Kryptiq booth, from Thomas Landholt (right), who runs a family clinic in Missouri and has been through the automation wars.
His advice? First write a business plan.
Whether you can afford an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system is one thing. But if government money is going to be your sole motivator, your automation effort is going to fail.
Instead, he suggested, treat your EMR investment just as you would an investment in a new imaging system, or lab system, or any other major purchase you are making for your business. That’s what your clinic is, a business.
Doctors resist thinking of themselves as businessmen, but unless you’re drawing a paycheck that’s what you are. And the biggest mistake many doctors make is spending all their time working in their business, rather than on their business.
Writing a business plan is working on your business. Figure out how you’re going to profit from this investment. Add up all the costs, list all the benefits. Put numbers on them. Do research to make certain the numbers are accurate.
What Landholt found, in building out his own EMR system, was that it helped him re-engineer his business. He put his nursing station in sight of the reception desk. He put in secure messaging to reduce the cost of connecting with patients, and increase communication. He changed workflows.
These are some of the things EMR software is designed to enable, under the stimulus. But what the software really does is provide you the opportunity to get inside your business and make it work better, more efficiently. You can lower costs and provide better care once you have access to your own data.
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by medicaltechont | Mar 12, 2010 | Apple, Hardware, Microsoft, Technology
By Larry Dignan
The questions of the day are really quite simple: Should you preorder a device you’ve never touched, played with or used in any fashion? And will gadget lust trump logic?
That’s what everyone is wondering. It’s the curse of the early adopter. The logic goes like this:
- I have to preorder the iPad or I may not get one.
- OK, so I’ve never tried it but man it looks good.
- But I want to be the coolest geek on the block.
- And it’s revolutionary.
- No wait, do I really want to plunk down $499.
- Oh why not I’ll order two.
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by medicaltechont | Mar 12, 2010 | Healthcare, Technology
The unprecedented level of detail in EMR clinical data opens new possibilities for defining clinical quality measures in more clinically meaningful ways. However, more detailed data can cause difficulties in ensuring that data across institutions are comparable, according to an article in the online March edition of the Journal of Medical Informatics Association.
Michael G. Kahn, MD, department of pediatrics at the University of Colorado in Denver and Daksha Ranade from the department of clinical informatics at The Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colo., sought to examine the impact of billing and clinical data extracted from an EMR system on the calculation of an adverse drug event (ADE) quality measure approved for use in The Joint Commission’s ORYX program, a mandatory national hospital quality reporting system.
http://www.healthimaging.com/index.php?option=com_articles&view=article&id=21163:jamia-more-detailed-emr-data-may-make-comparisons-difficult-XX
The Child Health Corporation of America‘s (CHCA) “Use of Rescue Agents—ADE Trigger” quality measure uses medication billing data from 48 nonprofit free-standing children’s hospitals in the U.S. contained in the Pediatric Health Information Systems (PHIS) data warehouse and was used to create The Joint Commission-approved quality measure, according to the authors.
“Using a similar query, we calculated the quality measure using PHIS plus four data sources extracted from our EMR system:…Four versions of the ‘Use of Rescue Agent – ADE Trigger’ quality measure’s numerator and denominator events were developed as SQL-based queries against the EPIC EMR system:
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by medicaltechont | Mar 2, 2010 | Canada, emr, Technology
Ontario must move faster with a series of legislative and regulatory measures in order to meet its commitment to create electronic health records for all residents by 2015, a senior official with eHealth Ontario says.
“It’s time the province decided if it’s really committed to this or not,” argues Doug Tessier, senior vice-president of development and implementation for the agency responsible for implementing the government’s multibillion-dollar electronic health records (EHR) strategy.
Progress on the province’s EHR file was hampered by the eHealth Ontario scandal surrounding compensation for consultants, Tessier says. The scandal triggered an audit, which concluded that the provincial government mismanaged over $1 billion and ultimately led to the resignations of former health minister David Caplan and former deputy minister of health Ron Sapsford.
“The swirl and scandal has hurt us,” says Tessier, considered the government’s expert on electronic health systems.
But Ontario’s EHR woes predate the scandal, Tessier says, arguing that there have consistently been delays in making key political decisions since the province first committed to implementation in 2000.
Deliberations on major decisions within the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care have often taken two years, Tessier says. “If you are really committed to this, two years is too long. … To my mind, if the government is not committed to something, they hem and haw.”
Moreover, even the basic, legal framework for patient EHRs — which will require changes to laws governing patient record management and privacy — still isn’t in place, more than seven years after the province established the agency, Tessier says. Not only are “two or three pieces of new legislation” still required, “but we’ve also got to undo a number of pieces of [existing] legislation.”
The government must also do more persuade health regulatory colleges to overhaul policies that impact on EHRs, Tessier argues. “Let’s put our arm around them and gently bring them into the 21st century. … With the regulations, the legislation and the policy changes that government has to do, that’s not so gentle. That’s on the critical path. If they don’t do it, we’re blocked completely.”
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