The U.S. market for electronic health records is expected to reach about $6 billion by 2015, up from about $2.2 billion in 2009, according to a report from research and consulting firm MarketsandMarkets, Healthcare IT News reports.
The report predicts that the EHR market will experience a compound annual growth rate of about 18.1% through 2015, partially driven by federal initiatives to expand EHR adoption.
According to the report, more than 1,000 EHR vendors occupy the market. In 2010, Allscripts led the EHR market for physician offices with 15.7% of the market share, while MEDITECH led the hospital EHR market with 24.9% of the market share (Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 6/14).
The report also noted that:
Source: iHealthBeat
The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one! So if you’re struggling with digitizing your paper charts – maybe you need to take a step back and look at the big picture.
The project is taking longer than expected, your staff has better things to do, the file room is overflowing and it looks like you’re still months away from getting all of those charts into your EMR. Let’s face it – it’s not as easy as it looks.
And that’s where we can help. At Pulse, we have the experience of scanning millions of patient records into a variety of formats. We work with you to satisy your practice’s timelines and we do it at a fraction of the cost of keeping the job in-house.
And if you simply wish to archive inactive charts rather than integrate them with an EMR, we can convert them to indexed digital images for easy retrieval and minimal cost.
To learn how Pulse can ease your transition to the digital age…
Please contact John Bybee at 615.425.2719 and he will discuss your practice’s needs.
A federal advisory panel is recommending that the government give hospitals and doctors offices an additional two years to get their electronic medical record systems in order.
The Health Information Technology Committee, which advises the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, voted 12-5 Wednesday to recommend that the department push its deadline for stage 2 “meaningful use” requirements from next year to 2014.
Meaningful use refers to a wide range of guidelines aimed at making sure health care providers are properly using electronic health records in their day-to-day operations, which supporters claim will reduce medical errors, improve overall patient care and save money.
Failure to meet meaningful-use standards could lead to cuts in Medicare reimbursement, starting in 2014.
Organizations such as the American Hospital Association have supported delaying the requirements, saying the process of switching from paper patient records to computer databases is complex and will take longer than expected.
In a Monday letter, the AHA suggested that the government not start stage 2 until three-fourths of eligible hospitals and physician providers are compliant with stage 1.
“We also urge you to be parsimonious in your recommendations for new requirements in stage 2, maintain flexibility, avoid complexity and ensure that the benefits of any new requirements outweigh the costs,” the group wrote.
In the letter, the AHA said that in a survey of its members, less than 2 percent of the 1,297 providers responding said they were able to meet minimum federal requirements in January, when incentive payments first became available.
It also noted that federal authorities have dispersed only $158.3 million of the $4.7 billion set aside by Congress to help health care providers roll out electronic medical records.
“Clearly, meeting the stage 1 requirements is challenging; raising the bar quickly and significantly in stage 2 risks limiting the success of the EHR incentive programs,” the letter said.
Source: Nashville Business Journal
Often in EMR/PM discussions, internet speed is usually overlooked and not addressed until after the fact. Going electronic will always increase the need for internet bandwidth.
Not only is speed critical, redundancy is also important for EMR/PM users. Having a redundant internet connection guarantees maximum up time and allows your staff to have access to all patient information at any given time. NO DOWNTIME FOR YOUR PRACTICE!
Do the the below questions sound familiar?
With the proper bandwidth and redundancy solution in place, none of the above questions come into play! What would that mean for your practice? More profit… Increased patient through rate… You can see the benefits!
Pulse has aligned and partnered with the leading telecommunication providers throughout the Southeast to provide the best and most cost-effective solutions for our customers. No matter your needs or budget… we have a solution for you!
To learn how Pulse can improve your bandwidth/redundancy…
Simply contact John Bybee at 615.425.2719 to discuss your practice’s needs.
When it comes to file servers, healthcare organizations are second only to legal firms in the sheer number of files they keep. They can often, however, be the overwhelming champs when it comes to the amount of data stored in those files. With medical imaging software, patient records, andother data being digitized, more and more information is being stored on file servers. This pattern is very common for any organization, but becomes even more of a burden in the healthcare industry for a few reasons.
First, most healthcare organizations cannot afford outages. Between patient’s lives hanging in the balance and staffers who are simply not accustomed to having to wait for critical data, there’s no allowance for outages. Data loss, similarly, is not an option; as the loss of a patient record could mean that you have no way of knowing of allergies, life-threatening diseases,and other issues. Even in a practitioner’s office that doesn’t practice emergency medicine—a dentist or podiatrist—the lack of this information could mean the accidental prescription of a wholly inappropriate drug.
Second, no matter if you’re working with practitioners or researchers, there are federal and often local regulations that require you to protect patient and other medical data. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability andAccountability Act) requires that data must not only be protected from theft and accidental disclosure, but it must be protected from data loss as well. Add this to your other factors, and there’s an entirely different set of disaster recovery (DR) parameters to be dealt with.
In order to protect file servers for healthcare organizations,you will probably need to take a multi-layered approach to DR. First, there are many different levels of availability that you may need. If you are responsible for a smaller practice, then you’re in luck. In such cases, you can determine your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for the business as a whole. For those who are in larger organizations, you will need to meet with each department to find RTO and RPO numbers individually.
RPO is the amount of data that can be lost to a disaster, usually rated in seconds or minutes of lost data. RTO is how long the system can be offline, usually rated in minutes to hours to days in some cases. Life-sustaining equipment and the file servers that contain the data they need to operate will have the tightest numbers when it comes to RTO and RPO. Research departments, on the other hand, will have a little more flexibility when it comes to downtime; however, with millions of dollars riding on each file, RPO and RTO numbers are uncompromisingly short. The reason you want to nail down these numbers is simple—smaller RTO and RPO numbers equate to larger budget numbers and more expertise needed to mind the systems that mind the data. So failure to get good numbers will lead to either inadequate protection or wasted expense.
The sheer amount of data in question also comes into play when talking about DR. Medical imaging systems store terabytes of data for even smaller hospitals and imaging centers. These files are vital to the well-being of patients, but offer some unique problems when it comes to protecting them. If you’re using tape backups, you will need a very large number of tapes and someplace safe to store them. Your best bet is to contract with a storage facility that can handle the number of tapes in question for as long as your legal advisors recommend you to keep them. Also keep in mind that your RTO will be quite long, as restoration of terabytes of data from tape is generally estimated in terms of days, not hours.
If you use replication systems, you’re going to need a large amount of disk space on the other side of the pipe to hold the replicated data,and tape cannot be ruled out of the mix, since a virus could destroy the files on both sides. Replication gives you a much tighter RTO and RPO, but the budge tincreases significantly, so keep those facts in mind when you start calculating the cost.
Planning DR options for file servers used in the healthcare industry is especially challenging. The amount of data and its vital nature leaves little margin for error. By getting the best possible estimate of RPO and RTO,you can build a plan that allows you to provide the necessary levels of recovery, while not overspending on your budget.
Source: Tech Republic
As the healthcare industry prepares for a major shift to electronic health records (EHRs) over the next several years, a new bi-annual report provides data that shows that providers are still having difficulty adequately securing patient data in a rapidly changing landscape.
The 2010 HIMSS Analytics Report: Security of Patient Data indicates that healthcare organizations are actively taking steps to ensure that patient data is secure. However, these efforts appear to be more reactive than proactive, as hospitals dedicate more resources toward breach response vs. breach prevention through risk management activities.
“The results of the latest study are bittersweet to say the least,” said Brian Lapidus, chief operating officer for Kroll Fraud Solutions. “On one hand, healthcare organizations are demonstrating increased awareness of the state of patient data security as a result of heightened regulatory activity and increased compliance. On the other, organizations are so afraid of being labeled ‘noncompliant’ that they overlook the bigger elephant in the room, the still-present risk and escalating costs associated with a data breach. We need to shift the industry focus from a ‘check the box’ mentality around compliance to a more comprehensive, sustained look at data security.”
Key report findings include:
Source: Net Security
Plan for the Unexpected…
With the recent news about earthquakes, floods and tsunamis it reminds us that anything can happen and we must be prepared! Best practices have shown that we should have an exit strategy in place in case of certain situations occurring that are beyond our control. But why don’t most people have one?
Do you have an exit strategy in place to address the unexpected when it comes to an IT failure? What is your exit strategy in case of a fire, flood or natural disaster? What if your computer crashes tomorrow morning or a virus wipes out all your data? Would you be able to effectively cope with this situation and its potential affect on your practice? If you don’t have a plan in place to handle these types of unexpected events, perhaps you should start thinking about one!
The key is to plan ahead for the unexpected and always be prepared! The more prepared you can be for these situations the less likely it will be that the impact is severe and will disrupt your practice for any length of time.
Last but not least, remember to have an exit strategy in place to protect your mission critical data. Whether it is patient records, emails or confidential business documents…. to have your data available is priceless!
To discuss an exit strategy for your practice…
Feel free to contact John Bybee at 615.425.2719 and he’ll discuss your practice’s needs.
Questioning children about their online life and exposure to Facebook and other social networking sites should be included when physicians take medical histories during patient visits, according to new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, NPR’s “Shots” reports (Hensley, “Shots,” NPR, 3/28).
AAP’s social media recommendations were published in the journal Pediatrics.
Reasons for Recommendations
The report states that adolescents can use social media to find health information and connect with other individuals who have similar medical conditions. However, such online tools might carry risk, according to the report (Gordon, HealthDay, 3/28).
Gwenn O’Keeffe, a pediatrician and co-author of the report said, “We are acknowledging that this a health issue — it isn’t just a technology issue” (Hellmich, USA Today, 3/28). O’Keeffe called the pediatric training model “old-fashioned” (Rochman, “Healthland,” Time, 3/28).
To learn more about pediatric patients’ online habits, the AAP report asks that doctors and parents look out for:
Source: iHealthBeat
Hospitals across the country are starting to leverage social media tools to communicate with patients, raise funds and connect with their local communities, Modern Healthcare reports.
About the Trend
Ed Bennett — director of Web strategy for the University of Maryland Medical Center-Baltimore — has collected data on hospitals’ use of social media over the past two years. According to data posted in January, 906 hospitals are active on six social media platforms. Bennett found that there are a total of 3,087 social networking accounts run by hospitals.
Hospital employees who work in communications say social media platforms help them learn what patients, physicians and business partners are saying about their facility. They say such feedback can help hospital administrators improve policies and processes.
Industry Examples
Some of the hospitals that have leveraged social media websites include:
Source: iHealthBeat
If you have any questions or interest in social media, don’t hesitate to contact us.
The launch of Apple’s iPad 2 has the potential to promote further mobile health advancements at hospitals and other health care facilities, InformationWeek reports.
According to recent studies, clinicians have widely adopted the original iPad in conjunction with electronic health record use. Considering improvements added to the iPad 2, more physicians could embrace the computerized tablet as a way to manage EHRs and access other medical information, according to InformationWeek.
John Halamka — CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston — said the iPad is helping physicians engage with patients because it allows doctors to directly show images and data to patients (Lewis, InformationWeek, 3/7).
Other iPad Uses in Health Care
Physicians are not the only health care professionals who use the iPad, the Syracuse Post-Standard reports.
For example, St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in New York plans to provide its board members with iPads so they can access online documents during meetings, according to Chuck Fennell, the hospital’s CIO.
In addition, workers at Crouse Hospital in New York use the devices to remotely control heating, ventilation and air conditioning in the facility.
iPad Obstacles
Fennell said that battery life is a shortcoming of the iPad and other tablet computers, which must be charged about every four hours.
In addition, Neal Seidberg, a pediatrician and chief medical informatics officer at Upstate University Hospital in New York, said the iPad’s screen is another limitation. He said he would not make a diagnosis based solely on seeing something on the screen because the “resolution is not good enough yet” (Mulder, Syracuse Post-Standard, 3/7).
Survey Finds Physicians Favor iPad Tablet
A recent survey by Aptilon surveyed 341 U.S. health care professionals’ tablet computer preferences. Among the survey respondents:
The survey found that 59% of respondents who already have an iPad said they use it for medical tasks, such as receiving and reviewing updated medical information and completing paperwork.
In addition, the survey found that 38% of respondents expect to have an iPad within the year.
Aptilon is a Canadian-based customer relationship management firm for the pharmaceutical industry (Pulley, “Health IT Update,” NextGov, 3/7).
Source: iHealthBeat
MGMA Supports ICD-10 Testing With Outside Organizations
July 30, 2013
Report: Many EHR Users Set To Replace Systems Within the Next Year
July 30, 2013
Providers, Vendors Urge Congress To Delay Meaningful Use Stage 2
July 30, 2013
Many Doctors May Find Meeting ‘Meaningful Use’ Requirements a Challenge
June 28, 2013
When it Comes to ICD-10 Physician Documentation: Collaborate and Educate
June 28, 2013
The Slow Crawl Toward Improved EHR Usability and Interoperability
June 28, 2013
Efficient Patient Communication and Engagement
June 13, 2013
ONC Issues Guidance on Stage 2 Transition of Care Requirements
May 31, 2013
Drugmakers Leverage Doctor, Patient Data To Market Their Products
May 31, 2013
Consumer Organizations Defend Meaningful Use Program
May 31, 2013
