The Informatics Review via MedWorm.com

Nationwide EHR implementation price tag estimated at $150 billion

The Informatics Review — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Full implementation of networked e-health records in U.S. doctors’ offices and hospitals could cost around $150 billion over eight years. Miller’s projections call for hospitals to spend $35 billion to acquire and expand EHR systems and $55 billion in new operating costs over eight years. He said this level of spending would bring hospitals’ IT spending closer to that of other industries. (Source: The Informatics Review)

DNA databases blocked from the public

The Informatics Review — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The National Institutes of Health quietly blocked public access to databases of patient DNA profiles after learning of a study that found the genetic information may not be as anonymous as previously believed. The study that sparked the move, published in today's edition of the journal Public Library of Science, revealed the ability of a new type of forensic DNA analysis to identify a person's DNA even if it were found in minute quantities and mixed with that of hundreds of other people. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Presence in Virtual Worlds Could Help Health Plans Achieve Real-World Behavior Change

The Informatics Review — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Second Life is a virtual world of avatars, sims and Linden dollars, and CIGNA, Corp., Partners HealthCare System, Inc. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are among the first health organizations to establish beachheads on its shores. But it's not, they say, because Second Life and other social networking media (e.g., Web sites) are new and flashy. Rather, their ventures are a response to changes in the way consumers are communicating and accessing health information. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Automated de-identification of free-text medical records

The Informatics Review — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

We have developed a pattern-matching de-identification system based on dictionary look-ups, regular expressions, and heuristics. Evaluation based on two different sets of nursing notes collected from a U.S. hospital suggests that, in terms of recall, the software out-performs a single human de-identifier (0.81) and performs at least as well as a consensus of two human de-identifiers (0.94). The system is currently tuned to de-identify PHI in nursing notes and discharge summaries but is sufficiently generalized and can be customized to handle text files of any format. Although the accuracy of the algorithm is high, it is probably insufficient to be used to publicly disseminate medical data. The open-source de-identification software and the gold standard re-identified co...

Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness

The Informatics Review — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

“Medicine 2.0” applications, services, and tools are defined as Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to enable and facilitate specifically 1) social networking, 2) participation, 3) apomediation, 4) openness, and 5) collaboration, within and between these user groups. (Source: The Informatics Review)

One answer to EMR data entry: Hire a scribe to do it

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Here's how it works: The scribe takes notes during the clinical exam and enters them into the appropriate place in the EMR, relieving the doctor of the note-taking and data-entry responsibilities. The common criticism of medical scribes is that their use adds one more layer of bureaucracy, and keeps physicians from unlocking the potential of their EMRs because they're never interacting with them. But medical scribe companies counter that they help physicians interact more with patients, because scribes handle the technology. (Source: The Informatics Review)

DEA proposes rules to allow e-prescribing of controlled substances

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The proposed rules, as explained in a 62-page Federal Register notice today, require doctors to use two forms of identification for each transmission of e-prescriptions for controlled substances in addition to an annual audit of each system by a certified public accountancy. (Source: The Informatics Review)

The Impact of Prevention on Reducing the Burden of Cardiovascular Disease

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Approximately 78% of adults aged 20-80 years alive today in the United States are candidates for at least one prevention activity. If everyone received the activities for which they are eligible, myocardial infarctions and strokes would be reduced by 63% and 31%, respectively. If more feasible levels of performance are assumed, myocardial infarctions and strokes would be reduced 36% and 20%, respectively. Implementation of all prevention activities would add {approx}221 million life-years and 244 million quality-adjusted life-years to the US adult population over the coming 30 years, or an average of 1.3 years of life expectancy for all adults. Of the specific prevention activities, the greatest benefits to the US population come from providing aspirin to high-risk indi...

A treasure-trove of data in the UK National Health Service is set to energize biomedical research

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Perhaps the most significant move for biomedical science at the NHS lies in opening up the ocean of patients' data that the organization has collected over the decades. Public consultations are now beginning that, favourable soundings suggest, will lead to ways by which researchers can readily find appropriate patients for research and clinical trials, and can gain access to data whose sources are anonymized but traceable subject to the patient's permission. In particular, the national extent and depth of those data will provide researchers in academia and industry with a globally unique resource for highly targeted studies and clinical trials — a key element of translational medicine. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

HealthMap (Source: The Informatics Review)

"Plug and Play" Hospitals Medical devices that exchange data could make hospitals safer

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Device interoperability could also reduce the large number of false alarms that nurses must contend with. "If you go into an ICU, it's a madhouse," says Szolovits. "There are alarms going off constantly, because each alarm is separate from the others, so none of them have an integrated view of what's going on with the patient." If the data from medical monitors were integrated, he says, alarms would be more likely to indicate something truly important. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Wrong National Strategy for EMRs?

The Informatics Review — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The health informatics community, the various national organizations and professional committees and ONCHIT need to consider making major changes in order to have any hope for meaningful progress towards working, efficient, and successful EMR implementations. First, we need an honest and open discussion on the current situation. Second, we need to look at many of the health informatics myths such as “the goal of 2014 is easily achievable”, or “interoperability can easily be achieved if we follow the HITSP standards”. Only then can we create cost-effective, interoperable, non-proprietary, user friendly, workflow-enhancing systems that can truly assist medical professionals in their computer-assisted healthcare work. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Novel, Web-based, information-exploration approach for improving operating room logistics and system processes

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

A Web-based, graphical dashboard is described in this study, which can be used to interpret clinical operational data, allow managers to see trends in data, and help identify inefficiencies that were not apparent with more traditional, paper-based approaches. The dashboard provides a visual decision support tool that assists managers in pinpointing areas for continuous quality improvement. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with implementing such a program in the perioperative environment are summarized. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Implementation of a novel on-ward computer-assisted surveillance system for device-associated infections in an intensive care unit

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

A computer-based surveillance system for detecting nosocomial infections (NI) with direct data input from attending on-ward physicians was implemented. Detected infection rates ranged within the German national reference data. Personnel costs for on-ward physicians and infection control personnel were 1.01 Euro per device day in the routine phase. Time expenditure of less than 3 min per device day, rendered in about equal parts by physicians and infection control personnel, was lower than in studies relying on on-ward assessment by infection control personnel. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Top five biggest healthcare IT blunders

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Despite their best efforts, many hospitals adopting healthcare IT have found some unexpected curves in the road over the last few years. Here are some of the biggest blunders... (Source: The Informatics Review)

CCHIT Certified Inpatient EHR 2007

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The following products have achieved CCHIT Certified status by testing against the 2007 Inpatient EHR criteria. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Overview of Trends in Health Information Exchange and Implications for Public Policy

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

This month's webinar will provide an overview of what's happening related to health information exchange. The most recent findings from surveys and research on health information exchange will be shared, including: health information exchange research funded by Harvard's Program for Health Systems Improvement and published in the December 2007 edition of Health Affairs, findings from the State-level HIE Consensus Project and Final Report which focused on assessing the current landscape of state-level health information exchange initiatives, and the preliminary results from the eHI 2008 Survey of Health Information Exchange at the National, State and Local Levels. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Information on Provider Taxonomy Codes for Payers

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Many hospitals, physicians and clinics are having difficulty getting claims paid because of problems related to Provider Taxonomy codes in payers’ crosswalks. The folks from HIT Transitions have posted a lot of information on their health IT blog, and they’ve just set up a link to all those posts. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Electromagnetic interference from radio frequency identification inducing potentially hazardous incidents in critical care medical equipment

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Health care applications of autoidentification technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), have been proposed to improve patient safety and also the tracking and tracing of medical equipment. In 123 EMI tests (3 per medical device), RFID induced 34 EMI incidents: 22 were classified as hazardous, 2 as significant, and 10 as light. The passive 868-MHz RFID signal induced a higher number of incidents (26 incidents in 41 EMI tests; 63%) compared with the active 125-kHz RFID signal (8 incidents in 41 EMI tests; 20%). In a controlled nonclinical setting, RFID induced potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices. Implementation of RFID in the critical care environment should require on-site EMI tests and updates of international standards. (Source: The I...

The onc-coordinated federal health information technology strategic plan: 2008-2012

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The Plan has two goals, Patient-focused Health Care and Population Health, which are defined as follows: Patient-focused Health Care: Enable the transformation to higher quality, more cost-efficient, patient-focused health care through electronic health information access and use by care providers, and by patients and their designees. (Source: The Informatics Review)

IT Visionary: William W. Stead, M.D.

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

“We wanted to focus on decision support,” he says, and that meant bringing together all the groups involved in management of information, from the library to hospital systems. The result was creation of the Informatics Center. It also meant building an information architecture to link the enterprise and a strong academic unit to support it. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Report from workshop on Guidelines for good evaluation practice and reporting" at MIE 2008 in Göteborg, 26 - 28 May 2008

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The WG meeting was very successful with more than 60 attendees and active participation of some of them. Attendees were enthusiastic about STARE-HI and GEP-HI and some of them already use STARE-HI e.g. for supervising Master theses. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Virtual Discussions: An Interface to Knowledge

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The Virtual Conversations® programs ( click to read article describing project (Source: The Informatics Review)

The more ‘wired’ the hospital, the happier the patients

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

An analysis of patient-satisfaction surveys from more than 1,000 hospitals found that the more “wired” a hospital is, the happier its patients are. Patients from the most-wired hospitals reported higher satisfaction related to the admission process, their experiences with physicians, and personal issues such as sensitivity and pain. (Source: The Informatics Review)

E-Prescribing: Becoming Mainstream Practice

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

report is intended to set the stage for rapid growth in the adoption and use of e-prescribing technology that can significantly improve medication safety while better managing medication costs and improving health outcomes related to medications. It provides an overview of the progress that has occurred, and challenges that still exist. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Behind the Curtain at Epic Systems

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Of course, there are ways in which Epic does resemble its competitors. It sells corporately designed clinical systems software, which it implements in patient care organizations; it has a team of internal software developers and a team of implementers; and it competes with other core-clinical companies for the same essential base of customers, in both the inpatient and outpatient spheres. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology

The Informatics Review — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Many people believe that health information technology (health IT) has the potential to transform the practice of health care by reducing costs and improving quality. In this paper, prepared at the request of the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examines the evidence on the costs and benefits of health information technology, possible barriers to a broader distribution and use of it in hospitals and clinicians’ offices, and possible options for the federal government to promote use of health IT. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Hospitals Using Telehealth to Provide Efficient ICU Care

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:35 +0100

The critical patients at both the Naval Hospital in Guam and the Army Hospital Yongsan in Korea can be stabilized under the direction of intensivists at Tripler. Dr. Benjamin Berg , an intensivist at the University of Hawaii's Telehealth Research Institute said, "patients can be treated and many times the need for air evacuation can be eliminated or delayed at a cost of more than $100,000. If they need to be, stabilized patients can be brought to Tripler on a regularly scheduled medical flight mission when they are in better condition to fly. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Just Looking: Consumer Use of the Internet to Manage Care

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:31 +0100

A recent Pew Internet and American Life survey showed that 80% of consumers search the Internet for health-related information. Yet their relationship to health information on the Web remains a passive one for most. Relatively few patients tap the Internet to manage their care, including scheduling appointments with their doctors, filling prescriptions, or using ratings information to make choices about their doctors or hospitals. (Source: The Informatics Review)

A New Concept for Medical Imaging Centered on Cellular Phone Technology

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:30 +0100

The goal of this study is to introduce and demonstrate the feasibility of a new concept in medical imaging that is centered on cellular phone technology and which may provide a solution to medical imaging in underserved areas. The new system replaces the conventional stand-alone medical imaging device with a new medical imaging system made of two independent components connected through cellular phone technology. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Simple accessories could turn mobile phones into useful medical devices

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:28 +0100

A research team led by Dan Fletcher from the University of California, Berkeley, which has developed a cheap attachment to turn the digital camera on many of today's mobile phones into a microscope. Called a CellScope, it can show individual white and red blood cells, which means that with the correct stain it can be used to identify the parasite that causes malaria. Moreover, by transmitting an image directly over the mobile network, the CellScope could greatly help with the remote diagnosis and monitoring of many illnesses. (Source: The Informatics Review)

The supporting player: second generation CDS goes beyond the basics to become intuitive

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:27 +0100

Ask most IT professionals for a definition of CDS and they're likely to talk about alerts or warnings related to drug allergies or drug-drug interactions. But new and emerging second-generation CDS goes far beyond alerts. It infers possible questions and needs before they are explicitly asked, and it combines reference information seamlessly with tools for taking action. It embraces order sets, guideline helpers, problem-based documentation templates, just-in-time flowsheets and data displays, and intelligent integrated reference information. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Medical Errors Cost U.S. $8.8 Billion, result in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:27 +0100

HealthGrades' analysis of 41 million Medicare patient records ( Full Report (Source: The Informatics Review)

Interface Terminologies: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Reality for Africa

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:26 +0100

Adoption of EHRs by physicians has been slow and the use of decision support has been minimal. Part of the difficulty lies in the challenges that users face in capturing structured clinical information. Reference and administrative terminologies have been in use for many years and provide a critical infrastructure to support reimbursement, decision-support and data analysis. The problem is that physicians do not think and work using reference terminologies. Interface terminologies bridge the gap between information that is in the physician's mind and information that can be interpreted by computer applications. (Source: The Informatics Review)

National Alliance for Health Information Technology (NAHIT) Releases HIT Definitions

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:26 +0100

Finally, NAHIT has released its final report (Source: The Informatics Review)

Practical Guide to Clinical Computing Systems: Design, Operations, and Infrastructure

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:25 +0100

The development of clinical computing systems is a rapidly growing priority area of health information technology, spurred in large measure by robust funding at the federal and state levels. It is widely recognized as one of the key components for reducing costs and improving the quality of care. At the same time as more and more hospitals and clinics are installing clinical computing systems, major issues related to design, operations, and infrastructure remain to be resolved. This book tackles these critical topics, including system selection, configuration, installation, user support, interface engines, and long-term operation. It also familiarizes the reader with regulatory requirements, budgetary issues, and other aspects of this new electronic age of healthcare de...

The Launch of Google Health

The Informatics Review — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:25:25 +0100

Google's Personal Health Record Application (Source: The Informatics Review)

Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease--non-clinicians and computerised algorithms together are as accurate as the best clinical practice

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:34 +0100

A combination of non-clinical researchers, a structured interview and a computerised algorithm is as effective at identifying AD as highly trained and skilled clinicians. (Source: The Informatics Review)

A Randomized Trial of the Effectiveness of On-Demand vs. Computer-Triggered Drug Decision-Support in Primary Care

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:34 +0100

Customization of computer-triggered alert systems is more useful in detecting and resolving prescribing problems than on-demand review but neither approach was effective in reducing prescribing problems. New strategies are needed to maximize the use of drug decision-support systems to reduce drug-related morbidity. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Detection and prevention of prescriptions with excessive doses in electronic prescribing systems

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:34 +0100

Our study revealed a remarkable number of prescriptions with doses exceeding approved limits (2.5 - 6.1%). Their prevention appears feasible but the choice of an appropriate database for MRTDs is essential, and differences between available information sources are large. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Best Practices for Laptop Management and Data Breach Prevention

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:33 +0100

In 2006, Allina lost a laptop containing sensitive data, and could not prove that the data on that laptop was encrypted. At that time, Allina could only locate approximately 65% of its laptop population. To address its laptop management challenges, Allina implemented Computrace®, an IT asset management, remote data delete and theft recovery solution. By 2007, the solution was deployed on all of the hospital network’s laptops and tablets. Since implementing Computrace, Allina Hospitals & Clinics has recovered 75% of stolen laptops, including a laptop that was tracked to Vietnam and back. (Source: The Informatics Review)

How Do You Amend Your Terms of Use? Hint: Don't Hide the Ball

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:32 +0100

The case, *Douglas v. U.S. District Court*, 495 F.3d 1062 (9th Cir. 2007), involved a change to terms of use for an AOL subsidiary providing long-distance telephone services. The subsidiary was acquired by Talk America, which changed the existing terms of use to add a number of new clauses, including a new arbitration provision and a waiver of the right to class actions. The plaintiff, a California resident, filed a class action on a number of claims arising from the change in terms. The defendant moved to compel arbitration based on the new arbitration provision. The District Court granted arbitration and the plaintiff appealed. On appeal the 9th Circuit held the arbitration clause was not enforceable. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Web guru targets malaria with social network site

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:32 +0100

Hadfield came up with the idea for www.MalariaEngage.org (Source: The Informatics Review)

AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:32 +0100

The Health Care Innovations Exchange is an AHRQ program designed to support health care professionals in sharing and adopting innovations that improve the delivery of care to patients. Explore this site to find innovative strategies and quality-related tools, learn how to improve your organization's ability to innovate and adopt new ideas, and interact with innovators and adopters. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Denis Protti, founder of the University of Victoria’s School of Health Information is honored

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:32 +0100

To recognize Protti’s commitment to improving health information systems and the quality and cost-effectiveness of patient care the health care systems management company Courtyard Group (Source: The Informatics Review)

Leapfrog CPOE Evaluation Tool

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:31 +0100

The CPOE Evaluation Tool is a remote test for use by hospitals to assess their compliance with The Leapfrog Group's CPOE patient safety standard. Leapfrog's CPOE standard requires that hospitals: assure that prescribers enter hospital medication orders via a computer system that includes decision support software to reduce prescribing errors; and, (Source: The Informatics Review)

SlidesOnline.org A resource for Powerpoint Slide Presentations

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:30 +0100

Slidesonline is a web resource designed to facilitate educational process of medical professionals. As you know slide presentations has become one of the key ways of facilitating education and a way of communicating the new scientific developments. Academic faculties and clinicians in practice from worldwide have contributed to the web portal. We would like to invite you to share and enhance the sharing and collaborative development of this educational resource. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Characterizing the Health Information Technology Workforce: Analysis from the HIMSS Analytics™ Database

The Informatics Review — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:11:29 +0100

The data in this report focus on IT professionals in health care settings. We extracted data from the HIMSS Analytics™ Database and extrapolated our findings to the United States (US) as a whole. We found the following results: There are approximately 108,390 IT professionals in health care the US. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Carefx announced the “go live” of its integrated, open systems platform for the Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange (LARHIX)

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:29 +0100

The integrated platform employs a federated model that offers clinicians secure, anywhere, anytime access to a portal-based view of patient-centric data housed in disparate applications across multiple hospitals. Fusion from Carefx provides the platform, architecture and aggregate view of real-time patient data. IBM Websphere provides the portal framework while user authentication and single sign-on, policy-based authorization, identity federation, and auditing of access is provided by CA’s Identity & Access Management suite of products. The architecture and data flow among the four technology partners ensures accurate patient identification based on an enterprise master person index (EMPI) supplied by Initiate Systems. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Executive support and financial incentives helped Partners HealthCare catapult EMR adoption to new heights

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:28 +0100

As of September 2007, an astonishing 86 percent of Partners’ primary care physicians were using an electronic medical record (EMR) system. What’s more, the Boston-based integrated health care provider aims to have 100 percent of those physicians onboard by year’s end. (Source: The Informatics Review)

The effect of computerized physician order entry with clinical decision support on the rates of adverse drug events: a systematic review

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:28 +0100

CPOE with CDS contributed to a statistically significant (P < or = .05) decrease in ADEs in 5 (50.0%) of the 10 studies. Four studies (40.0%) reported a nonstatistically significant reduction in ADE rates, and 1 study (10.0%) demonstrated no change in ADE rates. (Source: The Informatics Review)

New group forms to focus on interoperability

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:28 +0100

Open Health Tools' stated mission is to accelerate the implementation of electronic health information interoperability platforms, which improve patient quality of care, safety and access to electronic health records. The new tools will be available under an open source agreement so that anyone may use them to provision interoperable healthcare platforms to link clinics, hospitals, pharmacies and other points of care to make the healthcare system more efficient, OHT officials said. (Source: The Informatics Review)

An electronic prompt in dispensing software to promote clinical interventions by community pharmacists: a randomized controlled trial

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:27 +0100

Each time an oral antidiabetic agent was dispensed, a prompt was displayed reminding pharmacists to discuss the suitability of aspirin therapy in eligible patients with diabetes. All of the targeted clinical interventions were recorded in the prompt arm; no targeted interventions were recorded in the control group. The effect of the prompt decreased over the study period and was not maintained after prompt deactivation. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Health IT Bibliography

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:27 +0100

The Health IT Bibliography is a collection of carefully selected, high quality resources for health care and information technology (IT) stakeholders searching for information on how health IT can transform care delivery processes and improve quality, safety, and efficiency. (Source: The Informatics Review)

IT Visionary: G. Octo Barnett, M.D.

The Informatics Review — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:59:26 +0100

“I’m just a country doctor,” G. Octo Barnett, M.D., likes to say, and you might fall for the ruse if you discard the surroundings, titles and achievements of a lifetime of research, development and teaching. Still, it’s easy to see how Barnett’s Alabama accent and humble persona have served him in becoming one of the great pioneers during the past half century in the application of computers to health care. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Europe-wide project to detect drug reactions

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The project will involve a consortium of 18 leading European research institutions using clinical data from the electronic healthcare records (EHRs) of over 30m patients from European countries, including the Netherlands, Denmark, UK and Italy. ALERT will use a variety of text mining, epidemiological and other computational techniques to analyse the EHRs to detect ‘signals’ - combinations of drugs and suspected adverse events that warrant further investigation. (Source: The Informatics Review)

Long-Term Patterns of Online Evidence Retrieval Use in General Practice: A 12-Month Study

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

This was a prospective cohort study of 59 clinicians who had a computer with Internet access in their consulting room. On average clinicians conducted 9.9 searches per month in the first 2 months of the study. After this, usage dropped to 4.4 searches per GP in the third month and then levelled off to between 0.4 and 2.6 searches per GP per month. The majority of searches (79.2%) were conducted during practice hours on weekdays. The most frequent searches related to diagnosis (33.6%) and treatment (34.5%). GPs will use an online evidence retrieval system in routine practice; however, usage rates drop significantly after initial introduction of the system. (Source: The Informatics Review)

SquareLoop debuts HIPAA-compliant healthcare text messaging system

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The text messaging system, a new feature on SquareLoop's Mobile Alert Network, is HIPAA-compliant for regulations governing encryption of patients' electronic records and provides an application for secure mobile-originated text messages. (Source: The Informatics Review)

UCLA hospital bans cellphones, laptops

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

UCLA's neuropsychiatric hospital has banned all cellphones and laptop computers after a patient posted group photos of other patients on a social networking website. In a March 3 memo announcing the ban, Strouse wrote that he did not want to ask staff members to check whether cellphones or laptops had cameras, so he decided to ban them all. (Ed. Funny they didn't actually ban CAMERAS!) (Source: The Informatics Review)

Perlegen Gains Exclusive Access to Data on Four Million Patients to Enable Personalized Medicine

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Perlegen Sciences, Inc. announced today that it has formed a personalized medicine collaboration with an undisclosed electronic medical records (EMR) provider to identify and develop genetic markers to help predict how patients are likely to respond to specific medical treatments. Perlegen and its partner will mine data from the EMR’s growing information warehouse, which currently contains clinical treatment and outcome data on roughly four million patients, to enable the identification of subsets of patient records which meet highly specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Working via each patient’s individual care provider, Perlegen will then seek to obtain DNA from these highly-selected patients in a HIPAA-compliant, IRB-approved manner, to help physicians addr...

Quality Reporting in Primary Care: a Case Study at Partners HealthCare

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Understanding and improving clinical practice requires timely access to integrated views of data. Partners HealthCare is using quality reporting tools, integrated with EHR data, to modify clinical workflows and achieve better quality metrics. Jonathan Einbinder, MD, MPH - Corporate Manager for Quality Data Management at Partners will describe how Report Central, the solution developed at Partners and now being offered commercially by Recombinant Data Corp., is being used to support pay for performance, quality measurement, and clinical operations. (Source: The Informatics Review)

A Chronology of Data Breaches

The Informatics Review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The data breaches noted below have been reported because the personal information compromised includes data elements useful to identity thieves, such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, and driver's license numbers. Some breaches that do NOT expose such sensitive information have been included in order to underscore the variety and frequency of data breaches. However, we have not included the number of records involved in such breaches in the total because we want this compilation to reflect breaches that expose individuals to identity theft as well as breaches that qualify for disclosure under state laws. The breaches posted below include only those reported in the United States. (Ed. If you don't think it can happen in your organization just skip to the end o...

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