Practice Technology

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new online tool that highlights and compares national, regional, state, and local community data on the use of preventive services among adults aged 50 to 64 years in an effort to help healthcare professionals and others increase knowledge and use of preventive care services.

Regional health information organizations must provide leadership and financial incentives if more comprehensive, community-wide use of health information exchange is to occur, according to research recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Physicians who practice at facilities at which electronic health record systems are used have a high prevalence of computer-associated upper extremity musculoskeletal symptoms, according to research recently published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Americans remain concerned about the privacy of their medical records, according to the results of a new study released by the California HealthCare Foundation.

Home telemonitoring plus active medication management by a nurse practitioner resulted in greater reductions in A1C than did a monthly care coordination telephone call in patients with type 2 diabetes in a study reported in the March issue of Diabetes Care.

Your patients with chronic disease may use the Internet less than your other patients and also may remain more strongly connected to you and other offline sources of medical assistance, including friends, family, and books, compared with your other patients.

A new white paper released by the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology highlights five options and recommends additional research in relation to consumer consent possibilities for electronic health information exchange.

Remote monitoring reduced the median time to clinical decision compared with standard in-office follow-up for patients with cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, according to results of the prospective Clinical Evaluation of Remote Notification to Reduce Time to Clinical Decision trial recently released during the American College of Cardiology annual meeting.

The United States ranks in the bottom half among comparable countries in almost every metric used to measure the adoption of health information technology, according to the National Broadband Plan recently delivered to Congress by the Federal Communications Commission.

The physician leader of a growing ob-gyn practice reported that electronic health records have become a mandatory recruiting tool to land physicians out of residency.

The state of Louisiana has launched a new website, www.healthfinderla.gov, in an effort to give residents easy access to detailed, accurate information on how to live more healthful lives.

The use of at-home medical devices to connect doctors and patients via the Internet can help patients and their physicians work together more efficiently to manage some chronic conditions, according to results of a pilot project that paired the Cleveland Clinic?s electronic health records (EHR) system with Microsoft?s online HealthVault service.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded more than $2.4 million to five grantee teams to test whether and how information?such as the stress levels of caregivers of premature infants and medication-taking routines of senior citizens at risk of cognitive decline ? can be collected, interpreted, and acted on by clinicians and patients in real-world clinical settings.

Twenty-five percent of all office-based prescribers now use electronic prescribing, according to a new report by e-prescribing network Surescripts.

The electronic health record adoption rate in medical offices has climbed 3.2 percent since last year to 36.1 percent.

The HITECH Act was swept into law as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It affects many aspects of your HIPAA compliance and means increased enforcement and harsher penalties for violators. Here's what you need to know.

It's critical that developers or purchasers of electronic medical records systems consider more than billing function.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius March 2 proposed a two-part approach for establishing a certification program to test and certify electronic health record systems.

Physicians? overall perceptions of electronic health record systems are positive, according to two recent surveys that gauged physician usage and plans for the systems.

The concept of ?meaningful use,? together with an improving economy, appears to be spurring an increase in healthcare information technology spending, suggest recently released results of the 21st annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Leadership Survey.

To close the broadband connectivity gap that exists among healthcare practices, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing transforming its Rural Health Care Program, which is authorized to spend $400 million per year, to help healthcare delivery locations meaningfully use health information technology.

"Healthcare information technology is the instrument that will transform healthcare . . . [and] improve quality, safety, access, and cost-efficiency," said Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society board chairman, March 1 in his opening remarks at the HIMSS annual conference in Atlanta.

Ascension Health will offer online and Web camera visits to patients beginning in the spring.

Twenty percent of physicians plan to purchase an iPad within the year, according to responses from a survey by Epocrates shortly after Apple announced the device.

Automated telephone outreach with speech recognition is not an effective way to increase the incidence of colorectal cancer screening, according to a study of 80,000 health plan members published in the February 8 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Medical practice leaders continue to experience administrative challenges reporting data for Medicare?s Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, according to results of a survey recently released by the Medical Group Management Association. Specifically, respondents reported difficulty accessing the feedback reports and said that the presentation of information in the reports was not satisfactory.

More than 150 health information technology systems from 104 participating companies and organizations, including vendors, health information exchanges, government agencies, and open-source development groups, were tested recently at IHE North America?s annual Connectathon. Results are posted here.

Nearly 44 percent of office-based physicians reported using all or partial electronic health record systems in practice.

Dermatologists and oncologists are the physician specialist groups most likely to communicate with patients online, according to the latest physician report, "Physicians in 2012: The Outlook on Health Information Technology," from pharmaceutical and healthcare market research company Manhattan Research.

Two academic medical centers and one rural hospital will be recognized with Stage 7 awards, representing attainment of the highest level of electronic health record adoption as judged by HIMSS Analytics, at the 2010 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual meeting in March in Atlanta.