Hospitals’ and health systems’ ongoing prioritization of health information technology (IT) tools continues to expand patients’ ability to engage with their providers, access their health data, and interact with the health care system electronically. It also allows providers to more readily communicate across settings of care, supporting greater care coordination. In a patient-centered, value-driven care model, the ability of patients to interact and engage with both their health data and the health care delivery system electronically is a key driver of high-quality health care. 

This is the first in a series of issue briefs highlighting data from the 2016 AHA Annual Survey Information Technology Supplement for community hospitals
collected November 2016 – April 2017.1 This brief focuses on the state of patient's access to and engagement with their health data through health IT. Results are grouped into three categories of activity: accessing health data, interacting with health data, and obtaining health care services.

Click below to read full brief.

Presenters: 

Milisa K Rizer, MD, MPH, FAAFP, FHIMSS, CPHIMS

Chief Clinical Information Officer Professor of Family Medicine, Nursing, & Biomedical Informatics

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
 

Thomas Bentley, RN, MS, FHIMSS, CPHIMS, CHCIO 

Deputy CIO

Objectives: 

• Identify the top three factors that improve user efficiency and satisfaction.
• Identify the top tools that can be used to improve the amount of time spent in documentation activities. 
• Identify the two areas of greatest frustration of users of EMRs.
• Identify one area where your staff can be used to help with provider efficiency.
• Identify one place where you can be involved with improving the EMR in your hospital or clinic. 

Click below to view full presentation!

Many healthcare provider organizations recognize that implementing effective data governance is critical to meet increasing demand for information to support valuebased care and population health. However, they often find that achieving success in data governance is easier said than done. What is it about healthcare that makes data governance so challenging? What can organizations do to remove these barriers to consistent, timely, actionable information?

Click below to read more.

We live in a world that’s connected wirelessly with almost as many cellular phone subscriptions as there are people on the planet. According to the International Telecommunication Union, there were almost 6 billion mobile phones in use worldwide in late 2011.1 The ubiquity of mobile technology offers tremendous opportunities for the healthcare industry to address one of the most pressing global challenges: making healthcare more accessible, faster, better and cheaper.
Unlike many other forms of communication, such as the Internet, mobile health (mHealth) will likely have a greater effect on how care is delivered for three reasons:

• Mobile devices are ubiquitous and personal;

• Competition will continue to drive lower pricing and increase functionality; and

• Mobility by its very nature implies that users are always part of a network, which radically increases the variety, velocity, volume and value of information they send and receive.

Click below to read the full study.

According to Accenture analysis, when combined, key clinical health AI applications can potentially create $150 billion in annual savings for the United States healthcare economy by 2026.

At hyper-speed, AI is re-wiring our modern conception of healthcare delivery. AI in health represents a collection of multiple technologies enabling machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn1, so they can perform administrative and clinical healthcare functions.

Unlike legacy technologies that are only algorithms / tools that complement a human, health AI today can truly augment human activity—taking over tasks that range from medical imaging to risk analysis to diagnosing health conditions.

15 minutes. That’s how long your doctor has to see you, assess your complaint, diagnose a solution and see you out the door – hopefully on the pathway back to wellness.
This isn’t much time, when you consider the wealth of information that he or she has to consider. Your patient record, the medical research relevant to your complaint, the answers about your condition that you provide, the basic examination (“say aaaaaaah”) that is carried out.

So how will your doctor cope when faced with the tsunami of healthcare information that will occur when it is routine for your patient record to include data about your genome, your microbiome (bugs in your body) and your fitness regime?

Your electronic health record is fast becoming the most powerful tool in the medical toolkit. All the information will be stored in the cloud. It will have to be because the size of the electronic file containing your complete patient record is estimated to be as much as six terabytes. That’s a quarter of the whole of Wikipedia (24Tbs)!

A data file that large is required to enable the practice of precision medicine. This a new revolution in healthcare. It is the ability to target healthcare treatment specifically for an individual.

In addition to improving health outcomes, precision medicine will save vital health dollars because it is enabled by unique data insights that lead to more targeted treatments.

Click on the link below to view the entire presentation.

Changing the Course of the Opioid Epidemic: The Power and Promise of Proven Technology - Best Practices

Surescripts is the nation’s largest health information network, transmitting nearly 13.7 billion secure health data transactions annually, including nearly 4.8 million e-prescriptions each and every day. The Surescripts Network AllianceTM connects virtually all electronic health record (EHR) vendors, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), pharmacies and clinicians, plus an increasing number of health plans, long-term and postacute care organizations and specialty pharmacy organizations. This cross-market experience gives us a unique perspective on the role that technology can play in providing actionable intelligence to help reduce opioid abuse while ensuring that patients receive quality care and clinically appropriate medications. 

We all know the bad news. The opioid epidemic is ravaging our communities from coast to coast— and if we are serious about stopping it, all sectors of society must step up. The good news is that health data and information technology exist today that can help healthcare practitioners better navigate the crisis. Here are five ways technology can help:

Best Practices

• EPCS and CancelRx - These promote effectively delivered pain relief while preventing potential abuse and patient harm by allowing tracking and secure delivery coupled with a way for prescribers to cancel an opiate prescription
• Medication History - Having readily available data promotes better informed decisions
• Clinical History - Knowing past care also promotes better informed decisions and allows suspect care patterns to be detected
• Clinical Direct Messaging - This promotes secure communications between healthcare practitioners who are concerned about potential addiction
• Insights for Medication Adherence - Real-time messages about patient medication habits can be given at the point of care

The full position paper can be viewed below.  

Abstract

Importance: Patients with cancer who die soon after starting chemotherapy incur costs of treatment without the benefits. Accurately predicting mortality risk before administering chemotherapy is important, but few patient data–driven tools exist.

Objective: To create and validate a machine learning model that predicts mortality in a general oncology cohort starting new chemotherapy, using only data available before the first day of treatment.
 

Blockchain Technology for Healthcare: Facilitating the Transition to Patient-Driven Interoperability

Authors William J. Gorgon and Christian Catalini review blockchain technology as a way to improve patient centered interoperability.  Interoperability in healthcare has traditionally been focused around data exchange between business entities, for example, different hospital systems. However, there has been a recent push towards patient-driven interoperability, in which health data exchange is patient-mediated and patient-driven. Patient-centered interoperability, however, brings with it new challenges and requirements around security and privacy, technology, incentives, and governance that must be addressed for this type of data sharing to succeed at scale. This paper looks at how blockchain technology might facilitate this transition through five mechanisms: (1) digital access rules,(2) data aggregation, (3) data liquidity, (4) patient identity, and (5) data immutability. This review then look at barriers to blockchain-enabled patient-driven interoperability, specifically clinical data transaction volume, privacy and security, patient engagement, and incentives. It concludes by noting that while patient-driving interoperability is an exciting trend in healthcare, given these challenges, it remains to be seen whether blockchain can facilitate the transition from institution-centric to patient-centric data sharing.

The full review can be accessed below.  
 

E-Prescribing as a Tool to Fight the Opioid Epidemic

Surescripts shares the results of a new initiative in Maine requiring electronic prescribing for opioids.  Use of e-prescribing technology (E-Prescribing for Controlled Substances or EPCS) has greatly increased, demonstrating how legislation can be an important tool for driving technology adoption.  Various benefits of EPCS in regards to the opioid crisis are highlighted.  Tracking prescription helps reveal patterns of use amongst patients and leniency amongst providers.  Security is enhanced by reducing fraud associated with paper or oral prescriptions.  The article emphasizes that EPCS is simply one tool in what is likely to ultimately be a multi-pronged solution to the opioid crisis. 

The full article can be viewed here