Medical Records May Go Online
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Health industry, tech firms, government agencies might collaborate to \
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The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.U.S. healthcare providers continue to make errors that hurt tens of thousands of patients each year, and e-health records could prevent many of those problems, said Dr. Alan Lotvin, senior vice president of oncology for Magellan Health Services Inc. The U.S. healthcare system is failing patients &quot;despite the fact we have the knowledge and the technology to really do a much, much better job.&quot;About 3.5 percent of all U.S. hospital stays have a drug error associated with them, leading to more than 100,000 significant medical problems and nearly 30,000 deaths each year, said Lotvin, speaking at an e-health forum sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Health IT Now Coalition.U.S. residents should have a &quot;sense of outrage&quot; when confronted with these prescription errors, which would largely be prevented with e-health records, Lotvin said. He compared the U.S. health-care system&#39;s record to Amazon.com, which received 2,000 orders per minute during the 2005 holiday shopping season.&quot;I use Amazon a lot -- I have never gotten the wrong book,&quot; he said. &quot;We can&#39;t seem to get the pills from the pharmacy in the basement to Mrs. Smith in room 631 correctly. This is not acceptable.&quot;Lotvin called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would mandate that healthcare providers report their error rates. He also called for a law that would require healthcare providers that have made mistakes on a patient to pay for any subsequent care required. Many medical errors can result in long hospital stays or expensive procedures, and in many cases, patients or their insurance providers pay, he said.&quot;You break it, you fix it,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s a very simple concept. It&#39;s been around in china shops for years.&quot;In addition, the ITIF, in a report released Friday, recommended several steps Congress could take to encourage the adoption of e-health records:*&#160;Congress should pass legislation that supports the adoption of national health data standards. The report mentioned two bills that provide funding and organization at a national level, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act in the Senate, and the Promoting Health Information Technology Act in the House of Representatives.*&#160;Congress should pass a bill to support the creation of health record data banks, data centers where individual patients could store and control their health data. The Independent Health Record Trust Act in the House would regulate data bank operators, prohibiting them from charging fees to health-care providers for accessing or updating an e-health record upon permission of the patient.*&#160;The U.S. government should lead by example by covering the monthly access fees at health record data banks for patients covered by government-funded programs such as Medicare and the State Children&#39;s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).*&#160;Congress should allow patients free access to e-health records held by healthcare providers. Currently, medical privacy laws allow patients to get paper copies of their medical records, but healthcare providers can charge fees for copying and mailing those records. Congress should phase out those fees, a measure that would encourage doctors to move to electronic records, ITIF said.Currently, only about 25 percent of U.S. doctors use e-health records, and only about 10 percent of them have e-health records fully integrated into their practices, ITIF said. But in Sweden, 90 percent of doctors use e-health records, and in Denmark, 88 percent do, according to the ITIF.That shows that adoption in the U.S. is a matter of the right policies and incentives, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF&#39;s president. &quot;This is not rocket science,&quot; he said.More people need to push Congress to create incentives for e-health records, added Nancy Johnson, a former U.S. representative and co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition.&quot;Why, when we know this would help so much, are we not doing it?&quot; Johnson said. &quot;We know how to deliver a higher quality of care, and we&#39;re not doing it.&quot;
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The U.S. needs new medical privacy rules as the country moves toward greater use of IT to store health records, a group of health-care experts said Wednesday.
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The revised &quot;Medical checkup standards for Civil servants enrollment (trial)&#39;&#39; has been published online. Compared with the original one there are great amendments for the revised one.
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The American Medical Association is working with a start-up company that encourages doctors to swap ideas online and charges investment firms to view postings that could serve as tip-offs to drug side effects and other market-moving medical trends.
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NEW YORK  - With health officials now  urging Americans to dig into their family health history,  experts advise taking advantage of free Internet tools -- and  upcoming holiday gatherings -- to get started on the project.
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Microsoft launched a free, ad-supported online health portal called HealthVault yesterday that allows people to upload their medical records to the Web and share the information with doctors.
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Blog: Stanford and Harvard researchers find that electronic records aren't helping to improve outpatient medical care.
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Within five years, physicians could be able to access patients&#39; records from any hospital or doctors&#39; office in the state under a new ``eHealth&#39;&#39; initiative financed with an infusion
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According to new British study, patients who use the internet to find out information about chronic disease rather than listening to their doctor could be putting their health at risk.
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I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospitalâs patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendorâs normal Web site was down, and they were trying to come up with an emergency fix.
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(InfoWorld) - As U.S. hospital emergency departments struggle under the weight of overcrowding, lack of staff and ever-increasing government health-care regulations, many are finding relief through IT systems. After The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York implemented an emergency department information system, it went from 5,000 lost or illegible charts in 2003 to none in 2005, a year after it moved from paper to electronic charts. Across the country at the Daughters of Charity Health System in California, revenue rose $40 million across six emergency departments because of better billing processes after an electronic system was put in place. Such impressive returns on investment can be found at hospitals nationwide at the same time that the federal government is pushing health-care providers to move to electronic records and various agencies and industry groups release report after report about emergency department overcrowding and other issues. The U.S. has almost 4,000 hospital emergency departments, or EDs, and many of those are at "critical capacity" with patient visits overall in excess of 107 million per year, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians. Add to that the emphasis on disaster response by emergency departments and the need to track biohazards and threats from epidemics and automation becomes all the more imperative. "By automating processes, the time a physician spends looking for charts, tracking down laboratory results, mobilizing staff, and repeatedly recording information that someone else already recorded can be dramatically reduced," ACEP says on its Web site. "Information technology is changing the way today's emergency departments operate by speeding the flow of patients through bottlenecks, eliminating redundant patient records, sharing complete medical records, and allowing laboratory tests and films to be viewed instantly and simultaneously at multiple sites." Computerizing an emergency department can further decrease costs while increasing revenue and improving care and efficiency, ACEP says. Legal liability can be decreased, labor costs might drop and far fewer patients might give up and leave without being seen because wait times are too long or because they simply get lost in the paper trail. "I think that our patients get better care," says Dr. Kevin Baumlin, the director of informatics for the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai. "That's the real point of all of this. It's about taking care of patients, not about making money." The Mount Sinai ED sees anywhere from 180 to 320 patients on any given day. Initially, getting the funding for an automated emergency department system was a challenge, Baumlin says. The hospital spent $150,000 on workstations and spends $28,000 per year on maintenance. A little less than $300,000 a year goes for application lease payments support and actual upkeep. The hospital went with a software system from Picis Inc., based in Wakefield, Massachusetts. It signed its contract for that system in August 2003 and then went live with triage tracking and discharge instructions components of the software system in November of that year. A measured rollout of other software tools followed until the last phase for scanning and an interface to the billing application went live in June 2004. Getting the staff to accept the new system was a hard sell, but Baumlin set about doing that in a "fairly methodical way," with all 28 ED doctors and 80 nurses invited to participate in evaluating vendors. He found the "rule of thirds" was in force, with one-third liking the idea of a thorough IT system, one-third ambivalent to it and one-third not keen on it. One goal Baumlin set, and achieved, was making sure there were enough computers to go around so that even at peak times staff who need a workstation have access to one. The ED has 143 computers, amounting to one for each doctor, nurse, support staffer, and consultant -- plus 10. "I did not want any provider who needed a workstation waiting for a workstation. In my world if you have to wait more than three seconds you're done, you're on to another task," he says. During peak times, the emergency department will triage up to 20 patients an hour. Another benefit has been the ability to work with other sites using Picis software to share data sets and study information on crowding, how rapidly patients who say they are in pain are cared for when they arrive at an ED during a crowded time, as well as to design and share research. "It's a wonderful research tool," Baumlin says. He can also better respond to the needs of regulators and federal mandates that require chart analyses and metric tracking. Without the electronic system, "you'd have to actually hire FTEs [full-time equivalent employees] to do chart reviews and pull them out in real time. That's just nuts. ... I can sit here and pull up the number of pneumonia diagnoses we had last month. In two minutes." Besides working with the software, he continues to evaluate hardware, asking if laptops or handhelds will work better, for instance. Laptops don't work so well in small spaces and handhelds have small screens. And patients, particularly those in emergency care, "want to talk to us -- they don't want to talk to the computer in between us. ... The patients really want that three-minute encounter to just be you and them. As a physician, I'd rather just go touch the patient, hold their hand, say hello, find out what it is I need to do and then do the documentation later." Doctors at Daughters of Charity's five hospitals and one skilled nursing facility are engaged in the same balancing act. At the health-care system's St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, California, 70 percent to 80 percent of the ED staff document patient care on laptops that they roll on carts or carry to bedsides, says Dr. Mike Stephen, the medical director of emergency services. He does about half of his documentation at the bedside and the other half after he has finished talking to the patient. The 14 ED doctors and other staff at St. Francis needed about six to eight months to get comfortable with the new system, also from Picis, with deployment beginning in January 2004. "From the corporate perspective, we were looking at really improving patient satisfaction and being able to document and show improved patient care," says Richard Hutsell, vice president and chief information officer of the health system, based in Los Altos Hills. "The vast majority of our hospitals are located in some of the more economically challenged areas" of the state. The decision was made to implement the automated system first in the emergency departments and then roll it out through the rest of the hospitals. "My view is that the ED is the window to the community and I wanted to make that as efficient as possible," he says. The system also lets staff track bed capacity, so they know when they're full up and also allows for keeping tabs on peak times, which helps EDs to make better decisions about when to have more staff on hand. The total cost to implement the system to date has been about $4 million for all facilities, but that has already been recouped because of the improved billing process. An average hospital will find the implementation of such a system pays off in five to eight months after installation because of such revenue increases, said Todd Cozzens, CEO, president and vice chairman of Picis. He turns around the question of the expense of implementing an automated system of software tools and applications to ask, "What's it cost to not do something?"
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Privacy advocates are concerned that an implantable microchip designed to help doctors tap into a patient's medical records could undermine confidentiality or could even be used to track the patient's movements.
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Having easy access to a doctor's e-mail address appears to increase patient communication.
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Investigators say computer security flaws could lead to the disclosure of medical information on people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.
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(Source: AT&T)  The federal government has awarded more than $139 million to help healthcare providers move medical records more easily within a geographic region. The hope is that Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) will be the building blocks of a National Health Information Network.
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Itâs news that will have health obsessives breaking out in a sweat: browsing medical websites can be bad for you, a new study claimed today.