The growing computerization, exchange and analysis of patient data offer the potential to improve the quality of care and reduce costs and medical errors, but those benefits will not be fully realized until privacy concerns are effectively addressed, according to a keynote address by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on Monday.
Relatively few U.S. hospitals—between 2 and 12 percent—use EHRs, according to a hospital IT adoption survey, conducted in conjunction with the American Hospital Association (AHA).
Under current law, spending on Medicaid is expected to substantially outpace the rate of growth in the U.S. economy over the next decade, according to a new annual report released Oct. 17 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
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Former Senator Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has accepted President-elect Barack Obama’s request to become the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The American Health Information Community (AHIC), a U.S. advisory committee established in 2005 to offer recommendations to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt to accelerate the adoption of healthcare IT, formally concluded its work this week.
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt this week announced the launch of a pilot project to test standards for e-prescribing at the third meeting of the American Health Information Community (AHIC).
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.
When officials at Howard Memorial Hospital in Nashville, Ark., started drawing up plans for a new facility that opened in July 2009, Cindy York, the hospital’s director of radiology, had to make some decisions.