Insights
Precision Requires FHIR
Unfortunately like paper records, the failure to foster true interoperability as part of the Meaningful Use criteria used to guide EMR implementation left the industry with valuable data locked up in proprietary formats and incompatible data definitions.
New Standard Can FHIR Up Precision Medicine
Most medical treatments are designed to treat the average patient. This broad approach fails to account for the differences in genetics, physiology, environments, and lifestyles that greatly impact the effectiveness of therapies.
It’s Vegas Baby
As the nation monitors the back and forth between the FBI and Apple over unlocking the San Bernadino shooter’s iPhone, health IT professionals face their own major security and privacy challenges.
Get FHIRed Up
FHIR’s ability to isolate and describe data elements frees the data from the monolithic clinical database.
Rein in National Drug Spending
Drug costs now account for about 20% of all healthcare expenditures.
Putting Interoperability on FHIR
This lack of interoperability leads to incorrect diagnoses, ineffective therapeutic plans, and unnecessary and costly duplicate testing.
Predicting the Future: What to Look for in 2016
The role of a prognosticator is to accurately predict the future. We will see how well I have done when December rolls around.
How to Keep Score
Purchasing health information technology is obviously a risky and more difficult decision than choosing a bottle of red wine for dinner.
Choosing the “Good Jobs” Strategy
Provider organizations, for the first time, are now forced to choose between a good- or bad jobs strategy, with many leaders unaware of the available options.
Using Patient Acuity to Drive Healthflow
Creating a particular healthflow process requires stringing together various healthcare tasks, both clinical and administrative, to achieve a desired outcome in the most efficient manner possible.
Good Jobs or Bad Jobs
With great risk, many organizations are choosing a “bad jobs” strategy to address labor costs. Rather than retain experienced staff at higher wages, organizations take steps to encourage the departure of high-paid, experienced nurses to be replaced with less expensive and skilled substitutes.
Working Collaboratively to Enhance the Patient Experience
Delivering patient-centered care requires all professional involved in the care delivery to change what they do and how they do it.
Living and Working in Two Worlds
“It’s human nature to initially place “new” technologies into old behaviors since we have no other frame of reference.”
How to Keep Score
Although it is obvious that the difference between a 90-point and 89-point wine is insignificant, and the higher-scored wine may potentially be inferior depending on our intended use, the price difference to the consumer for the higher-scored wine can easily exceed $30.
Putting the Patient in CRM
Linking a care delivery episode to a patient’s perception of delivered services offers a view of how successfully an organization is satisfying the needs of patients.
Accurately Predicting the Future
While healthcare information technology bombards clinicians with ever increasing patient data, it generally fails to offer clinicians tools and solutions that help them utilize this data effectively.
Join the Fight to Defeat Cancer – 2015
Our 2015 is off to a good start. Helen, Davina, Art, Lynne, Mike, and Suzanne are doing well, Things are stabilizing while the medical community marches on discovering precision medicine approaches to cancer. Although we are losing sometimes, our record for winning...
Patient Driven Staffing Levels
On average, hospitals devote close to 70 percent of their budget to labor costs. Until robots replace humans in the delivery of patient care, selection of the proper skill mix and number of nurses remains a significant factor that determines cost in provider organizations.