Healthcare information technology Archives

New Standard Can FHIR Up Precision Medicine

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Mar 15, 2016 | Archives

On February 25th President Obama at the White House celebrated the one year anniversary of his announcement of the Precision Medicine Initiative. The Initiative, first announced in the President’s State of the Union Address last year, initially invested $215 million...

Get FHIRed Up

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Feb 10, 2016 | Archives

Although I’m a physician, not a technology expert, I’m jazzed about the FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) specification. Organizations struggle to share patient information with each other due to data structure and definition incompatibilities. This...

Rein in National Drug Spending

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Feb 5, 2016 | Healthcare Policy

Although overall healthcare cost inflation remains relatively small, healthcare spending just passed 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product at the end of 2015. Because of the size of healthcare as a component of the nation’s expenditures, this continued...

Putting Interoperability on FHIR

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Jan 27, 2016 | Healthcare IT

The release of the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC) Connecting Health and Care for the Nation marks a dramatic shift from focus on Meaningful Use to incenting all stakeholders to fix our interoperability problem. While the HITECH act moved the nation’s...

Predicting the Future: What to Look for in 2016

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Jan 20, 2016 | Archives

The role of a prognosticator is to accurately predict the future. Although many have tried to predict the trend of the stock market, an imminent earthquake, or even the end of the world, soothsayers rarely get their predictions correct. That said, they are very...