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Cerner and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) have teamed to provide evidence-based medicine (EBM) embedded in the electronic medical record in a manner that is as exciting and encouraging a development in healthcare IT as anything I’ve ever seen — I repeat, as exciting as anything I’ve ever seen. Coming from a noted cynic and [...]

Though there are thousands of Meditech hospitals, only a handful are in the in the process of migrating from the Magic to 6.0 platform. Of course, those hospitals (and their CIOs) are being watched very closely by the Meditech community. One of those CIOs is Ed Ricks of Beaufort Memorial Hospital. Ricks is not only [...]

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Beaufort Memorial Hospital VP of IS & CIO Ed Ricks, Chapter 3 [9:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (165)

The field of biomedical is full of acronyms — CPOE, HIE, EMR, HL7 — that may be interesting to IT professionals, but merely connote longer days, multiple logins and frustration for clinicians. While people in “healthcare” love it concept of CPOE, physicians feel it slow them down and turns them from docs into secretaries. I recently gave a ground rounds to our large children’s hospital to explain how biomedical informatics is evolving. There is a plan in my mind of how CPOE, HIE, etc., can come together leveraging bar code medication administration and actionable alerts, to prevent beside safety issues and improve care. What will also emerge is quality reporting which can provide data for large scale research.

Implementing a few clinical systems isn’t going to get you applause at El Camino Hospital. That’s because the organization has “been there, done that,” implementing the first CPOE system some 40 years ago. Considering that tough crowd, the CIO role isn’t for newcomers, and Greg Walton is no newcomer. With 40 years in the business [...]

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/ El Camino Hospital CIO Greg Walton, Chapter 2 [13:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (80)

In what has become an interesting debate among CIOs — which to do first: CPOE or bedside bar-coded eMAR — smart individuals are coming down passionately on both sides. It’s also interesting that more than a few intrepid souls are counseling both should be done at the same time, though bandwidth constraints leave that group [...]

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Hennepin County Medical Center CIO Joanne Sunquist, Chapter 2 [11:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (53)

Over 75 percent of CIOs prefer to take on the massive challenge of implementing bedside-barcoded electronic medication administration records (eMAR) versus the equally massive task of converting to CPOE, according to the May healthsystemCIO.com SnapSurvey. But it doesn’t look like a weakness in the clinical decision support functionality of CPOE is to blame for the eMAR preference.

Health Affairs recently published an interesting article that may have gone unnoticed by many in the industry. The article, entitled “Mixed Results in the Safety Performance of Computerized Physician Order Entry”, was authored by Jane Metzger and Dr. David Classen of CSC, Dr. David Bates and Stuart Lipsitz, of Partners Healthcare, and Emily Welebob, a [...]

The FDA has been receiving a great deal of criticism from the clinical community about a variety of issues, but probably none is as contentious as the ongoing patient safety issues regarding harmful drug-drug interactions and drug-gene interactions, estimated by the Institute of Medicine to cause 250,000 deaths each year in the U.S.
The current generation [...]

As part of its Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program to promote innovation, ONC has awarded four organizations a total of $60 million — Mayo Clinic of Medicine, Harvard University, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Each institution’s research projects “will identify short-term and long-term solutions [...]

At HIMSS 2010, GE Healthcare IT tried to make a splash with the release of its Qualibria clinical knowledge management platform. While it’s unclear how the industry has received that new application, it is clear the vendor has one thing going for it — outstanding development partners in the likes of Intermountain Healthcare and the [...]

While meeting Stage 1 requirements of the Meaningful Use NPRM is a daunting challenge to most, a few are just about there. One such institution is University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics, a HIMSS Analytics Stage 7 facility. And though VP and CIO Mike Sauk has just a few odds and ends to deal with, [...]

Individualizing drug therapy based on pharmacogenomics (PGx) is considered by many academic researchers and clinical experts as the “next significant domain of clinical practice” (see the American College of Clinical Pharmacology’s very informative web-based tutorial, “The Future of Medicine: Pharmacogenomics”, http://user.accp1.org/index_new.html).
Drugs that are currently recommended for PGx testing by the FDA include specific medications that [...]

An HHS committee on Physician and Patient Education is developing new certification requirements for hospital physicians in genomics and pharmacogenomics.  Most hospital physicians, unless your specialty is oncology or obstetrics, are not familiar with anything but diseases inherited as classical Mendelien traits.  These new rules will require basic certification in both classical genetics and the [...]

The Ignite Institute is a new non-profit institute based in the National Capital region. Ignite is one of the first entities to fully integrate biomedical research, development, commercialization, all integrated into a hospital and healthcare network. In November 2009, Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine announced a $200 million commitment from the State and its partners to [...]

HIMSS Analytics has recognized two academic medical centers and the first rural hospital with its Stage 7 Award. The hospitals are: Citizens Memorial Hospital, Boliver, Mo.; Stanford Hospital & Clinics, Palo Alto, Calif.; and University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics, Madison, Wis. Stage 7 hospitals: deliver patient care without the use of paper charts; are [...]

Although not mentioned as one of the ‘Meaningful Use’ or ‘Initial Set of Standards and Certification Criteria’ for a Certified or Complete Electronic Health Record (see http://healthit.hhs.gov/blog/onc/), a new federal guideline to enable the use of personal genomic data in EHRs is being developed, according to sources within HHS.  The U.S. Veterans Affairs Department (VA), [...]

“The FDA considers both unwanted harmful effects and lack of efficacy to be adverse events. When considering candidates for pharmacogenomic relabeling, the FDA evaluates the severity of the adverse reaction, the degree to which genetics predicts the reaction, and the total number of individuals likely to be affected.  These factors are important in assessing the [...]

Gerald Higgins, PhD., MBA, MS, is not your typical CIO — that’s because Higgins is a chief innovation officer. Getting paid not to carry out EMR implementations or persuade physicians to embrace CPOE, Higgins is remunerated to “see what’s happening one or two hills over the horizon.” With a dizzying array of jobs and accomplishments [...]