Disaster Recovery Planning

I had the pleasure recently to present to a group of IT and business leaders on the topic of disaster recovery.  Based on some of the questions and feedback from the group, I thought I would add some comments on this topic on the blog.
First, a fair number of attendees commented that they were having [...]

Meaningful Use – Some Thoughts

HHS and CMS have released the regulations as promised to help define the phrase “meaningful use” that can be found within ARRA and will determine which health care professionals have been naughty and will receive no incentive payments from Uncle Sam, and those that have been nice and will.  The regulations themselves are long.  I [...]

Meaningful Use Gets A Definition

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services have released for public comment proposed rules that help, among other things, to define “meaningful use” in the context of electronic health records systems.  As astute readers will note, the federal government intends to start making incentive payments to qualifying [...]

From My Pen to Your e-Record

Vernon Huang, an anesthesiologist, and his company, Shareable Ink, have created a pen that both writes on paper, and transfers your writing to an electronic health record system through the use of a tiny camera in the pen that keeps track of what you are writing.  (see article here)  Given that a majority of health [...]

The Quest for Meaningful Use

Section 4101 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act creates an incentives program for Medicare providers (and a penalty program after 2015 with regards to reimbursement) for EHR adopters.  See this article from June 2009 on “meaningful use.”  See also an earlier blog post on ARRA incentives here.
One of the provisions for receiving incentive payments is [...]

Lost Data in the Cloud: How Sad

The headlines are ablaze because somebody over at the company, Danger, upgraded a storage array without making a backup, and voila – bye bye T-Mobile contact data.  (See the article on The Washington Post here)  Nik Cubrilovic’s point in his article is that data has a natural lifecycle, and you should be able to survive [...]

Health Policy & U.S. Healthcare

I usually do not write about health policy in the U.S. because it is somewhat outside of my area of expertise, but I have been thinking about the issues with health care reform this year and thought I would provide some analysis.  Watching the news, there seems to be a lot of resistance to health [...]

Reducing Health Care Inefficiencies

Can Health IT save us from ourselves?  See the Yahoo Article on another assessment of health care spending in the U.S. and how much money is wasted in service delivery costs.  According to this article, about 1/2 of the spending of the U.S. on health care is wasted in inefficient use of resources.  Now, if [...]

Understanding Health Information Exchange

I recently attended a break out session at the Centricity Healthcare User Group (CHUG) Fall meeting in Washington D.C. on health information exchange (HIE) in Oregon.  HIE is an information system that allows individual health care providers to exchange data with trusted partners about patients shared among the partners.  For example, clinical data about a [...]

The Future of Health IT

An important aspect of President Obama’s health plan (partly funded through this year’s stimulus package) is health technology.  As noted in a prior blog post, section 4101 of the ARRA provides qualifying health providers with Medicare reimbursement incentives for implementing Health IT that meets the statutory criteria set out in that section: meaningful use, participation [...]

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