Health Care Insights | Weekly Round Up

Health Care Insights brings you your weekly healthcare round up. Below you will find relevant articles on key industry topics that we thought our readers would benefit from - enjoy.


 Top Stories:

4 Principles Guiding Healthcare’s Age of Enlightenment
There are many emerging themes and movements driving healthcare innovation and evolution, which is comparable to the Age of Enlightenment with its new discoveries and ways of solving problems.

“There’s no mystery, no magic… you can access all patient data at the bedside“
 Katleen Smedts, Project Manager ICT at University Hospital Antwerp (UZA) and Bernard Algayres, GM Radiology IT EMEA, GE Healthcare, discuss how vendor neutral archiving can improve access to patient data, facilitate clinical collaboration and drive up quality of care.

Experts say Texas needs more than specialized centers to fight Ebola
Dr. Thomas Geisbert, a scientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was at a conference in Germany in 2000 when he and a Canadian collaborator decided to work together on a vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus.

Avalere Analysis: Medicaid Managed Care Enrollment Set to Grow by 13.5 Million
A new analysis from Avalere Health projects that enrollment of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) beneficiaries in managed care – i.e., state payment of private companies to provide benefits – will increase by 13.5 million individuals from 2013 to 2016.

CMS launches $840M effort to spur medical practice ‘transformation’
The effort, called the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative, is a first-of-its kind effort from the public sector and large-scale investment dedicated solely to sharing information among physicians. CMS estimates that only about 185,000 of the country’s doctors take part in similar programs that strive to transform industry practices through the use of collaboration and technology.

Relaunched health IT company offers MDs chronic condition patient data between visits
A health IT company that previously provided migraine patient data to pharmaceutical companies, Ubiqi Health, has relaunched as Klio Health. The new business, which CEO Jacqueline Thong started earlier this year,  aggregates data from patients with chronic conditions with the goal of assessing effectiveness of treatment between visits through a portal.


Have a great weekend!

AHRQ Takes a Look at E-Prescribing Issues

According tot his post on FierceHealthIT the AHRQ wants to know how many medical practices have successfully implemented functional e-prescribing systems and what factors hurt and help adoption.

The biggest problem that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has encountered is that most e-prescribing systems do not have the same features, and so rolling out with a national system might be difficult. Also, pharmacies are having trouble with e-prescribing software and integrating it into workflow. Because of this, the AHRQ is planning to conduct a 2 year survey which will include physicians, medical directors, IT administrators, pharmacists and other relevant staff members at 110 organizations as participants.

Intel and General Electric Plan to Add More Connectivity Options to Intel Health Guide

According to this article in eWeek Intel and General Electric will invest roughly $250 million over the course of the next five years to develop and improve IT technologies in the Intel Health Guide to better aid linking patients to their physicians and caregivers.

The improved system will allow patients to directly connect with their physicians via high-speed broadband and residential phone services. Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of the Intel Digital Health Group mentions, "We believe that deploying technology in the home can help pave the way for a more personalized, cost-effective health care system and we will continue to innovate and develop products that achieve this."

It will be interesting to see how new technology and improvements to the IT infrastructure will pan out over the next couple of years.

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