If you have gone online recently to pay a hospital bill, request a prescription refill, or look at lab results, you are among the minority of people across the U.S. using technology to monitor your health. Moving patient health records from a paper-based system to an electronic one has long been a dream and a goal of doctors, hospital administrators and policymakers, but the effort has been anything but seamless, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. "If an ATM puts somebody else's money in your account, nobody dies," said Chuck Christian, board chair at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. "But if we mess something up, it could very well impact someone's life."
As many providers struggle to comply with the next stage of the Meaningful Use program, they are also trying to prepare for another mandated electronic reporting requirement: Medicare's Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).
A new 3D printing technique developed at Carnegie Mellon will allow the printing of soft living tissue like that of our own organs. The most amazing part is that Carnegie Mellon has done this with off-the-shelf 3D printers that cost about $1,000. Up until now, 3D printing was mostly done using rigid materials like plastics, resins, and metal. Until this process, 3D printing of soft tissue required special artificial frameworks or lattices to hold together the organs. Otherwise, if you try to print softer materials in air, they cannot support their own weight as you add layers of material.
With all of the comments made about Millennials these days – their unbreakable addiction to technology; the high value they place on meaningful, informed, predictive services; their demand for flexibility and personalized care – it seems almost redundant to require medical school students to devote extra time to healthcare big data analytics. After all, these students have been swimming through a deeply interconnected world of smartphones, tablets, Google searches, and ubiquitous internet access before the "Internet of Things" was just a twinkle in a buzzword creator's eye. Millennials pick up new computer skills with an almost eerie rapidity, leaving less tech-savvy users in the dust as they fly through menu options and complete tasks with a minimum of fuss.
Hospitals are continuing to make big investments in technology as they recognize the need to effectively manage population health, according to C-suite execs polled for Premier's Fall 2015 Economic Outlook survey. More than 64 percent of respondents reported an increase to capital budgets this year, reflecting the need for investments in advanced technology to meet value-based care goals. In fact, 39 percent of these respondents increased their budgets by at least 10 percent. The biggest investment for hospital expenditures is on health information technology, according to 72.2 percent of respondents to the survey.