Chris Nowakoski's wife died in Wisconsin during what should have been a routine procedure on her pacemaker. Danny Long's wife in North Carolina suffered catastrophic neurological injury during a surgery to relieve numbness in her extremities. A doctor perforated the colon and esophagus of Deirdre Gilbert's daughter in Texas, then operated on her after she was dead. In each case, the families still don't know the full story of what happened to their loved ones because of a lack of documentation and an inability to pursue a costly lawsuit. They are relatives of an estimated 400,000 a year people who die in the United States of preventable medical errors, the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.
There are many health IT experts out there who believe that, because of the potential value the Internet of Things (IoT) can offer, healthcare organizations should definitely plan to implement IoT-based services. This viewpoint was abundantly clear during SearchHealthIT's inaugural #chatHIT tweet chat, in which participants expressed their strong beliefs that healthcare needs to adopt IoT and discussed the many benefits IoT provides to patients as well as doctors. But for others, a strong IoT business case in healthcare is missing, bumping it down low on the priority list. While Werder said that IoT in healthcare has relevancy, he questioned the financial benefits.
For many years, acute care hospitals participating in CMS' Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program (IQR) have been using manual chart abstraction to generate required quality data. But CMS' 2016 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) final rule has added a new mandate to require hospitals to report some electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) via an electronic submission method in 2016. While CMS has provided an option for eCQM reporting for four years, the majority of hospitals have not chosen to use the option because it poses many challenges, such as technical complexities and significant resource needs.
A few weeks ago, a New Zealand doctor donned Google Glass and beamed video of an aortic surgery to the U.S. offices of medical device maker Endologix Inc. The test demonstrated the potential power of a technology that famously flopped with consumers but is quickly becoming a go-to gadget for the medical world. Google is expected to roll out a new version of Glass in the coming months, and medical device makers, hospitals and family doctors are eagerly anticipating improvements. These will probably include an adjustable eyepiece, longer-lasting battery and water-resistant properties, according to people familiar with the project.
Several U.S. health care organizations recently have disclosed data breaches, potentially affecting thousands of individuals. On Monday, the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing announced the protected health information of individuals from 1,622 households might have been compromised after a technical glitch sent letters to the wrong recipients, Clinical Innovation & Technology reports. According to Health Data Management, the glitch occurred when Deloitte -- under a contract to handle mailings with the Colorado Office of Information Technology -- updated the state's benefits management system.
We're all aware that our business and social lives can be hijacked electronically. The University of Arizona is leading national efforts to make sure human medical devices are safe from remote tampering. We regularly hear reports of people's personal information being stolen, and of bank and social media accounts being hacked. While it sounds like a plot line from a medical or crime drama, the potential for medjacking, or malicious medical device hacking, is real. The UA is involved in creating strategies to protect connected devices such as intravenous drug pumps and pacemakers from tampering.