With the calendar counting down toward Oct. 1, 2015, the Workgroup for Data Interchange on Monday circulated its latest readiness survey results, and, though the findings were positive among large health systems, some concern remains. The upshot: 90 percent of hospitals, 75 percent of health plans have begun or completed external testing, and 75 percent of IT vendors have fully completed product development. Bad news: Fewer than half of medical practices responded that they are would be ready for the switch. "In light of our most recent findings, we are hopeful that industry leaders take the necessary steps to help ensure that the transition to ICD-10 is completed with minimal disruption to the healthcare industry," WEDI Chair Jean P. Narcisi said in a statement.
The federal government says health care facilities should stop using Hospira's Symbiq medication infusion pump because of its vulnerability to hacking. The Food and Drug Administration said Friday it's the first time it has warned caregivers to stop using a product because of a cybersecurity risk. It comes at a time of rising concerns about breaches of products that connect to the Internet. A week ago, automaker Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles because of a flaw that made them vulnerable to hackers. The FDA says the computerized pumps could be accessed remotely through a hospital's network, but it doesn't know of any cases where that has happened.
CVS Health (CVS) and IBM say they've formed a partnership designed to better predict deteriorating health of the pharmacy giant's customers through predictive analytics. IBM's Watson, the computer giant's artificial intelligence system, hopes to bring better care coordination and more personalized care to CVS customers and employer clients. The effort will better identify patients who may be at risk for bad health outcomes, the companies say. Predictive analytics and IBM Watson's "cognitive computing" are part of an evolving and growing trend in the health care industry.
In the bucolic Upper Connecticut River Valley in New Hampshire an academic medical center is working to rewrite the book on healthcare with the help of predictive analytics, wearable devices and the cloud. "It's important to think about healthcare being on the precipice of what I think of as an industrial revolution," says Dr. Jim Weinstein, president and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System, a nonprofit academic health system that serves a patient population of 1.2 million people in New England. "The current system is not sustainable. It costs too much, is too diffuse and not efficient."
When a person becomes a patient in a hospital, a team forms around them. Keeping that team informed and connected to other specialists, caregivers, and teams is a constant challenge -- especially when the healthcare organization encompasses six hospitals and more than 26,000 employees. That challenge was taken up by New York-Presbyterian Hospital in the project that earned it a spot in the InformationWeek Elite 100. Aurelia Boyer, senior vice president and CIO, and Dr. Peter Fleischut, associate chief innovation officer at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, discussed the nature of the challenge and how they found a solution, in a telephone interview with InformationWeek.
While most other industries have enjoyed a decades-long marriage with the Internet, in health care, we're still in the "getting to know you" phase, working to establish a level of trust. Understandably, there are major concerns in our industry surrounding data integrity, both in and outside of the firewall. Even as health care and the Internet continue their awkward slow dance (Jonathan Bush of Athenahealth likes to poke fun, with respect to health care, "that Internet thing is going to be big!"), the Internet of Things is already upon us.