Physicians who meet with patients via direct to consumer telemedicine services are just as likely to prescribe antibiotics as those who conduct in-person visits, according to a study conducted by Rand Corporation. The study was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine. The study examined health plan claims from 1,725 patients who used telemedicine service Teladoc and 64,099 who went in for an office visit. Visits were covered by the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS). Researchers analyzed health claims from users who were continuously enrolled in CalPERS from April 2012 to October 2013 and visited with a physician one or more times for an acute respiratory infection (ARI).
From fitness accessories such as Fitbit to telemedicine and electronic medical records systems that better connect patients, physicians and clinicians to improve health outcomes, health care is a hotbed of innovation. But it's typically difficult for health care innovators to get the funding to take their idea, product or service to the next level. Investors representing perspectives from angel capital to the buyout phase gave advice to innovators at different stages of creating health care products and services at a panel discussion Wednesday at the Healthcare Dealmakers Conference in Dallas.
Many health care organizations are using electronic health record systems to support their data analytics capabilities, according to a survey by HIMSS Analytics, Health Data Management reports. or the survey, researchers reviewed the HIMSS Analytics data warehouse and polled 189 health care organization officials, the majority of whom were director- or C-suite-level executives. Results were compared with a similar 2013 study that also measured the provider analytics field. Overall, the survey found that health care organizations' adoption of clinical and business intelligence solutions increased by six percentage points between 2013 and 2015, from 46% to 52%.
A hospital at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center has a robot filling prescriptions. The $15 million system works like this: a doctor writes out an electronic prescription. At the pharmacy, a mechanical arm scoots past dozens of shelves and picks out the medicine. The pills are then sorted and dispensed into little packets. The packets are grouped together into these little rings—one ring for each patient. In the old system, a doctor would write out a prescription by hand. A clerk would then have to scan and fax the prescription to a pharmacist by hand. The pharmacist would then have to type in the order into the computer. A pharmacy technician would go out and fill the prescription.
Imagine a hostile nation-state with your psychiatric records. Or an organized crime ring with your child's medical file. Or a disgruntled employee with your medical insurance information. It's scary but true. Cyber criminals—from unhappy employees to the most sophisticated hackers—are targeting healthcare data, findings from the Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy & Security of Healthcare Data indicate. And no healthcare organization, from an 18-bed county hospital in Illinois to healthcare insurer CareFirst to insurance giant Anthem, is immune to these attacks. Without fear or favor, these criminals want to hack into healthcare systems to seize your medical data either to make a profit or to expose the security vulnerabilities of the U.S. healthcare system.
Since President Obama took office, the federal government has poured more than $29 billion into health information technology and told doctors and hospitals to use electronic medical records or face financial penalties. But some tech companies, hospitals and laboratories are intentionally blocking the electronic exchange of health information because they fear that they will lose business if they share information on patients with competing providers, administration officials said. In addition, officials said, some sellers of health information technology try to "lock in" customers by making it difficult for them to switch to competing vendors.