The American Hospital Association (AHA) would like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to, as quickly as possible, issue a final rule that includes a firm deadline for ICD-10 implementation so that providers will have enough time to be ready by that date, AHA officials told InformationWeek Healthcare. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes CMS, proposed in April that the deadline for shifting to the new diagnostic code set be postponed for one year, from Oct. 1, 2013, to Oct. 1, 2014. Because of the uncertainty about the deadline, hospitals' focus on ICD-10 is starting to waver, said Chantal Worzala, director of policy for AHA.
Healthcare providers lose on average $70.2 million annually, or 15% of additional revenue per hospital, due to their failure to fully leverage the information they collect, according to a study from Oracle. (Oracle, of course, sells BI tools along with its bread-and-butter database tools.) Healthcare providers lose on average $70.2 million annually, or 15% of additional revenue per hospital, due to their failure to fully leverage the information they collect. The study shows that 47% of healthcare executives say their organization cannot interpret and translate the information into actionable insight, and 40% say their current systems aren't designed to meet the specific needs of the industry.
Called RP-VITA, the robot allows doctors to virtually visit patients in distant locations, carrying on conversations and even taking measurements in real time. Equipped with cameras, microphones, 3-D mapping sensors, a stethoscope, and a video screen "head" that automatically swivels to listen to voices, the robot transmits and receives video, audio, and navigation instructions over a Wi-Fi broadband connection. Doctors, patients, and hospital staff control the robot with a specialized terminal or via a software application that runs on Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet computer, and talk to one another using a Skype-like video chat displayed on the robot's main screen.
McLean-based Science Applications International Corp. plans to add more than 1,300 employees to its health business with its planned acquisition of Westfield, Ind.-based MaxIT Healthcare Holdings, announced last week. The deal marks the latest contractor move into health information technology and follows the Supreme Court's recent decision allowing President Obama's healthcare law to move forward. Contractors are aggressively buying up health IT businesses in hopes of positioning themselves to win work modernizing health systems and records at the state and federal level and at commercial healthcare providers.
Implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), compliance with government regulations, and other healthcare IT initiatives are driving up demand for health IT pros these days. But while their pay inched up last year, health IT professionals' compensation still, for the most part, lags behind IT pros across all industries, according to the InformationWeek 2012 IT Salary Survey. However, while health IT managers earned smaller paychecks than IT managers across other industries, healthcare CIOs fared better than CIOs in general. Healthcare IT staffers also did better than healthcare IT managers, whose increases in base pay and total compensation in 2012 over 2011 were slightly smaller than those seen from 2010 to 2011.
IBM officials believe that turning Watson's brainpower onto the medical system can reduce errors and improve the quality of care. Watson can store huge amounts of data ranging from patient health records to cutting-edge treatments. While a doctor may spend 10 hours a week reading the latest advances in medical journals; Watson can read 200 million pages of text in three seconds. IBM began working with managed care company WellPoint last year on a program to automatically pre-authorize certain medical procedures. WellPoint also is working on a Watson project with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to build decision-making tools for oncologists treating breast, colon and lung cancer.