New York has corralled three Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) and three health IT vendors to participate in the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY). As an increasing number of N.Y.-based private practices, nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals are using electronic health records (EHRs), many have connected their systems to RHIOs in their part of the state. A recent announcement made by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), along with the New York State Department of Health, said the three RHIOs include the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange, the e-Health Network of Long Island, and the Taconic Health Information Network and Community (THINC). They're joined by vendors HealthUnity, IBM, and InterSystems.
There is a possibility we could improve overall healthcare in the country while reducing costs and speeding services if hospitals joined together with insurance companies to provide centralized, secure access to patient information. Now THAT would be big data. Imagine the ability to sift through clinical data from every hospital in the U.S. to look for trends in healthcare. It would be much easier to share important test results between doctors and specialists when required. Patients would benefit by having their entire medical histories readily available in an emergency. There are thousands of examples of the benefits of moving patient data to the cloud.
This year, at a faster pace than many industry insiders anticipated, we're seeing genomics enter the world of real-life care for patients. It took researchers 13 years and about $3 billion to complete the Human Genome Project. A decade later, companies like Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) and Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) are in a fierce competition to sequence genomes at industrial scale, for as little as $1,000 apiece in a single day. But this year we are seeing an increasing wave of demand emerging from hospitals, clinics, and leading physicians who want to take advantage of the new fast and cheap sequencing tools to see if they can be used to help patients.
A clinical trial by the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass., was conducted at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Patients in the wireless sensor group saw a reduction of just over two days in the average stay in the ICU (a 45.9% reduction), when comparing pre- and post-intervention, with a trend of a decline in the number of transfers. The results translated in a 47.2% decrease in the rate of total ICU days for transfers between the pre-intervention and the post-interventions periods.
For 14 months, a bipartisan group of 17 states quietly has been collaborating with the Obama administration to help build a foundation for the healthcare-reform law's success. They are backed by $3 million in funding from eight nonprofit organizations. Together, they have come up with a tool to help consumers navigate the health-insurance exchanges. The tool was released Friday for other states to use if they wish. The project’s nonprofit backers hope it will give all states one of the resources they will need to hit the healthcare law’s tight deadlines and provide assistance to states that have run into financial and political obstacles to moving forward.
The Premier healthcare alliance's PremierConnect technology network will allow its member physicians and executives in 2,500 hospitals to work together online as one in communities of common interest. It allows more than 100,000 providers to share best practices, as well as data based on thousands of patient outcomes. Individual health systems can use PremierConnect it to interact with colleagues across all of their care sites, including hospitals, physician offices, and outpatient clinics. Premier CEO Susan DeVore said that data shared by others on the PremierConnect network enables clinicians to make data-driven, evidence-based medical decisions that improve their performance.