The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology has certified two more ambulatory electronic health records systems under its 2007 criteria. The new certifications are for Record UE Version 4.5 from Atlanta-based MedcomSoft Corp., and Sevocity Version 5.0 from San Antonio-based Conceptual Mindworks Inc. CCHIT has certified 31 systems under its 2007 criteria, which is no longer open for applications.
CINA
will assist HealthBridge, one of the nation's largest community Health Information Exchanges, in a data extraction and aggregation project to satisfy the requirements of a federally funded community-wide project to be initiated throughout regions of Cincinnati, OH. This initiative will attempt to demonstrate that data extracted from physician-based electronic medical records and practice management systems throughout the HealthBridge service area can be successfully integrated with HealthBridge's own clinical data for quality improvement purposes.
The California Department of Insurance is encouraging consumers in the state to use Web-based personal health records. Despite their availability through insurers and managed-care groups, not enough Californians are using PHRs, according to a report issued by the Insurance Department. The report states that PHRs are efficient and secure, and give consumers a place to better manage their healthcare and deal with insurance claims.
A flash drive that will store all of a patient's personal health records is now on sale at 103 Kroger stores in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The product, called MedFlash, will cost $29.95 and is about an inch long. The records can be downloaded through any computer.
For all it spends on healthcare, the United States really doesn't have a healthcare "system" consumers can use to evaluate providers and easily access information the way they can with airlines and banks, says U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt. One way of empowering consumers will be a "network of networks" of electronic medical records that will include quality and price information that will help to drive down costs, Leavitt recently said at the Medical College of Georgia. The school is currently working on a study about whether a secure electronic patient record system helps improve the health of patients. Leavitt also touted his department's work to establish electronic medical record networks in 28 pilot sites, and he thinks that most patients will have access to them by 2014.
Two years ago, infrastructure at Huntsville (AL) Hospital was so maxed out its three data centers had outgrown their own disaster recovery hardware and nearly outstripped the amount of power available from their existing connections. The hospital opted to remedy the situation with virtualization, and in a three-month pilot program Huntsville implemented IBM BladeCenter rack servers and VMware software to set up a scalable infrastructure that could cut costs both on the front end and the back end. The pilot program proved so successful that the hospital decided to go full bore with its virtualization effort.