Sage Software joined a list of petitioners urging the White House and President George W. Bush to revise regulations which prohibit controlled drugs from being electronically prescribed. According to a letter from the e-Prescribing Controlled Substances Coalition, such regulations are negatively impacting the adoption of electronic prescribing and foregoing potential significant efficiencies e-prescribing brings to healthcare. Sage Software is among those submitting the letter along with large healthcare-related organizations such as BlueCross BlueShield, CVS, American Society of Consultant Pharmacists and Wal-Mart.
"E-prescribing is safe and secure," says Michael Burger, director of clinical product management for Sage. "We appreciate that the government's obligation is to safeguard public health, but the vast inefficiencies in our healthcare system are overlooked in the current regulations. E-Prescribing is one of the many remedies that could counteract such inefficiencies. The cost savings are immense and the need in our healthcare system is great."
HospitalPortal.Net will build an employee intranet for Crittenden Regional Hospital, West Memphis, Arkansas. The 132-bed hospital with 650 full-time employees previously had no Intranet. "With HospitalPortal, we get a single-source secure and user-friendly process for the dissemination of policies and procedures, news and information, events scheduling and continuing education accessible to all departments," said Joseph Royal, Crittenden's director of management information systems, in a press release.
KLAS has released its 2007 Top 20 Year-End Report, which details vendor performance ratings for health IT software, professional services and medical equipment. Results are compiled from evaluations received from healthcare professionals during the past 13 months.
About 1,000 times a year in the United States, a surgeon leaves a surgical sponge inside a patient. This can cause such problems as infections, longer hospital stays, additional surgeries and even deaths. It happens even at top hospitals such as Loyola University Medical Center.
There is only one thing you need to know about telemedicine: location doesn't matter. The pathologist who examines your blood tests, the radiologist who reads your MRI scan, the internist who orders your prescription or the nurse who reminds you to refill a prescription--none of these providers needs to be in the same room with you. Or in the same city. Or in the same state. Or even in the same country.
A voluntary, patient-controlled system of unique identifiers is the only way to ensure acceptable levels of safety and accuracy when exchanging medical information through an electronic national network, according to The National Alliance for Health Information Technology. Led by its Technology Leadership and Policy Committees, the Alliance has concluded that the current statistical process for matching patients to their records based on such attributes as name, address and birth date is too unreliable.