With funding and technical support from his employer, Washington internist Brad Moore made a swift transition to electronic records seven years ago. He now pulls up a patient's chart with a few clicks of his mouse. Lab tests show the man, a diabetic, has his blood sugar under control. A surgeon's note describes progress after a shoulder operation. Before heading to the exam room, Moore, 47, clicks on a yellow "FYI" button, the electronic equivalent of a sticky note. It reminds him to ask how his patient is doing after his wife's recent death. About 20 miles away in suburban Maryland, internist Jonathan Plotsky hunts for the same kind of information in charts, some of them six inches thick, others taking up three volumes. He is well aware of the benefits of electronic records, but like most U.S. doctors, Plotsky, 56, is hesitant to switch. At up to $50,000 per clinician, the systems cost too much for him and the part-time doctor with whom he practices, he says. He doesn't know what to buy, how to install it or how he would transition to paperless. "I'm waiting to see what will work for people," he says. "The cost is prohibitive. It won't be any more revenue, and it will change the way I do things."
Web app contests like NYC BigApps continue fostering new ways to access public data — and these challenges are now making their way into the medical field. But before these medical apps get too far along, they need the proper platform and interface. That's where the Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies platform comes in. In April 2010, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology awarded $15 million to researchers at the Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School to design SMART. This platform was made public this month —in conjunction with the SMART Health App $5,000 Challenge, a Web app contest to encourage developers to design apps to benefit patients, physicians or public health. Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra posted on the official White House blog that the app competition prize could speed up innovation in a variety of areas. Developers could potentially build a medication manager, health risk detector, laboratory visualization tool, or an app that integrates patient data with external data sources in real time.
Three out of four hospital executives say their organizations have partly or fully implemented electronic health records of some sort, and 83% have either selected or implemented an EHR that can fulfill federal meaningful use requirements, according to a survey conducted by Dell. The Dell Executive & Patient Survey interviewed hospital executives as well as recent hospital patients in fall 2010 to gauge their attitudes toward various issues facing the healthcare industry. The survey, which polled 150 hospital executives, also found that a third of respondents are participating in some form of local, regional, or state health information exchange, which allows multiple providers to have access to the same patient data. Another 54% are planning to participate in an HIE and almost 70% have partly or fully implemented an online physician portal.
After hours of pushing, Michelle Morales' labor was not progressing. As exhausted as she was, Morales thought she was going to keep trying to deliver the baby. But instead, her obstetrician asked nurses to bring in a device called a vacuum extractor. Placing a soft suction cup on the baby?s emerging head, the doctor eased Landon Harrington into the world at 4 pounds, 3 ounces on Sept. 30, 2009. Landon now is a beautiful little boy with serious disabilities. He is blind, has cerebral palsy and likely will never walk on his own. His parents and their lawyer blame brain hemorrhaging caused by the vacuum extraction device. They contend it should never have been used on a preterm infant like Landon, who arrived five weeks early, and he should have been delivered by caesarean section.
A female patient has alleged she was sexually assaulted by a hospital worker while she was seeking treatment in the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, CA, according to police. The incident allegedly occurred March 8. The next day, the woman told hospital officials that a patient care technician had assaulted her. Officials then reported the incident to police, who have not yet interviewed the employee, a department spokesman said. Orange Police Sgt. Dan Adams said that a patrol officer took reports from the hospital and the patient and filed the paperwork Thursday. But the detective bureau is generally closed Friday, Saturday and Sunday unless there is a major case like a murder, he said, and on Monday all of the department's detectives were investigating a homicide. Adams said the patient first reported the incident to hospital officials, who contacted the department. Hospital officials refused to provide details of the alleged attack, saying they needed to "respect the rights and privacy of everyone involved in this situation."
The U.S. government has filed a federal lawsuit against a Baltimore doctor, accusing him of fraudulently billing thousands of dollars for hundreds of medically unnecessary eye procedures performed on dozens of patients at an outpatient clinic owned by Bon Secours Hospital. The 33-page civil suit claims that between Oct. 29, 2002, and April 14, 2009, John Arthur Kiely, MD, repeatedly performed laser eye surgery on patients who didn't need it — more than a dozen times on some people. He then falsely billed Medicare and Medicaid for the unwarranted work, according to the court documents, which were filed March 11. The procedures led to blindness in one woman, who should have been referred elsewhere for a different procedure, records claim.