A criminal investigation has begun into the death of a patient on a waiting room floor at a New York City-run hospital in Brooklyn last year, the Brooklyn district attorney said. The district attorney said that a grand jury had begun an inquiry into the death of Esmin Green, 49, who died early on June 19, 2008, about 24 hours after arriving by ambulance at Kings County Hospital Center's psychiatric emergency room.
GE Healthcare and global eHealth specialist InterComponentWare, Inc. have signed a strategic agreement to integrate and co-develop their health information exchange solutions. Through this relationship, GE Healthcare and ICW will leverage their existing solutions and co-develop new offerings for the health information exchange and global eHealth marketplace, according to a release.
Data show that Medicare beneficiaries registered to use My Health Manager, Kaiser Permanente's personal health record, are satisfied with using the Internet to manage their healthcare online, according to a Kaiser release. The e-mail survey received 4,560 responses and looked at respondents' comfort in using computers, Internet use habits, and current health status.
This article published in The McKinsey Quarterly examines the Obama administration's plans to use electronic medical records to cut the cost and improve the quality of health care over the next decade. To meet these goals, the sector must undergo a wrenching shift from the current "silo-ridden and usually paper-based arrangements to a system that coordinates information more effectively and efficiently, with IT supporting a wide range of medical decisions," the article states.
Under a spending authorization bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Veterans Administration would get $3.31 billion to spend on information technology in 2010. Much of that money would go toward electronic medical records projects at the VA, as well as the integration of those medical records with the medical records kept by the Department of Defense. In all, the committee recommendation includes $800 million for new program development.
Massachusetts-based doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, and hospital IT experts are using $20 billion of stimulus money to help shape the electronic medical record landscape for the country as a whole. According to John Halamka, chief information officer at CareGroup Healthcare System, "The average use of EMRs in the U.S. is between 2 and 20%. In Massachusetts, we're somewhere between 30 and 50%, so we've had a fair degree of experience with what works and what doesn't work."