Chinese health experts warn that the number of bird flu cases in humans will increase over the next several months—already, more than 70% of bird flu cases occur in the winter and spring months. Following the recent death of a teenager in Hunan, officials from the National Centre for Disease Control and Prevention agree that China must work harder at preventing such outbreaks.
The e-Health 2009: Leadership in Action conference is scheduled for May 31 to June 3 in Québec City, Canada. Some topics for the 2009 include Access and New Models of Care, Balancing Workforce and Technology, and Innovation and Sustainability.
Interactive Supercomputing Inc. has added new imaging capabilities to its Star-P technical computing software. The Star-P imaging function library was developed with the help of Anona Labs, an Israeli software company specializing in advanced image processing technologies for interactive numerical analysis environments. The library can be used for life sciences, defense and any other application involving complex imaging problems with high computational requirements or with extremely large data sources, such as medical imaging, microscopy, surveillance and biometrics, according to a release.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced it has put the finishing touches on the ICD-10, a new set that will allow for more specificity and precision in the way doctors and hospitals bill insurers for tests, procedures, and other types of care. But after receiving more than 3,000 comments on its earlier ICD-10 proposal, the feds now say medical providers will have until Oct. 1, 2013, before they have to use ICD-10, rather than a prior proposal of Oct. 1, 2011. Many comments requested more time to comply, citing costs and the need for training and testing, according to CMS.
With increasing instances of data breaches and the introduction of HIPAA and other state and federal mandates, closer attention is being paid to privacy concerns. But the challenges are daunting: Access to healthcare records can come from hospital staff tapping into the database, or from malicious outsiders hacking their way into the database mining for the valuable personal information.
Wired.com gives a broad overview of President Barack Obama's use of technology throughout his campaign and what we can expect to see during his "Government 2.0" presidency. The article notes that Obama's presidency will likely utilize technology more than any president before him, with Obama saying he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it.
Electronic medical record adoption has stalled. It's as if the industry hit a hump and couldn't ever quite get enough momentum to get over it. Then last week Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives unveiled an $825 billion tax cut and spending bill with a huge chunk set aside for healthcare initiatives, including $20 billion to modernize health information technology systems.
There is no doubt that $20 billion is a lot of money, but it's certainly not enough to buy every physician practice in the United States an EMR. So I was curious to see what your reaction to the stimulus plan would be. I wanted to know how you expect to see the money spent and, more importantly, if you think this could be the nudge the industry needs to get over this hump.
Luckily there has been no shortage of people willing to share their opinions with me. Shortly after the stimulus plan was announced, I began receiving calls and emails from a number of you, including a sprinkling of CIOs, some vendor-types, and one or two industry analysts, and the picture that began to emerge was, well, surprising. The overall sentiment is one of optimism. Maybe slightly colored by caution, but optimism nonetheless. The money itself is important, but it is the inclusion of health IT in the economic stimulus package that has caused a stir of excitement.
"We have heard a lot of talk about technology and adoption over the last few years, but we have seen nothing done to actually make adoption happen. What we're hearing and seeing now seems to be a sincere interest and motivation on the part of Congress in improving this situation," says Stephen Lieber, president and CEO of HIMSS. "The technology is there. The barrier of adoption has not been a question of whether the technology is ready or if we should wait until it advances to a different level. The barrier has been financial."
Lieber has a point. Your average primary care providers are not getting paid to manage data, they are getting paid for office visits, diagnostic tests, and procedures. So what does a family practice physician have to gain from digitizing his practice?
It's that question that the healthcare portion of the economic stimulus package is meant to address. The proposal includes $18 billion to be parceled out to hospitals and physicians through a combination of grants, loans, and incentive-based payments. And, for physicians who do not make the switch to digital, Obama is expected to eventually propose lowering reimbursements from government-subsidized healthcare programs. The proposal also includes provisions for establishing more standards and increasing interoperability, which are both going to be needed to boost adoption, says Sarah Corley, NextGen Healthcare's Chief Medical Officer.
"We definitely think there will be some money spent on helping interoperability. And that's where funding toward standards comes in, because I think that lowers the barrier to adoption for a lot of practices. If they feel this information can be shared, while saving them costs and improving healthcare, that will probably push adoption," she says.
The proposal also provides for $2 billion to be managed by the Office of the National Coordinator. Though ONCHIT hasn't specified what aspects of HIT it will target, it's expected it will be used to further the national health information network and possibly for grants to help providers purchase CCHIT-certified HIT products. "We do believe that money should be used for the acquisition of HIT that is based on nationally accepted standards from the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel and certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology," says Lieber. "The main point behind that is that the technology has already gone through these processes that are broadly endorsed by the private and public sector."
While I'm as skeptical of politicians as the next guy, it seems that Obama, with the help of his economic team, has already begun to follow through on at least one of his campaign promises, and it's only his first day in office. Including health information technology in the economic stimulus plan is proof to me (and it seems you, too) that President Obama meant what he said when he pledged to bring our healthcare system into the 21st century.
Kathryn Mackenzie is technology editor of HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at kmackenzie@healthleadersmedia.com.
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Within days of taking office, President-elect Barack Obama will rescind a Bush administration policy that has impeded state efforts to provide health insurance to children from low- and middle-income families, aides and advisers announced. The policy is one of many that the new administration hopes to change or withdraw in its first weeks in office. Obama has said, for example, that he objects to a Bush administration rule that grants sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to provide care because of their "religious beliefs or moral convictions."
Researchers say they found an "alarming" increase in children's ear, nose and throat infections nationwide caused by dangerous drug-resistant staph germs. The study found a total of 21,009 pediatric head and neck infections caused by staph germs from 2001 through 2006. The percentage caused by hard-to-treat MRSA bacteria more than doubled during that time from almost 12% to 28%.
More than a year after creating a five-member public board to plan and build St. Bernard Parish's first post-Hurricane Katrina hospital, the Parish Council will consider asking the panel to let it take over the job of building it. In a resolution, the council is "offering" to take over the construction of the hospital, noting "there is a desire both between the governing authority and the hospital service district to expedite the construction of the hospital as quickly as possible." If the council passes the measure and the hospital board agrees to relinquish the responsibility at its meeting, the Parish Council would then be responsible for deciding where to build the hospital and how to move forward with architects and contractors.
