▼ U.S. Healthcare Providers Seen Growing IT Budgets by Over 10 Percent
Source: TelecomWeb

Healthcare, a sector that has experienced single digit growth for many years in terms of investment in information technology (IT) -- long lagging behind other industries -- is finally starting to heat up. That’is the conclusion from a new report series based on interviews with more than 100 U.S. healthcare IT decision-makers by independent market analysts Datamonitor.... 

“The U.S. healthcare industry is responding to reports of very high fatality numbers caused by medical errors each year. Institutions are beginning to wake up to the fact that employing point-of-care IT is one of the ways in which patient safety can be increased and medical errors reduced,” Datamonitor Senior Healthcare Analyst Panni Kanyuk told TelecomWeb.  “A contributing factor is also the U.S. government’s pronounced interest in healthcare IT -- through President Bush’s proposal to develop standards for healthcare data interchange and also the JCAHO’s [Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations] proposed patient safety goals which would require barcode technology at the patient bedside by 2007.” (Read more...)
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▼ Data Storage Solutions Essential to Meet HIPAA Recommendations
Source: DataStoreX
 
Healthcare facilities in the United States are currently in a rush to meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) deadline for security compliance. Data storage management solutions are likely to play a key role in preparing these facilities to meet the HIPAA recommendations regarding keeping patient record in a timely, secure, and organized manner.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Data Storage Management Markets for U.S. Healthcare Settings, reveals that revenue in this industry totaled $845.2 million in 2004 for storage hardware solutions, and projects to reach $1,329.6 million in 2008.

The market is already showing a marked increase in IT spending on security system upgrades. Investment in picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), electronic medical records (EMR), and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) solutions expects to be among the top priorities.  (Read more...) 0105
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▼ JCAHO Bar Code, Pump Rules Coming
Source: Health Data Management

While the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations did not include proposed bar code and infusion pump requirements in its final 2005 patient safety goals, those issues remain high priorities and could become final in the 2006 goals. (Read more...)
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▼ Clinical Applications on Mobile Devices
Source: Spyglass Consulting

Mobile Devices Face Significant Hurdles to Gain Wide Spread Adoption Within Inpatient Hospital Settings

According to a recent market study by the Spyglass Consulting Group, mobile computing usage among physicians has grown significantly over the past few years through the use of standalone knowledge-based applications. More than 90 percent of clinicians interviewed under the age of 35 use some form of reference application on a daily basis. Grass roots initiatives are inciting large numbers of medical clinicians to independently purchase handheld devices that are being used primarily for drug reference databases, reference manuals and medical calculators.

Mobile computing usage, however, face a significant number of obstacles to widespread adoption in an inpatient hospital setting as the applications become more comprehensive and require increased integration with existing legacy-based clinical and financial systems, according to Gregg Malkary, Managing Director of Spyglass Consulting Group.”

Key highlights of the report:

• More than 92 percent of the clinicians interviewed were affiliated with healthcare organizations that were using legacy-based systems completed by inefficient paper-based processes and workflows. As a result, many of these organizations are under a significant amount of pressure to invest in clinical information systems to improve quality of care and patient safety, increase clinician productivity and reduce the risk of medical errors.

• E-prescribing has been slow to take off within inpatient hospital settings due to high initial deployment costs and lack of standards for electronically transmitting orders to a pharmacy. Approximately 15 percent of all paper prescriptions contain potential medication errors in which the patient receives the wrong drugs, an inappropriate dose of the correct drug, a drug to which they are allergic or a drug that interacts with another drug they are taking. (Full story...)
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▼ An "Old" Trend Heats Up: Clinical Decision Support 
By Mark Hagland
Source: Healthcare Informatics 

Clinical decision support (CDS), a hot tech trend? To some, that might seem an oxymoron; after all, the notion of CDS has been around for decades. What's hot these days is how CDS seems finally to be coming into its own--becoming more comprehensive, useful, integrated, real.  

Signs are everywhere, including at Partners HealthCare in Boston, where Blackford Middleton, M.D., is helping lead the clinical IS charge. "Our current strategy can be summarized very quickly," Middleton says. "We want to implement a comprehensive EMR across the entire continuum of care" (which the folks at Partners call a longitudinal medical record). "We want to manage our knowledge assets carefully, as we recognize knowledge as a critical asset. In other words, we want to invest in knowledge management." (Read more...)
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▼ OR software helping hospitals better manage the business of surgery
By John Hall
Source: Healthcare Purchasing News

Health First, a small southern Florida- based regional integrated network, has set a lofty goal of becoming one of the nat'ions first completely paperless healthcare organizations. As if that doesn’t raise a few eyebrows, one of the departments which has nearly achieved that goal is also one of the least likely: surgery.

Health First, which operates three hospitals on Florida’s east coast, chose to excel   in a department that could hardly be more demanding in documentation and charting to test its mettle. Now, Health First is well on its way. (Read more...)

► Learn more about OR / Surgery software selection tool
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▼ Assessing Privacy Risk in Outsourcing
By Margaret Davino
Source: American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)

Healthcare providers can outsource transcription, but they can’t outsource their obligation to safeguard privacy. Here’s how to minimize risk.

Healthcare providers are faced with multiple pressures, many of them financial. The need for management to meet financial constraints often translates into a desire to contract with vendors at the lowest possible immediate cost, sometimes without thought as to the nonprice issues in a contract.

It is important to linger over the legal issues that may be associated with vendor contracts, especially with vendors that may subcontract portions of their tasks. The October 2003 incident in which a Pakistani subcontractor, in a dispute with a medical transcription company, threatened to release patient information on the Web provided a dramatic reminder of this. Provider and vendor liability has become even more important in light of HIPAA privacy and security regulations, which place an obligation on covered healthcare providers to ensure that their vendors safeguard confidentiality. (Read more...)
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▼ Faith-Based Spending
By Neil Versel
Source: Modern Physician

Take everything you have ever heard about technophobic physicians, balky computer systems, slow response times and tightwad finance departments.

Then throw it all out the window.

No matter what you may have been told in the past, physicians today believe in information technology. They are going online in record numbers, and their organizations are on board, too. E-mail usage is rising, investment in electronic medical records is soaring, and the phrase “clinical information systems” is no longer an oxymoron.

According to the sixth annual Modern Physician/ PricewaterhouseCoopers Survey of Executive Opinions on Key Information Systems Issues, the dynamics of information technology in medical practices have changed.

While few harbor illusions that a fully wired, seamlessly interconnected healthcare industry is right around the corner, significant numbers of the 436 survey respondents are getting more of what they want and need: more money, more speed, more usage, more understanding and more connectivity. And more is better. (Read more...)
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▼ HIPAA Insecurity
By Debbie Gage
Source: Baseline Magazine

If Chris DeVoney hustles, he can stay one step ahead of the hackers he fears are going to steal patient records. But he doesn't dare rest. He is the computing director at the clinical research center of the University of Washington Medical Center. In the past year, he has patched and installed software firewalls on 50 to 100 disparate medical devices—everything from computers to printers to FDA-approved devices that require bridging firewalls because no software can be loaded onto them.

Last month, he cleaned up after an attack by the Witty worm, which rewrote hard drives on 80 or so computers. The week before that, a notebook computer was hacked as it tracked data emanating from sensors attached to a subject who was sleeping as part of a research project. The campus had to "cut the hacker out" by turning off Internet access to the notebook so the study could be finished, says DeVoney.

The research center depends on the university's technology infrastructure, and government budget cycles make it hard for the university to buy what it needs when it's needed. Right now, for example, DeVoney has no perimeter firewall. Nevertheless, in April 2005, the Medical Center and thousands of other healthcare organizations will have to comply with regulations to protect the electronic security of patients' records—records that keep track of their physical or mental conditions, their treatments and their healthcare insurance and payments. Violations can incur civil penalties of up to $25,000 per infraction per year, and criminal penalties of up to $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison. (Very small organizations have an extra year to comply). (Read more...)
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▼ Harnessing Efficiency: Workflow Automation
By Mark Hagland
Source: Healthcare Inforamatics

What IT development will be needed for the full potential of most other IT developments to be fully exploited in the coming months and years? The simple answer, industry experts and IT leaders say, is workflow automation. It has the ability to speed and integrate the full range of available clinical, operational and financial IT as well as improve the work lives of clinicians, executives and staffers by making things run smoother and simpler.

The possibilities available with workflow automation are tremendous, although everyone seems to have a different definition of precisely what the concept means in practice. (Read more...)
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▼ IT Opportunities in Radiology: Managing Digital Images with PACS
By Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Source: IT Manager's Journal

PACS, the Picture Archiving and Communications System, is a vital component in the future of both radiology and our medical infrastructures. At a basic level, PACS is “filmless radiology,” dispensing with those big x-ray films that we're so used to seeing TV doctors hold up to the light, to make meaningful noises over as they pretend to diagnose exactly what's going on inside their patient. In reality this technology represents much more, especially in terms of opportunities for programmers and other IT professionals who can help hospitals become digital enterprises.

Where most people are most aware of PACS is looking at breakdowns of clinical budgets. A PACS system today can run millions of dollars for the full combination of servers, workstations, software, and training. That price tag might seem like an excessive expense -- and in fact radiology these days is often partially blamed for the high costs of medical care -- until you look at the costs of film. Each piece of X-Ray film costs roughly one US dollar, and this price is not likely to drop since silver halide (and hence silver) is used in the process. Since each patient trip to get X-Rays typically use five sheets of film for even a simple problem, you can ascribe at least five US dollars to each patient visit. That's not per patient, but per time that someone is sent to have x-rays done.

According to Paul Nagy, Ph.D.-- an Assistant Professor of Radiology as well as the Director of the Medical College of Wisconson's Radiology Informatics Labooratory -- a large institution ("large" characterized typically by five hundred or more beds) easily sends 200,000 people for X-rays in a given year, meaning that X-rays can cost a hospital or clinic one million US dollars for film alone. Steve Langer, Ph.D., the Associate Professor of Diagnostic Physics and Imaging Informatics at Mayo Clinic Radiology, adds that the costs of the chemicals required to develop the film, maintaining the film processor, renting storage space for the unused and used film, and paying the toxic waste disposal costs of both the film and the chemicals boost the total material cost per X-ray to 14 or more US dollars.

A PACS system that successfully replaces film can have a return on investment (the vaunted ROI) within 18 months for medium and large health care institutions. Of course, while a PACS can and should be cost-effective, its largest benefit is its ability to help deliver better, faster, and more efficient healthcare. To understand how this is, you have to take a quick look at what happens with imaging when PACS is not used. (Read more...)

► Learn more about PACS software selection tool
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▼ Patient Records Healthy for Storage
By Dave Raffo
Source: Byte and Switch

Driven by the need to store massive digital files and follow new compliance regulations for patient records, healthcare is becoming a booming market for networked storage.

"It's one of the fastest-growing segments of IT," says EMC's John Mello. "There are two major applications: PACS and electronic patient records." PACSs (picture archiving and communications systems) store cardiology and radiology tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results, and other large files.

Healthcare storage needs have also expanded due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal regulation that requires records to be kept longer. "They're taking all that off film and making it digital," Mello says. "Those pictures take up a lot of storage."

Still, Mello says healthcare is a late adopter of technology, claiming that only about 5 percent of healthcare firms have sophisticated electronic storage systems. He says that most large hospitals already have them, while smaller and midsized facilities plan to implement them soon. (Read more...)
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▼ Health-Care Vendors, Providers Call for More HIPAA Help 
By M.L. Baker
Source: eWeek

A coalition of health-care vendors and providers is urging the government to make sure that health-care payments are not disrupted or delayed as the industry moves to comply with new national standards for electronic health-care records, which are required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the largest health-care payer in the country, has stated that after July 2004 it will no longer accept claims that don't meet HIPAA formatting standards. But many of the intermediaries between health-care providers and CMS—the ultimate payer—will not be able to process the claims, according to the coalition, called the HIPAA Implementation Working Group. (Read more...)
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▼ Chicago's Central DuPage Hospital to Offer Innovative Technology to Staff, Patients
Source: TMCnet

Sprint has reached a wireless solutions agreement with Central DuPage Hospital that will enable it to become one of Chicago's most high-tech hospitals. The innovative wireless solutions will allow nurses, physicians and administrators to communicate instantly with each other and obtain mobile access to important patient information from virtually anywhere within the hospital, resulting in optimal patient care.

Under the agreement, Central DuPage Hospital will deploy the Sprint PCS Vision Smart Device Treo(TM) 600 by palmOne, along with the Horizon Mobile Care Rounding(TM) application by McKesson. This combination of mobile handset and software will allow physicians remote access to patient information both in and outside the hospital, including real-time access to laboratory and radiology results, vital signs, medication updates and patient history. This point-of-care communication system contributes to improved patient safety and reduced costs, and is part of a continuing joint effort by Sprint and palmOne, the world's leading maker of handheld computers and highly acclaimed smartphones, under their business solutions agreement to provide best-in-class mobile solutions to the Healthcare industry. (Read more...)