CDA ubiquity
Dr. Doug Fridsma of the ONC recently blogged that “reducing optionality improves interoperability and lowers the cost for vendors to implement, thus lowering the cost for healthcare providers as well”. Right on Dr. Fridsma. “ONC is identifying the vocabularies, the message and the transport of ‘building blocks’ that will enable interoperability,” he continued. And that, “while vendors should be able to flexibly combine them to support interoperable health information exchange (HIE), these ‘building blocks’ need to be unambiguous and have very limited (or no)...
Read MoreNew Year, same Feds?
Catching up on my reading over the Holiday I was not-so-surprised to learn that PHI data breaches are on the rise. I guess if I started googling around I would probably find that everyone wants the Feds to ease up on MU stage 2 & 3 requirements, as well as physicians complaining about EHR usability. What’s new? I hope and pray that 2012 is a year of Federal leadership! Regardless of your political position, or mine, I hope that this year we see true leadership from our friends at the ONC, NIST, VA, DoD and others who influence the future of Health IT. It’s time to stop...
Read MoreThe new role of the HIMe Director
Last Friday I had the good fortune of speaking at the NCHIMA regional event in Charlotte at Piedmont College. My topic was about the role of HIM supporting the facility in its quest in meeting Meaningful Use. It wasn’t about detailed areas of responsibility that are, or are not, definitively ‘HIM’, but rather to encourage the HIM Directors of tomorrow to acknowledge that their role is evolving and the future is clear… HIM will become HIMe (Health Information Management & Exchange). HIE is the key to interoperability, patient safety and physician adoption. My...
Read MoreMore of the same…
I almost have to force myself to type this. In case you haven’t already seen it, there was a new report on Healthcare IT News last week. The topic? 10 things you hate about your EMR. Shocking, I know. Not so shocking is the consistent references to usability. Hopefully, the EMR vendors are going to come around soon. The FEDS are starting to pay more attention. If you didn’t already hear, in the new Federal Health Strategic Plan 2011-2015 posted a couple weeks ago Usability is a key topic for the first time. Hallelujah! Can I get an amen?! Could it be that the FEDS are listening...
Read MoreSimple Math
The physician community has been complaining rather vocally about the poor usability of EMR systems, and been doing so for some time now. We recently announced an integration with a forward-thinking EMR vendor, SynaMed, that clearly demonstrates that physicians don’t have to type into the EMR to get data into the EMR for Meaningful Use. So, the question now is will they embrace what it is that they have asked for ? Will physicians do the Math? If you utilize an EMR in the traditional sense, point & click in the templates, the odds are you will either see fewer patients each...
Read MoreWhat the heck is Semantic Interoperability?
Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. For most healthcare folks, especially non-IT, this is a new term. If you visit Wikipedia, Semantic Interoperability is ”the ability of computer systems to communicate information and have that information properly interpreted by the receiving system in the same sense as intended by the transmitting system”. In healthcare, that means that successfully transmitting a patient record, like a Continuity of Care Record (CCR) from one healthcare provider to another. So, if you live in NY and you are on vacation in South Florida, and you get...
Read More