EHRs and the FDA
File this under your definition of irony: an iPhone app that turns your phone into a breathalizer with the addition of a small accessory can’t get on the market without FDA approval while the software that medical professionals rely on everyday to check interactions between medications and communicate patient medical information barely has to make … Continue reading
Big Data: A Warning
You’ve heard of Big Data, right? The coming Goliath that will be the savior of everything and has a significant chance of blowing your mind? If you work at a healthcare organization or perhaps just run a blog about HIT you’ve probably already gotten calls and e-mails about how this new version of analytics will change … Continue reading
Bidding The Hierarchical Database Adieu
Jeff Atwood over at the Stack Exchange recently posted his thoughts on the differences between Flat or Threaded style web discussion forums. To save you the trouble of clicking, a flat discussion thread would be one where the comments are linear, a threaded style would be where they are nested, or hierarchical. How is this … Continue reading
Meaningful Use Stage 2 Final Rule Word Cloud
If you remember, back in the day I created a word cloud of the proposed Meaningful Use Stage 1 rule. The obvious implications of that visualization were that the government really wanted to dangle lots of money in front of healthcare organizations in order to use EHRs. Yet, despite initially touting the benefits to the … Continue reading
Help The Electronic Health Records. They Are Being Abused!
At this point I think I may revert back to the old-fashioned term of Electronic MEDICAL Records because suddenly they’ve gone from saviors of the healthcare industry to tools of the money-grubbing doctors…at least according to some. That and we’ve realized that they help the medical community more than they improve the health of people. … Continue reading
Decide On This
A fundamental factor in understanding Information Theory is that a signal, regardless of noise, will degrade over time and distance. Those of us in healthcare are starting to feel that a person’s mental capacity also degrades the more time and clicks they spend on an EHR. There are people who really hate working with EHRs. … Continue reading
Meaningful Use Attestations Show the Rich Get Richer
Originally posted on HISTalk Practice. Meaningful Use charts and graphs are a dime a dozen these days and as much as I’d like to add another bar or delicious pie chart to the mix, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I have no reservations about creating maps from the data though! For the … Continue reading
Service Woes of EHR Vendors
One of my clients had their service representative notify them that they were leaving the company on Monday. Her last day would be that same day. Then she laughed maniacally. OK, she didn’t do the laugh, but there were some nervous giggles. Given the abruptness though, her supervisor was contacted, apologies were issues, and … Continue reading
5 UI/UX Tips For MEDITECH’s New Web-Based EHR
For those not following the rumors, the conjecture…and well, the words coming out of MEDITECH’s employees’ mouths at their CIO Forum; MEDITECH is developing a web-based EHR for 6.1. It will supposedly come in a tablet-friendly format (meaning web-browser based, but “designed” for a smaller screen), and no it does not appear that it … Continue reading
Meaningful Use November 2011 Attestation Report
The CMS has released their Meaningful Use November 2011 Report for the masses to review. I have gone ahead and loaded the data into IBM’s wonderful Many Eyes site so you can play around with the data too. No big surprises have come out of this data. Epic is the heavyweight and is pulling in … Continue reading
Aaron Berdofe, MHI - Health Informatics 