OIG: Health IT remains a top challenge facing HHS

Health information technology remains a top management and performance challenge confronting the Department of Health and Human Services, as the healthcare industry attempts to leverage the universal adoption of electronic health records and achieve true EHR interoperability.

That’s the contention of the HHS Office of the Inspector General, which ranked health IT third overall in its annual ranking of the department’s top 10 management and performance challenges.

Specifically, auditors expressed their concerns about the meaningful, secure exchange and use of electronic information—not just for HHS but also the overall U.S. healthcare system, which increasingly rely on such data. For the full article click here 

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A Pioneering Spanish CIO Shares his Perspectives on the New Healthcare

In western Europe, as in the United States, IT-facilitated clinical transformation remains a work in progress, with tremendous variations by geography and by type of patient care organization. One organization in Spain that has made tremendous strides—and which became one of the first European hospital organizations to receive “stage 7” recognition from the HIMSS Analytics division of the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), per its EMRAM schematic around electronic health record (EHR) development—is the Hospital Marina Salud de Dénia in the suburb of Valencia called Dénia, on the east coast of Spain. Indeed, the leaders of the hospital received the prestigious Davies Award from HIMSS in 2015, and the hospital’s CIO, Vicent Moncho Mas, was presented with the award at HIMSS’ World of Health IT conference in Riga, Latvia, that year.

Moncho Mas spoke of the journey into digitization and clinical transformation on Tuesday, Nov. 22, at World of Health IT 2016 (WoHIT2016), being held this week at the Centre de Conveniones Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB), in Barcelona, Spain. For the full article click here 

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4 things we learned from the annual ONC report on health IT

Thanksgiving is Thursday here in the U.S., which, for those of us in the publishing business, means it is a slow news week. So we amuse ourselves reading things like health IT reports from the federal government.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology this week released its annual report on health IT to Congress, as required by the 2009 HITECH Act. That’s the law that ushered in Meaningful Use in 2011.

There’s a lot of usual language in the report, talking about all the health IT programs and initiatives and standards ONC has launched or endorsed in the last 12 months, plus, of course, some interesting data. Here are four interesting things we learned from reading the document For the full article click here 

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3 Health Information Exchanges Make Health IT Investments

3 Health Information Exchanges Make Health IT Investments

New ‘Cures’ language coming soon

UPDATED 21ST CENTURY CURES BILL IMMINENT: The wait is over, or almost. A revised version of the 21st Century Cure Act might be released as soon as today in preparation of a House floor vote next week, sources on and off the Hill are telling Morning eHealth. The bill has been on hold for almost the entire year as Republicans and Democrats haggled over how to offset increases in NIH spending and funding for the cancer moonshot, Precision Medicine and opioid prevention and treatment. But Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton said last week a deal had been struck, and the rest of the world will see the fruits of their labor any time now. Lawmakers were trying to create a reconciled bill to pass through both chambers of a lame-duck Congress.

Some health IT things to watch:Check out our Pro Health Care colleagues for more pharma-centric coverage, but here’s a refresher on what eHealth items of interest:
— Definitions of interoperability – (the House bill was more specific)
— Interoperability standards – the House would contract with a standards-development organization to develop them; the Senate tries to create a trusted exchange framework
— TRUST IT Act – Sen. Bill Cassidy’s proposal to create a star-ratings system of EHRs wasn’t well received in the House, so its status in a reconciled bill is uncertain For the full article click here

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Is protectionism hurting health IT innovation?

The results of the U.S. election this month have got me thinking about protectionism.  Webster’s Dictionary defines protectionism as: “the theory or practice of shielding a country’s domestic industries from foreign competition by taxing imports.”  Advocates for a global trade system are obviously opposed to this idea and many attest that even though the strategy seems like a good idea at the time, in the long term it will never really work out.

So why am I discussing foreign policy strategies? I’m a data scientist and eHealth advocate after all. I bring it up because protectionism is exactly what is being practiced throughout the healthcare industry and it is systematically killing healthcare innovation. For the full article click here 

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Vital Signs: Could healthcare IT be the key to better addiction treatment?

In a new, landmark report on addiction, the U.S. surgeon general made a solid argument for the role of health information technology in improving the treatment of patients with drug or alcohol abuse as well as behavioral health problems.

Dr. Vivek Murthy’s office pushed for greater health IT adoption and use by providers of alcohol, drug abuse and behavioral health treatment. But it took no position on a pending federal rule that could relax the current strict privacy protections covering the medical records of many patients receiving those treatments.

The report, Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health, highlights a fundamental health IT dichotomy: Patients get better care if their records are shared among providers, but patients won’t seek treatment if they believe their information will be widely disclosed.

An estimated 23% of the U.S. population age 12 and older—some 67 million people—have engaged in binge drinking. Meanwhile, 10.2%—about 27 million people—used illicit drugs or misused prescription drugs. And more than 40% of people with a substance use disorder also have a mental health condition, the report said. For the full article click here 

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Health IT investors share lessons learned from early investments

If you were to ask a healthcare investor what their investment strategy is, it is likely the product of some brilliant foresight, a little luck, and some lessons learned from bad experiences or near misses.

In a series of phone and email interviews, we picked the brains of health IT investors at four firms. We asked them what they learned from early investments and how those lessons and insights informed their strategy going forward. One theme that threads its way through the investment narrative of these companies is that technology is all well and good, but you need a service to support it as well.

Cotiviti (originally iHealth) and athenahealth were two of the firm’s first investments made in the space, Lamont said in an email.

“They were very much about fixing broken processes through software, services, and data. That’s been our approach – addressing a broken system and improving it through the powerful combination of software, data, and services.  That’s particularly the case when behavior change is an important part of what needs to happen to improve healthcare and materially bend the cost/quality curve.  Appropriately, Aspire Health, Quartet Health, VillageMD and Axial Healthcare all have service as a component.” For the full article click here 

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Ireland to go-live with national maternity electronic record

Ireland’s biggest maternity hospital will go-live with Cerner next month, as part of an upgrade that will see all its maternity units switch to the electronic health record system.

Cork University Maternity hospital will deploy Cerner on the weekend of 3 December. By the end of 2017, the country’s 17 maternity hospitals that will share a single nationwide Cerner record.

eHealth Ireland chief executive Richard Corbridge told Digital Health News that Cerner had rebuilt and validated the system specifically for Ireland’s maternity context.

“This will be a single instance across 17 hospitals to promote the sharing of information,” he said. For the full article click here 

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Many Insured Children Lack Essential Health Care, Study Finds

Margo Solomon has health insurance for herself and her four children.

But actually getting treatment is another matter.

Ms. Solomon, a 35-year-old mother from the Bronx, says she has struggled to find a doctor who accepts her insurance. And with three of her children coping with asthma, and one with more complicated medical problems, locating a specialist is even more challenging. And once in the door, she cannot afford the costs, including for deductibles and medications.

“I feel like I am all alone out here,” Ms. Solomon said.

She is not alone.

A new study to be released on Monday by the Children’s Health Fund, a nonprofit based in New York City that expands access to health care for disadvantaged children, found that one in four children in the United States did not have access to essential health care, though a record number of young people now have health insurance. For the full article click here 

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Letter: ACA repeal would turn back century of health care progress

I commend Sen. Joe Manchin for calling for reform of the Affordable Care Act rather than repeal (W.Va. reps to seek repeal of EPA rules, ACA, Nov. 10).

It is shocking to think that President-elect Donald Trump and Congress might repeal the ACA and turn back the clock on a century of progress toward universal health care.

President Richard Nixon and President Ronald Reagan had plans that included some of the principles in the ACA. Access to affordable health care should not be a privilege for the rich and those employed full-time in big business. It is a fundamental right.

Repeal of the ACA would be “devastating” to West Virginia (to quote Terri Giles on Nov. 11). Health care is a large sector of our economy and West Virginia has poor health outcomes and higher morbidity and mortality than most states. For the full article click here For the full article click here 

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Study finds reasons for accumulated stress levels more complicated than thought

TORONTO, Nov. 17, 2016–African-American and Latina women have a higher accumulated stress level than Caucasian women, but a new study found that less than half the differences could be explained by expected factors such as poverty, neighbourhoods, stress and support systems.

Study author Dr. Pat O’Campo, a researcher with the Centre for Urban Health Solutions of St. Michael’s Hospital, said there was growing interest in the impact of stress on women’s health, including lifetime accumulated stress and the psychological toll of having to repeatedly respond to stress.

In a study published today in the journal Social Science & Medicine, Dr. O’Campo compared the “allostatic load” of African-American, Latina and Caucasian women enrolled in a large longitudinal health disparities study in the United States. For the full article click here 

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ML Tool Speeds Deployment of Health Predictor

Large health datasets are being used to develop predictive risk models for individual and population groups. The latest example is a partnership between a predictive analytics vendor and a machine-learning platform specialist to deploy a new health predictor.

Brooklyn-based Yhat, developer of a machine-learning deployment platform called ScienceOps, said this week that analytics vendor Lumiata is using its platform to launch its AI-powered health prediction tool. Yhat said its platform helps overcome incompatibilities between AI algorithms and emerging digital applications.

ScienceOps is positioned as providing the technical infrastructure “to transform statistical code on an analyst’s laptop into a product you and I can interact with,” explains Austin Ogilvie, Yhat’s CEO and co-founder. The goal is to help launch more AI-based applications, Oglivie added. For the full article click here 

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Hospital Impact: Trump, chaos theory and the OIG

It is not yet possible to predict what President-elect Donald Trump’s administration’s policies will be when it comes to EHRs and health IT.

Will he embrace some of President Obama’s projects, like precision medicine? Will anything happen to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the review of certified EHR technology? And what happens to the fight against information blocking? Will that continue? Or become less important?

So imagine how much more daunting it is for those in the government who have to follow through on policy in the face of all these questions, all this change and so much chaos. For the full article click here 

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Obamacare enrollment surges after the election; no spike in Washington state

During the campaign, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress vowed to immediately “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, yet now that dismantlement is possible, people across the U.S. are rushing to lock in coverage. More than 300,000 chose plans from Nov. 9-11.

For years the backers of the Affordable Care Act have fretted over how best to stimulate insurance enrollment on the exchanges so the law could work as designed. They might have finally found a way from the unlikeliest of sources: the election of Donald Trump as president.

During the campaign, Trump and Republicans in Congress vowed to immediately “repeal and replace” the health-care law known as Obamacare, calling it a failure. Yet now that dismantlement is possible and maybe even likely, people across the nation are rushing to lock in coverage for next year.  For the full article click here 

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In Trump’s Presidency, Value-Based Purchasing, Health IT Must Push Forward

With so much uncertainty around us, it’s critical to stay on course when it comes to value-based healthcare and the optimization of health IT

The results of last week’s presidential election were extremely unexpected to many, and in the days that followed, debates in media and social circles took front and center for many of us. Those discussions will likely not cease any time soon, but in a time of great uncertainty, it’s important to focus on what we know rather than what’s now behind us. What we know: Donald Trump is the 45^th president of the United States while Republicans maintained control of both the U.S. House and Senate. This will have a profound impact on healthcare’s already-changing landscape.

At a broad level, we also know what Trump and many Republicans think about the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare). On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump spoke about repealing the ACA which would mark a significant shift in healthcare policy. While it remains unclear on what exactly “repeal and replace” means, as Trump has said, there will be major changes in store. In a story last week, Healthcare Informatics spoke to multiple healthcare policy experts who had varying opinions on what this could mean for value-based purchasing and healthcare IT, with an underlying theme being that most of what our industry has been accustomed to will likely not be altered in any great way. For the full article click here

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Cambia, Mosaic merge venture groups to create Echo Health Ventures

Cambia Health Solutions and Mosaic Health Solutions have combined their respective investment groups into one new investor called Echo Health Ventures. Under the leadership of CEO Rob Coppedge, who has led Cambia’s investment division for the past six years, the new company will manage both companies’ existing portfolios as well as pursue new stage-agnostic investments in healthcare innovation.

“We have complementary portfolios, both by stages and by sector,” Coppedge told MobiHealthNews. “Both parents realized the future of strategic investing and corporate investing is partnership. Because we can’t do this alone. We’ve co-invested before, we’ve worked together on other things, so it made a lot of sense to bring the groups together.”

Echo will be an independent company but its board will include Mark Ganz, president and CEO of Cambia Health Solutions, and Brad Wilson, president and CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. Maureen O’Connor, current president of Mosaic Ventures, will retire at the end of the year. For the full article click here

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Just a little fitness protects your health

Researchers say it’s not necessary to be an athlete to lower the risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

It is vitally important to stay fit to maintain good health. It appears you don’t have to work out nearly as hard as an athlete to gain the health benefits of fitness. The Université de Montréal reports that it has been shown in a new study that even low physical fitness is adequate to help prevent most of the risk factors which are associated with cardiovascular disease.

Exercise is a great way to help prevent and cure many diseases

It has often been observed that exercise is a great way to help prevent and cure many diseases. In a new study done in Canada it has been demonstrated that even a low level of physical fitness, up to 20 percent lower than the average for people who are healthy, is adequate to produce a preventive effect on most of the risk factors linked to cardiovascular disease. For the full article click here 

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Community advocates call for more transparency in med school spending

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Community advocates came together Monday, fighting for more oversight for your money spent on health care. A city watchdog says there are no records indicating $105 million Central Health gave to UT Dell Medical School is actually going to improve healthcare for the poor.

Healthcare advocates want Travis County commissioners to call for an independent audit of UT and Central Health to learn where the money is going. Keep in mind, it was in 2012 voters decided to increase property taxes to fund a medical school. That ballot language indicated funds will be used for improved healthcare, including support for a new medical school consistent with the mission of Central Health. It also said that support could include education and specialty medicine, as well as to obtain federal matching funds. Monday’s gathering was to address Central Health’s core mission, helping indigent people receive healthcare.

Attorney Fred Lewis, who’s been working to determine how the money is being spent, says if Travis County commissioners don’t call for an audit, he hasn’t taken a lawsuit off the table. In a report released Monday, Lewis says says the medical school, in conjunction with Central Health, appears to have For the full article click here 

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