Morning Headlines 3/4/13

Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway and RelayHealth Announce Ground Breaking Alliance to Enable Integrated Health Care

The major news from HIMSS today is that the Cerner-McKesson announcement turned out to be much larger than suspected, including a total of six major players coming together to form the CommonWell Health Alliance. The organization will be an independent non-profit for EHR vendors together that want to achieve a higher level of interoperability between systems.

Nuance and Cerner Partner to Offer Point of Care Solution for Clinical Documentation Improvement

Cerner announces that it will integrate Nuance’s suite of clinical language understanding products to support physician documentation in a new workflow that will allow physicians to dictate notes while the tool simultaneously performs quality review, prompting clinicians for clarifying information where needed.  

ICD-10 Snapshot Study

A recent survey of 260 healthcare professionals involved in ICD-10 planning reveals that only 55 percent of respondents are confident that they will meet the October 1, 2014 deadline. Primary concerns center around additional training needs and a lack of time. 43 percent of respondents reported frustration with vendors "not providing an adequate schedule to ensure we will be ready by the deadline."

HIMSS 2013 iHIT Study – Final Report

HIMSS releases its 20132 Impact of Health IT report. The results paint a suspiciously rosy picture of end user satisfaction, including 83 percent of respondents agreeing that HIT applications support clinical processes and workflows. The survey-takers were comprised of 63 percent nurses, 22 percent pharmacists, and 11 percent physicians working at larger than average (and most likely more technologically refined) hospitals with an average 681 beds.