Sounds reasonable, until you look at the Silicon Valley experience. Silicon Valley grew like a weed precisely because employees could…
Morning Headlines 6/28/13
ONC publishes its annual report to Congress on health IT adoption as required by the HITECH act. The report addresses EHR adoption, health information exchange adoption, and the general state of the nation as it pertains to health IT.
Created in the Corridor: Geonetric
Geonetric, a Web developer specialized in creating patient portals for hospitals and health systems, is profiled in the local Cedar Rapids, IA media for its unusual HR policies. None of its 70 employees have managers; instead, work is done collaboratively. Dress is casual, Fridays are bring your own meat for the office barbecue, and the company CEO calls its staff "probably one of the most advanced software teams in Iowa." The company’s own website is notably underwhelming considering that description, but the product must be top notch because it has plans to add 130 employees over the next year.
Sprint Launches Secure Messaging Solutions to Enable HIPAA Compliance
Sprint announces the availability of two HIPAA-compliant text messaging platforms, a functionally rich solution called TigerText and a less expensive, stripped down option that still delivers person-to-person HIPAA-compliant texting.
Cerner supports Blue Button + to engage individuals for better health
Cerner announces that it will support the Blue Button + initiative, which means that Cerner clients can now securely deliver information to any personal health record participating in Blue Button +.
Healthcare IT is notably underwhelming to most observers.
We need a red button to capture the evidence on the screens including pop-ups to directly report adverse events, design flaws, defects, delays, near misses to the FDA, ECRI, AHRQ, and consumer watch dog groups.
That will be more effective in improving care than having a blue button for patients which only encourages more disruption for the doctors who have to field innumerable questions from patients who are frightened by what they read.
I agree with Raj’s comment about adding a red button to report adverse events. I suggest adding a fraud alert button to PHRs so patients can alert payors (esp. Medicare) to fraud.
The ONC report to the Congress was inferior and deficient in that it failed to address safety, costs, and outcomes. Moreover, it failed to discuss what it was doing to provide after market surveillance of adverse events and near misses.
Additionally, the report omitted the most significant reason for doctors not buying: these systems cause errors that are insidious and hard to detect; and they are cognitively disruptive because of their poor usability.
Thank you for printing the ONC report to Congress. I searched the entire report hoping to find an update in safety, outcomes, and costs, but came up empty.
Members of congress really don’t understand the current state of health IT and look to ONC both for updates on progress but also on what is needed to make progress.
Painting a too-rosy picture provides a disservice to both Members and everyone involved in health IT other than ONC.
The only reason that ONC is pushing the big lie unto everyone BLUE button is because their mutli-million dollar investment in health information exchange has failed and they are now defaulting to the patients as the means of exchange. The flaw of course is that patients don’t get their data in time. Blue button is nothing more than a fax machine that is set up to feed 1 or 2 private PHR’s to thank them for their contributions to supporting ONC (and the funding legilsation).
If for example you are sent from one hospital to another or from one hospital home with a doc for follow up or from the ER and back to your doc – guess what you have to wait 4 days to get the records..
FAIL..
Every state in the US got literally millions to build out exchanges and th eonly ones that have had them BEFORE the $$ or like NY have state funding as well. Ask yourself just how many patients have had their records shared via a state HIE?
Also how many EHR’s can receive the data?