Morning Headlines 9/12/13

ONC Launches Patient Matching Initiative

ONC launches a collaborative initiative that will focus on developing highly reliable patient matching techniques for use in health exchanges to ensure that patient records can be correctly identified across disparate systems.

Effect of Pay-for-Performance Incentives on Quality of Care in Small Practices With Electronic Health Records

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that pay-for-performance programs implemented in EHR-enabled small practices modestly improve care for cardiovascular patients, compared to care received at EHR-enabled fee-for-service small practices. The study was conducted between 2009-2010 and spans only a year of trended outcomes, which resulted in researchers noting that longer-term studies would need to be done to determine whether the changes increased or decreased over a longer timeline.

Electronic Medical Records Hold Clues to Suicide Risk

The VA is researching the use of natural language processing, in conjunction with its EHR system, to automate a risk profiling program designed to alert for potential suicide risk. The NLP-based program searches non-structured clinical narrative in a patients record for key signs that would indicate that the patient is at risk.

SAIC Outlines Business Objectives For Leidos, A National Security, Health & Engineering Solutions Leader

SAIC leadership presents the strategic objectives of Leidos, SAIC’s healthcare and national security spinoff business. The mission of the health sector of the business will be to "optimize the use of electronic health records, apply data analytics and behavioral health research to help enable customers to improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes, detect and prevent diseases, enhance scientific discovery, and reduce costs to the healthcare system."