Morning Headlines 5/19/14
Veterans Affairs Chief Accepts Resignation Of Robert Petzel, Under Secretary For Health
Robert Petzel, the top VA official for health care, resigns after it was discovered that the Phoenix VA Medical Center had been falsifying appointment wait lists to appear compliant with the VA’s standards. Petzel was already scheduled to retire in just a few months, so the resignation is more political than a meaningful effort to remove a problematic leader.
Health Datapalooza unveils a packed speaker lineup for its June 1-3 conference: US CTO Todd Park, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni, author and surgeon Atul Gawande, athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, UK Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt, and Time author Steven Brill, among others.
Long Island Jewish Medical Center (NY) has installed a new real-time auditing system in its operating rooms that use video cameras to monitor the procedure and provide real-time guidance. The system ensures that timeouts, surgical checklists, and pre and postoperative equipment inventories are all being properly conducted according to protocol. Hospital executives say that within a few weeks of implementing the system, they saw meaningful quality improvements.
IBM Reveals New Companies Developing Watson-Powered Apps
IBM unveils the first consumer apps that integrate services from its Watson supercomputer. Modernize Medicine, a dermatology EHR system, is included on the list with its new point-of-care reference app called schEMA.
The primary point of using the Cloud is using operating expenses vs limited capital ones and avoiding having to update…