Morning Headlines 5/20/14
VA Faces Systemwide Problems With Patient Scheduling
In a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing today, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said that he is "mad as hell" that new instances of waitlist gaming tactics had been reported from around the country, and that he was ordering a system wide investigation in response. Since the news that the Phoenix VA Medical Center had been maintaining an off-the-record waitlist, similar stories have been reported from whistleblowers in Colorado, Florida, Texas and Wyoming. President Obama has assigned White House deputy chief of staff Rob Nabors to work alongside Shinseki to investigate the allegations.
Pilot at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess gives patients electronic access to therapists’ notes
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is expanding its Open Notes program by providing patients online access to their therapists notes, a decision that has spawned extensive internal debate at BIDMC.
MMRGlobal is on its way to securing three new health IT related US patents, including: one that describes functionality that allows patients to use a PHR to self report clinical trial data, one that describes patients sharing PHR data with secondary care providers, and one that describes expanding what is stored in a PHR to include wills, powers of attorney, and other portions of the legal record.
Surgeon Cuts Vendors Out Of EHR Quest
Dr. Lloyd Hey of Hey Clinic for Scoliosis and Spine Surgery (NC) hires a full-time programmer to build a custom EHR after concluding that the systems available today were designed for primary care physicians rather than surgeons, and that none deliver the benefits he believes EHRs should generating.
It took a while to plough through 4 hours of Acquired podcast. I have been a fan of their work…