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March 19, 2015 Headlines 7 Comments

A bill to amend title XVIII of the Social Security Act to repeal the Medicare sustainable growth rate

A new bill in Congress calls for the permanent repeal of the SRG, but also names health IT interoperability a national priority to be achieved by the end of 2018.

Graphical Display of Diagnostic Test Results in Electronic Health Records: A Comparison of 8 Systems

AHRQ publishes a study comparing the differences in how laboratory results are displayed across eight EHR systems. The study was based on 11 criteria for the proper display of lab data. None of the vendors met all 11 criteria, and some deficiencies were misleading enough to have a significant, negative impact on patient safety.

The inside story of how Apple’s new medical research platform was born

Apple reportedly began working on ResearchKit in 2013, having been inspired by a MedX presentation by Stephen Friend, MD on the future of medical research. During  his presentation he describes his ideal platform, “Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries.” Apple VP of medical technologies Mike O”Reilly was in the audience.

Epic System’s auditorium, contractor win national award

Epic’s new 11,000 seat, space-themed underground auditorium has been named the best new building in America in the over $200 million category.



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Currently there are "7 comments" on this Article:

  1. Epic can built a 200 million dollar, 11,000 seat space age award winning auditorium and EPs across the US are getting hammered with both data entry and program overload with overly complex behemoths like MU PQRS VBM MOC ICD-10 etc. etc. Epic and other EHR vendors continue to squabble about interop and leave the EPs and EHs to get penalized for their software issues. I think there is a massive disconnect here and it won’t be long until you see serious blowback from the EPs and EHs. I’m rather tired of paying for the space age play-lands of EHR vendors and everyone else making a buck of my caring for my patients. Not a day goes by that I am not considering a new profession, And to quote a famous movie, I’ve just had enough and I’m not going to take it anymore.

  2. With 17% of our economy spent mostly on EHs and EPs it seems very odd to jump on Epic for building a place for EPs and EHs to meet, learn from each other and try to improve healthcare around the globe.

    I do appreciate the doctors who dedicate their career to taking care of people. I also appreciate health system execs who work hard every day to make a margin.

    The EHs and the EPs were pretty excited about MU when it first came out. Now everyone’s down on it because there’s no paycheck with it and penalties are coming.

    Yes, some medical facilities are spartan but most not.

    The vast majority of that 17% of GDP ends up in the pockets of doctors, nurses, health system execs, workers of all sorts in the facilities, etc.

    If you want to compare average programmer salary with average doctor salary, and compare the entire Epic business to a typical hospital system’s business, I would think you’d feel good about things again. EHs and EPs – you’re still winning – and by a wide margin.

  3. It is my understanding that of the $ trillions spent on health care, approximately 7 percent or less go to doctors’ compensation. It will take many more $ trillion to wire up medical care, with little to show for it, since those doing the wiring have neglible accountability and transparency and there is negligible if any reporting of the adverse events, and near misses, unlike the aviation industry.

  4. If you didn’t build an OR Keith, then doctors (the real kind) couldn’t do surgery.

    If you didn’t buy an CT Scanner, you could charge fortunes to read them.

    If you didn’t buy an Anesthesia machine, you couldn’t make a fortune as an Anesthesiologist.

    These guys all make more than the tech companies doing EHRs.

    Time to give it a break!

  5. Well lets look at your statement Ah but keith.
    First the contractors that build ORs actually listen to surgeons about what they need. We meet, we go over workflow. We design together. They do not have headquarters with massage tables, ping pong and luxury accommodations.
    Second, we do not need EHRs to care for people. It would be different if the current EHR vendors actually gave us usable, efficient, safe and secure systems. As a group, EPs are standing on our chairs screaming that EHRs are devastating the practice of medicine.
    In our medium to large hospital, I am the head of Orthopaedic Surgery, I am on the IT committee, and guess how many times our IT staff or EHR reps have come around to make sure my workflow is efficient, safe and usable? Zero. How many times have I asked? Many. We are desperate for a new model of EHR innovation and actual support. We paid millions of dollars for our system and it only gets in our way, you could not imagine the click here, not there, type dot this, do this before that, but don’t click here, etc that we have to remember… Its awful.
    With MU 3 proposed rules and EHR cert criteria recently released, I see its more of the same, infinitely worse. As front EPs we are penalized for the lack of action of others including our poor and our elderly patients, we are penalized because our EHR cannot interoperate let alone be efficient or usable. EHRs companies don’t get penalized for anything. We are not data entry clerks we are physicians. We are overwhelmed and overburdened by these programs.
    Someone is making a lot of money at Cerner and Epic and all the others.
    I am shocked that you feel the costs to the medical system are the payments to EPs. That is a joke. If you paid EPs zero, you would hardly dent the trillions spent of healthcare. If you feel that EPs get 17% of GDP then you would need to know that GDP is 16.7 trillion. Then the average salary of an EP would be 2.8 billion. there are only 970,000 EPs in the US. So good luck with your math.

  6. re:meltoots

    http://www.slideshare.net/histalk/1-2014-vendor-overview1

    I can’t tell you what all the doctors, nurses and med techs in america knock down for total accumulated gross revenue (before taxes and employee expense (oh but wait, you’re your own employee)).

    But, I can tell you that Mr. H just posted Vince C’s presentation on the gross revenue of all the major HIT vendors and it pegs in just a bit below 12B total.

    That’s a pretty solid fact and very provable.

    So, Wikipedia says our GDP is 17.2 Trillion bucks.
    If healthcare is 17% of that, that makes 2.9 Trillion of that healthcare related.
    If almost all the vendors combined make a up 12 billion (total gross revenue) then that is about 0.4% of the 2.9 Trillion.

    Apparently doesn’t rock as much to be in software as some of you claim.

    Good thing us programmers have a few hundred thousand hours of user centered design, programming, QAing and supporting users who are thrilled to have us help them cash yet another MU check or collect another performance bonus from CMS.







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