Morning Headlines 2/28/13

House committee worried DoD, VA ‘moving the goal posts’ on e-health records

VA CIO Roger Baker made his final appearance before the Veterans House Services Committee Wednesday to answer for the cancellation of the iEHR project. He reported that the program was large, complex, and difficult to control. He also acknowledged that both the VA and DoD, could have done a better job communicating changes across the departments. Baker, along with VA CTO Peter Levin, resigned their positions last week.

M*Modal and Merge Healthcare Bring Speech Understanding to Imaging Solutions for Improved Workflow and Reporting

Merge and MModal announce a strategic partnership that will allow Merge to sell MModal’s natural language understanding tools baked into Merge’s imaging and radiology PACS solutions.

Predicting out of intensive care unit cardiopulmonary arrest or death using electronic medical record data

A recent study measuring the ability of EHR-backed predictive surveillance tools to predict cardiac events concludes that the automated model outperformed both manual risk assessments and human judgment-driven risk response teams. The automated model predicted cardiac events 15.9 hours before they occurred and 5.7 hours earlier than rapid response team activation.

Why Telemedicine Is Finally Ready to Take Off

CIO.com points to advances in technology, pressure to reduce costs, and bipartisan political support to substantiate its prediction that 2013 will be a flash point for telehealth adoption.