Practice Technology

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The United States ranks in the bottom half among comparable countries in almost every metric used to measure the adoption of health information technology, according to the National Broadband Plan recently delivered to Congress by the Federal Communications Commission.

The state of Louisiana has launched a new website, www.healthfinderla.gov, in an effort to give residents easy access to detailed, accurate information on how to live more healthful lives.

The use of at-home medical devices to connect doctors and patients via the Internet can help patients and their physicians work together more efficiently to manage some chronic conditions, according to results of a pilot project that paired the Cleveland Clinic?s electronic health records (EHR) system with Microsoft?s online HealthVault service.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded more than $2.4 million to five grantee teams to test whether and how information?such as the stress levels of caregivers of premature infants and medication-taking routines of senior citizens at risk of cognitive decline ? can be collected, interpreted, and acted on by clinicians and patients in real-world clinical settings.

The HITECH Act was swept into law as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It affects many aspects of your HIPAA compliance and means increased enforcement and harsher penalties for violators. Here's what you need to know.

The concept of ?meaningful use,? together with an improving economy, appears to be spurring an increase in healthcare information technology spending, suggest recently released results of the 21st annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Leadership Survey.

To close the broadband connectivity gap that exists among healthcare practices, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing transforming its Rural Health Care Program, which is authorized to spend $400 million per year, to help healthcare delivery locations meaningfully use health information technology.

"Healthcare information technology is the instrument that will transform healthcare . . . [and] improve quality, safety, access, and cost-efficiency," said Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society board chairman, March 1 in his opening remarks at the HIMSS annual conference in Atlanta.

Automated telephone outreach with speech recognition is not an effective way to increase the incidence of colorectal cancer screening, according to a study of 80,000 health plan members published in the February 8 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Medical practice leaders continue to experience administrative challenges reporting data for Medicare?s Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, according to results of a survey recently released by the Medical Group Management Association. Specifically, respondents reported difficulty accessing the feedback reports and said that the presentation of information in the reports was not satisfactory.

More than 150 health information technology systems from 104 participating companies and organizations, including vendors, health information exchanges, government agencies, and open-source development groups, were tested recently at IHE North America?s annual Connectathon. Results are posted here.

Dermatologists and oncologists are the physician specialist groups most likely to communicate with patients online, according to the latest physician report, "Physicians in 2012: The Outlook on Health Information Technology," from pharmaceutical and healthcare market research company Manhattan Research.

Two academic medical centers and one rural hospital will be recognized with Stage 7 awards, representing attainment of the highest level of electronic health record adoption as judged by HIMSS Analytics, at the 2010 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual meeting in March in Atlanta.