Guest post by Sean Armstrong, Director of Product Management at AppNeta.
Today, healthcare practices run on critical applications that connect remote users (hospitals, physicians, clinics) to centralized and hosted resources. From the largest medical centers to small clinics, healthcare organizations depend on network-sensitive applications every day. Electronic Health Records (EHR), ePrescriptions, medical imaging, online medical registries, desktop virtualization, VoIP, IP storage, cloud–based system, Software-as-a-Service — all of these critical applications help keep hospitals, physicians and clinics running. When these slow down or crash, so do the healthcare providers and the offices relying on them.
Here are five main reasons why every healthcare provider needs be able to monitor and manage application and network performance:
Who among us that spend time working in health IT don’t think about ways to use the technology in practices to create efficiency and make work life better? However, on the other hand, how often do we think about the technologies and technological strategies employed in healthcare that just don’t measure up to much except for waste of time and resources.
Stepping back for a minute, but using that concept as a launching point, I recently asked several people this very question and the responses I received were plentiful. They ranged from implementing new solutions to make life easier for physicians on rounds to techniques for streamlining the use of email.
You see, electronic health records and practice portals, for example, are not the only solutions and approaches that can make us more productive or create productive IT throughout the care setting.
Farzad Mostashari recently said that 5 percent of the problem in healthcare now is people while the remaining 95 percent of the problem is systems and IT.
According the national health IT coordinator, as reported by Government Health IT, “It’s systems that let ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
However, the tools that allow us to do extraordinary things contribute to nearly all of the problems physicians and their practices face in healthcare. IT is to blame for healthcare’s problems; not lack of payment reform, overarching government intrusion, lack of research, the fact that doctors are only able to spend about eight minutes with each patient per visit, etc.
Because I’m fascinated with the lack of information surrounding pricing of various electronic health records and because I admire the work of AmericanEHR Partners, I thought it relevant to shine a little light on another interesting piece of information from the organization.
As this seems to be the year of the big EHR switch, and because seemingly the folks at AmericanEHR hear as much as I do about the lack of transparency in the pricing structure of these solutions, I thought I’d publish some guidance for what to consider when making the transition to EHRs. In my research on the subject – I’m developing a piece on the subject of EHR pricing – I came across this piece, compiled by the AmericanEHR from the Maryland Health Care Commission.
In my engagement with leaders in and around health IT, I’m fortunate to have access to some of the best thinking and leadership in the industry. Part of my responsibility of with this publication is to collate and collect some of what I consider to be the best thought leadership in health IT and publish it for anyone to read.
In my “travels,” I recently was introduced to Dr. Ed Fotsch, CEO of PDR Network, an organization that provides innovative products and services that benefit bio/pharmaceutical manufacturers, electronic health record (EHR) and ePrescribing vendors. Hopefully, I’ll be able to feature him in the near future in a HIT Thought Leadership Highlight.
If you love drama, there may be no better time than now to be in health IT. Specifically, the CommonWell Health Alliance movement – spearheaded by vendor giants Allscripts, Athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway and McKesson — to promote health information exchange.
However, as we all know, the one giant in the room not to be invited to the dance, Epic, is crying foul.
Perhaps there’s no better place for a case study on effective use of telemedicine and health IT interoperability than in my native South Dakota.
Avera Health, a network of hospitals, family care practices and specialty clinics located in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska, opened an e-care hub in fall 2012 in Sioux Falls as way to shrink care gaps in rural medicine throughout the state and across the Northern Plains. Well, So. Dak is made up of nothing but rural areas, so this is the perfect place for an experiment.
The intent is to use electronic services to help rural patients stay closer to home and to boost small-town economies, but according to The Sioux Falls Argus Leader, officials say it also is creating a model for other systems nationally and beyond.
Guest post by Ken Perez, Director of Healthcare Policy and Senior Vice President of Marketing, MedeAnalytics, Inc.
Recently, Mitch Seavey, 53, became the oldest winner of the Iditarod, the most famous dog sledding race in the world. At a distance of 1,600 kilometers, the Iditarod constitutes a race of supreme endurance. In dog sledding, the dogs that are chosen to lead the sled are usually the smartest, as well as the fastest, and they are appropriately called lead dogs.
The lead dogs in the realm of Medicare ACOs are the 32 pioneer ACOs, the selection of which was announced in December 2011 with great fanfare and optimism. With the greater risks (and rewards) of the pioneer ACO Model, the pioneers were widely considered the best and the brightest, the organizations most likely to succeed as ACOs.
