Healthcare IT Update

Chosen Communities to be ‘HIT’ with $220M in Grants

Beacon funding program to kick off when 130 applicants are chosen. Fifteen lucky communities will be awarded a total of about $220 million in grants for health IT infrastructure, national coordinator for health IT David Blumenthal, MD has announced. The grants will come from the Beacon Community program, which provides funding to communities to build and strengthen their HIT infrastructure and exchange capabilities. The chosen communities will have to “pay it forward” by achieving measurable improvements in health care quality, safety, efficiency, and population health — and then sharing lessons learned.

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HIT Jobs: There’s Gold in Dem Dar Hills

Prospecting for jobs? HIT is the place to be. All those doctors jonesin’ for EHRs means that someone’s got to be around to sell, implement and support HIT systems, and CIOs at health systems already are feeling the pinch. “At the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS ) conference in Atlanta this week, some CIOs reported they’re finding it hard to recruit needed talent and that they’re seeing early signs of talent wars,” says this Information Week article. And if health system CIOs can’t hire HIT staff directly, they’re looking to outsource, which means that consultants are hiring as well. Given the pace at which technology and the market are moving, newcomers just might be on an even keel with seasoned vets when it comes to hiring, the article suggests. Even folks who’ve been HIT pros for awhile are taking classes to keep up with the flood of new information ……

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HIT Pits Techies & Docs

If HIT vendors want to sell their wares to physicians, they must acknowledge and fix this key problem. A recently-held President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) meeting drove home a key point—medicine and IT are strange bedfellows. Things got interesting Google CEO Eric Schmidt engaged physician and health policy expert Atul Gawande in a witty exchange. Dr. Gawende’s recently published book, The Checklist Manifesto, promotes checklists as a way to improve health care quality and at the same time lower delivery costs. Google’s Schmidt responded by asking Gawande to imagine what it will be like to visit a doctor be like five years from now. “In my ideal world what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms he or she also observes, and it would be matched against the data in this repository,” Schmidt said. “Then this knowledge engine would…

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EHRs Don’t Improve Quality of Care, New Study Finds

What will we get for our $19 billion HIT investment? Do a google news search for ‘HIT’ or ‘EHR’ and without fail you’ll get at least a couple of articles that gush over health information technology’s potential to improve health care quality, but a new study from Harvard says HIT hasn’t yet proved itself be the easy cure-all for what ails us. An Internet search today, for example, might yield articles lauding EHR’s potential to prevent 25 percent of hip fractures or battle H1N1 in emergency departments. But if you look closely at these articles, you see that such studies are often funded — and later publicized — by HIT companies that have lots to gain from nationwide EHR adoption. Also, such studies tend to focus on health care institutions that have state-of-the-art EHR systems…

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Rise from HIT Geek to Healthcare Leader With This Lesson from Radio Days

If you’re like most information professionals, you didn’t go into your career expecting to be one of those slick, charismatic business leaders. But it’s technical pros that just might be the best equipped to be transformative leaders that lead their health care entities through big changes, author Malcolm Gladwell told information professionals gathered last week at IBM’s ‘Information On Demand’ conference. Gladwell has written some well-known books like The Tipping Point and Blink, and he told us a cool story from the 1920s that distills what turns the IT nerd down the hall into a “change maven.” Meet David Sarnoff, a guy who worked for RCA during the days when radio was an interesting piece of technology that consumers weren’t buying. The news was big, Gladwell explains, and most big cities had five newspaper editions per day. So, RCA was broadcasting news programs…

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Seeking the Meaning of ‘Meaningful Use?’

We’ve all heard the term ‘meaningul use,’ but what exactly does it mean? The latest American Medical News tackles the ‘meaningful use’ question. To qualify for ARRA incentives, it’s not enough to simply purchase EHR. They must achieve ‘meaningful use.’ Here are some bullet-quick takeaways for HIT professionals seeking a path to enlightenment: HHS hasn’t officially defined ‘meaningful use’ in a regulation, but there’s enough language in the legislation to guess what the feds will say before their end-of-year deadline. Meaningful use involves system certification, as well as capabilities for electronic prescribing, quality reporting and information exchange. If you’re buying HIT now, the no-surprises approach is to go with a big vendor that will adapt your system to developing federal regs. Best way to get a jump on achieving meaningful use in your health care organization? Seek out those paper holdouts among your clinicians, and ‘electrify’ them. More from AMNews…

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HIT Grants: How To Get Your Share of ARRA’s $48 Billion

Put these grant opportunities on your radar–and stay tuned. Your health system may qualify for millions in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding to support your HIT initiatives — that’s in addition to the Medicare and Medicaid EHR adoption incentives. Much of the ARRA funding will become grants that health centers can apply for, said Michael Paddock, CEO of Grants Office in Rochester, N.Y., at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Chicago. Responding to these funding opportunities will be similar to what you’ve done for previous grants; the difference will be in the dollar amount, which could reach to hundreds of millions, Paddock said. Still, the ARRA funding will not stretch far enough to fund EHR across all healthcare agencies. Be on the lookout for loan programs to fill in the gaps, he added. AUDIO TRAINING EVENT: $44,000 for…

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