Healthcare IT Update

Electronic Exchange of PHI Might Help Quality of Care, Says GAO

Are government regs blocking our way to becoming ‘meaningful users’? Electronically share information! But be sure to protect it! Providers are caught between two competing federal initiatives, according to the latest General Accounting Office study, and security concerns over PHI might actually be holding them back from achieving better of quality of care. As required by the HITECH Act, the GAO released a study on Feb. 17, 2010 titled “Health Care Entities’ Reported Disclosure Practices and Effects on Quality of Care.”

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EHRs Don’t Save Hospitals Money

New Harvard study debunks some myths. Everybody’s talking up the financial benefits of electronic health records these days, and CMS’s new proposed regs on ARRA incentive payments to hospitals and providers who adopt EHR technology assumes that quality of care and EHRs go hand in hand. Federal News Radio calls adoption of EHR the “holy grail” for health care providers. New Harvard study debunks some myths. Everybody’s talking up the financial benefits of electronic health records these days, and CMS’s new proposed regs on ARRA incentive payments to hospitals and providers who adopt EHR technology assumes that quality of care and EHRs go hand in hand. Federal News Radio calls adoption of EHR the “holy grail” for health care providers. We reported on a study released back in November finding that adoption of EHRs doesn’t improve quality of care. Now, in an article…

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Case Study: One Health System’s Plan for Physician EHR Adoption

The North Shore-LIJ Health System has jumped feet first into EHR and is spending millions to incentivize its physicians to adopt the program — and the clinical protocols that are built into it. North Shore-LIJ announced in September that it will pay for up to 85 percent of the cost of implementing and operating its new electronic health records (EHR) system in 7,000 affiliated physician offices in New York City and Long Island.

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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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