Mobile health technology adoption depends on insurers Insurers will also play a pivotal role in the development and adoption of patient-focused mobile health (mHealth) technology adoption for wellness as well as for the management of chronic diseases. 1. Payers hold the purse strings.  Insurers will be the ones paying for the use of mHealth for chronic disease management for the vast majority of patients.  They have a vested interest ...

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Why IT is the core of the healthcare renaissance Warning!  I am a practicing doctor who sees real patients using an electronic medical record (EMR).  My sole agenda is to provide the best patient care.  I have no financial stake in information technology (IT).  However, unlike the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Stephen Soumerai of Harvard or Mr. Ross Koppel of the University of Pennsylvania, I have actually ...

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Why the iPad Mini is the tablet physicians have been waiting for I was skeptical about the iPad Mini.  I’ve used my Retina display iPad (3rd generation) for the past six months and been satisfied with the experience. I’ve used it in the hospital setting during rounds, and even while talking to patients in the ER.  I’m able to easily pull up Epic’s EMR using the Citrix app, and I can easily store the iPad ...

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Every time someone publishes an article or a paper or a blog post that has anything remotely to do with electronic health records (EHR), there is usually a flurry of reactions in the comments section, now available in most publications, and these always include at least half a dozen anonymous statements, usually from clinicians, decrying the current state of EHR software, best summed up by a commenter on
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You're using an EHR. You're e-prescribing. You've eliminated pulling the old paper chart (most of the time!). That's good. But how about those orders? Are you still writing on the bottom of your fee slip or encounter ticket that you want the patient to be scheduled for a test or with another physician? That's not good. Get the order in your EHR. Instead of taking the time to write on paper, keep your hand ...

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Venture capitalists (VCs) ... are a combination of professional gamblers and loan sharks. The secret to success is pure luck and ruthlessness, and when the combination works and the ball lands on the exact number on the spinning roulette, venture capitalists make lots of money. -Margalit Gur-Arie, via KevinMD.com The tone of this article, Why venture capitalists shouldn’t try to solve health care, exemplifies what is wrong with healthcare. In ...

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Imagine this scenario: A CEO stands in front of the board at a crucial juncture in corporate history, and says:

Members of the board, as you can see from the financial statements before you, we have had a reasonably good year. What!? You don’t have the financial statements in front of you? I have them here. I mean, I think I have them here. Where are they? Let me check with ...

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Healthcare innovation companies are just beginning to understand technology challenges that come with engaging patients with chronic diseases in care management and care transition. Many of healthcare IT vendors assumed that a simple access to portals with half-baked information and  fragmented medical records will do the trick. Boy… were they wrong! For the past twenty years, the HIT industry has focused on developing software solutions exclusively for healthcare providers. These companies ...

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As medicine moves forward in its most technologically advanced era yet, we continue to struggle with basic concepts such as record keeping.  The medical record is vital to the care of the patient.  It tells the story of each patient’s journey through the medical system.  The idea of centralizing all pertinent medical information is, in theory, a step in the right direction.  In utopia, there would be one medical record ...

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Not long ago, Secretary of Health and Human Services Sibelius and US Attorney General Holder issued a stern warning to healthcare providers who are using electronic health records (EHRs).  The federal officers maintain there has been an alarming increase in the charges to Medicare in institutions where EHRs have been implemented, and they warn that those behaviors will be treated as “fraud,” an illegal gaming of the system to increase ...

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