Healthcare IT Blog

9:14 a.m. Sunday… Only one person in the checkout line at Stop and Shop in Everett, MA. Cool. Time to play pop culture catch-up. Who knew Jennifer Aniston might be getting married in Greece? Or that Brad and Angie and all those kids were in the Galapagos applying SPF 1,000 to protect against rays bouncing off that $500,000 engagement ring? Hang on…Newsweek next to Us and People and Hello? Weird. Even weirder, it was screeching, “The End of the Doctor-Patient Relationship” above the Newsweek title itself.1Kudos to the Newsweek editors on “The Doctor Will See You—If You’re Quick” by Shannon Brownlee, acting director of the New America Health Policy Program and author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer . I shelled...Continue Reading

At the recent NaviNet Chief Medical Officer Advisory Board meeting, Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Todd Park, gave us an inside view of the HealthDataInitiative Forum III (HDI Forum III), a competition also known as The Health Datapalooza, which will take place at the Washington Convention Center on June 5-6, 2012. In addition to Todd Park, the agenda includes healthcare luminaries and policy makers such as:•   Matt Miller is a weekly columnist for the Washington Post’s online edition; the host of public radio’s “Left, Right & Center”; a contributor to MSNBC and CNBC; and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.•   Thomas Goetz serves as Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, in addition to being the author of...Continue Reading

This morning, we had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Richard Popiel, President and Chief Operating Officer at Horizon Healthcare Innovations, a subsidiary of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (BCBSNJ), and spoke about just-released results on its patient-centered medical home (PCMH) program, which is New Jersey’s only comprehensive, statewide PCMH. The program now includes 152 physicians at 22 practices and will continue to expand throughout 2012.Many of you are familiar with Kevin Maher and Dr. Tom McCarrick’s stories, which highlight how Horizon Healthcare Innovations collaborates with the primary care physician (PCP) offices in the PCMH program. The stories anecdotally relate the superior patient outcome and cost benefits resulting from the program through the voices...Continue Reading

 We recently sat down with Dr. Geeta Nayyar, the first-ever Chief Medical Information Officer at AT&T and a practicing physician. Her work touches multiple healthcare stakeholders and organizations. Geeta’s clinical background is in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology. She is a member of the Public Policy Committee for the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and serves on the Committee on Government Affairs for the American College of Rheumatology. Dr. Nayyar believes that technology can enable effective and efficient healthcare.   What do you predict as the biggest game-changers in HIT in 2012?Healthcare stakeholders are increasingly looking for technologies that will better allow clinically integrated care. Technology can help us analyze the...Continue Reading

Noted author, commentator, and observer Nancy Finn (e-Patients Live Longer: The Complete Guide to Managing Health Care Using Technology) joined NaviNet’s Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, Meghan Oates-Zalesky, on Thursday, March 15, 2012, to discuss one of the most important challenges in healthcare today: patient engagement. The AHIP-sponsored webinar, “Care Collaboration and the Engaged Patient,” drew a wide audience of health plans, providers, nurse practitioners, care coordinators, and many others interested in this pivotal piece critical to the success of the accountable care delivery model puzzle.We are in a transition period, moving from a fragmented healthcare system to a more collaborative model focused on the patient at the center of care. Within the framework...Continue Reading

Jennifer Dennard is the Social Marketing Director at Billian Inc.—parent company of Billian’s HealthData, Porter Research, and HITR.com—as well as a syndicated blogger for Healthcare IT News and EMRandEHR.com. We caught up with Jennifer on how to educate and engage patients, the focus on coordinated care, and the powerful role social media can play in our healthcare system.What do you see as the biggest developments in HIT in 2012?Two areas immediately come to mind based on the work that Billian’s HealthData and Porter Research have been doing over the past six months. I expect that 2012 will bring a significant increase in the development of and utilization of business intelligence and analytics tools, and the formation of a corresponding number of accountable care...Continue Reading

Janice McCallum, Managing Director of Health Content Advisors, the healthcare division of the InfoCommerce Group, Inc. (ICG), is a leading blogger and contributor to healthcare IT conversations on social media. We spoke with Janice about her predictions for care collaboration, value-based purchasing, and meaningful use in the coming year.What do you see as the biggest developments in HIT in the next year?We’ll begin to see the emergence of models for leveraging the secondary data produced by electronic health records (EHRs). Healthcare analytics companies will find more opportunities to analyze aggregate data compiled from data recorded in EHRs. The most interesting development area is in mining longitudinal EHR data to create inputs for clinical decision support (CDS) systems. While...Continue Reading

Chad Johnson is a blogger and curator for HL7Standards, which focuses on how technology can revolutionize our healthcare system. In this post, Chad shares his insights on the role that patients, providers, and health plans play in this change. What factors will shape care collaboration in the coming year?One of the major motivations for organizations to adopt care collaboration is the ability to curb rising healthcare costs. To improve the quality of care and manage healthcare expenditures, all healthcare continuum participants must move toward a system that rewards improved patient outcomes.What is the role of health plans in creating technology solution standards in accountable care organization (ACO) development?To date, government organizations have predominantly set technology...Continue Reading

What if we could lower the financial burden associated with the top 5% of patients accounting for almost 50% of healthcare costs?1 We believe that such a transformation is achievable through accountable care delivery models like the patient-centered medical home (PCMH), which offers a collaborative, team-based approach with the primary care physician (PCP) at its nexus. One of the most powerful elements in PCMH is that this model financially rewards outcome-based healthcare.In contrast to the current fee-for-service delivery model, the PCMH model offers financial incentives for PCPs, specialists, and healthcare plans to share their data—thereby avoiding redundancies and identifying gaps in care before they result in hospitalization and emergency room visits. Here in the United States,...Continue Reading

The Massachusetts Health Data Consortium‘s February 3 HIT’12: The Future is Now attracted leaders in healthcare from all over New England: providers, health plans, government agency staff, and other healthcare continuum stakeholders. This one-day event included such topics as "Cutting-Edge Technologies in Genomics, Robotics, and Medical Care," "How HIT Has Transformed Care Delivery," and "The Leading Challenges of 2012."What if you could transform the terabytes of structured and unstructured medical data into actionable intelligence that physicians can use to meaningfully improve patient outcomes and satisfaction, as well as lower costs? This was the challenge addressed in the panel discussion “Technology Solutions to Meet the Challenges of the Future,” which included NaviNet’s...Continue Reading