At what point will we, as patients decide that enough is enough.  There is certainly sufficient technology available now for medical practices to do away with the clipboard and at some point we are going to begin insisting that they take advantage of this technology.

You’re right, that is a bit of a rant but those thoughts were going through my mind often at HIMSS11 last month.  I saw rows of booths packed full with amazing technology that could significantly improve the patient experience at any sized medical practice.  One of the easiest, and most cost-effective things I saw was the Patient Passport Express™ from Connected Technology Solutions, or CTS.

There were a number of patient kiosk type devices on display at HIMSS11 but the CTS version was the only one I saw that was adjustable. CTS claims their 40″ vertical range of screen adjustability provides unprecedented access, convenience and usability.

According to the company over 5 million patients have already used CTS Patient Passport Express kiosks to:

• Check-in for appointments
• Update medical histories
• Verify insurance information
• Make credit card co-payments and bill payments
• Sign documents using an electronic signature pad
• Print HIPAA forms and other documents

The easy-to-move and ADA compliant touch screen is as accessible to a person in a wheelchair as it is to a 6-foot tall person standing, and can be used by vision-impaired, hearing-impaired, or blind individuals, as well as those with limited dexterity. The anti-glare screen allows for use near large windows and skylights.

“CTS is known for its innovation,” said CEO Sandy Nix. “Our engineers and designers are driven to create unequalled user experiences that continue to revolutionize the patient check-in industry.”

Since implementing OpenVista only a few weeks ago, LMC has embraced the comprehensive open source health IT system throughout the facility. Clinician adoption of the system, the key to meeting meaningful use and true clinical transformation, is virtually universal. Now in its first stage toward a paperless environment, LMC physicians are entering 93 percent of medications through OpenVista’s Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) Module, far surpassing the 30 percent required by the federal government for meaningful use.

“I am so proud of the way Lutheran Medical Center, as an institution, has adopted the OpenVista EHR and is making it an integral part of the care we provide,” said Wendy Z. Goldstein, president and CEO of Lutheran Medical Center. “It took a lot of work to get here, but the transition has gone very smoothly; the clinicians and staff deserve endless praise. I have no doubt that, with Medsphere’s valuable assistance, we will be prepared for meaningful use next year.”

Managing over 627,000 outpatient and 66,000 emergency room visits annually, the 687 attending physicians, 200 residents and 600 nurses at LMC can now access a range of OpenVista features: CPOE, medication order management (pharmacy), laboratory, radiology, and nutrition and food service. Enhanced emergency room efficiency is also part of the solution through an ED Tracking Board that LMC developed and Medsphere will share with other clients through the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem. The entire system becomes interoperable with third-party applications through Medsphere’s Interface Suite. (Visit http://www.medsphere.com/solutions/openvista-for-the-enterprise for more on OpenVista applications and benefits to clinical workflow and patient care.)

Improved clinician collaboration and communication facilitated by OpenVista also enabled LMC providers to transition to an EHR environment with minimal workflow disruptions. Reductions in administrative paperwork create more time for patients to receive increasingly efficient, well-informed medical care.

“Now medications go straight from the doctor’s head to the pharmacy—it’s wonderful,” said Helen Buckel, R.N., a nurse manager at LMC. “Doctors and nurses are able to focus more on what we were trained to do instead of paperwork. And I don’t have a crowd of people at my station every morning looking for meds and paper charts.”

With OpenVista in place, LMC is better able to maximize teaching opportunities in real time.

“The residents have a better sense of what medication reconciliation is, because it’s gone from disjointed information on several sheets of paper to one screen with all relevant data,” explained Beth Raucher, M.D., LMC’s chief medical officer. “Recently, when there was a question about the medication a resident ordered, we were able to have a whole discussion about that in real time, and we were able to see and decipher exactly what happened. Several days ago, it would have taken hours to get the same information.”

Added Chief Operating Officer Claudia Caine, “We saw an immediate improvement in efficiency and access to information. Our EHR clearly improves our ability to take care of patients. We don’t have handwriting issues for doctor orders. If there’s a medication allergy, there’s an instant alert in the system. It’s also easier and faster for the pharmacy or laboratory to double check things as well––for each department to be better partners in care.”

“Moving forward, we expect the improvements from CPOE to position us for rapid adoption of our next two phases of implementation: clinical documentation and barcode medication administration,” said LMC Chief Nursing Officer Rosanne Raso, R.N. “All combined, these will go a long way toward overall enhancements in quality and efficiency.”

“Medsphere congratulates Lutheran Medical Center on OpenVista go live and, more importantly, moving so quickly to embrace the solution clinically and organizationally,” said Mike Doyle, Medsphere president and CEO. “As is already demonstrated, the ultimate beneficiaries will be LMC patients. This shows quite clearly that OpenVista is just as effective in large urban clinical environments as it is in rural community hospitals.”

In the greater New York area, Lutheran will soon be joined by New Jersey’s Meadowlands Hospital, which is going live this week, and Hoboken University Medical Center, scheduled to go live in the first quarter of next year. Regionally, Medsphere has already implemented OpenVista in Silver Hill Hospital, a nationally recognized psychiatric facility in New Canaan, Conn., and the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, a seven-facility acute, long-term and psychiatric care network.

As the most fully commercialized version of the Department of Veterans Affairs VistA EHR system, OpenVista is a responsible reapplication of the VA’s $8.5 billion VistA investment. OpenVista is proven to enhance medical care and remove the cost barrier to EHR implementation that hospitals typically encounter when considering proprietary, closed-source products. Medsphere’s subscription-based and transparent pricing model for implementation, maintenance and support services make effective health IT resources financially possible for every hospital, clinic and integrated care system in the United States.

About Lutheran Medical Center

A Level I Trauma Center and Stroke Center, Lutheran Medical Center (LMC) has cared for Brooklyn communities since 1883. As a full service 476-bed teaching hospital, LMC is the hub of Lutheran HealthCare, a network of primary, acute and long-term care centers in southwest Brooklyn. Learn more about LMC and its commitment to patient care excellence, community service, health education and research online at www.LutheranMedicalCenter.com.

About Medsphere and OpenVista

Founded in 2002 and based in Carlsbad, Calif., Medsphere Systems Corporation is an award-winning organization of clinical and technology professionals working to make quality health IT solutions accessible to organizations of virtually any size, shape or budget. Medsphere’s OpenVista® is a portfolio of clinical support products and professional services that leverages an electronic health record (EHR) system developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. This VistA EHR is widely credited with helping transform the VA into the nation’s most efficient and clinically effective healthcare organization. OpenVista, the most fully commercialized VistA offspring, is a responsible reapplication of the VA’s $8.5 billion investment, which recent studies show have yielded $3.09 billion in benefits, primarily from the near elimination of medication administration issues and duplicate testing.

Medsphere’s subscription-based pricing model enables hospital, clinic and integrated delivery network customers to pay for OpenVista from their operating budget with no upfront costs or back-end balloon payments. Expert implementation and other services facilitate fluid and rapid transition to a paperless clinical environment focusing on best practices and evidence-based medicine in six to nine months. Medsphere also actively nurtures the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem, a global community of customers, partners, developers and other online collaborators who drive OpenVista innovation, and provide a parallel development and support structure.

Learn more about Medsphere at www.medsphere.com / www.medsphere.org.

“GE worked closely with us from the start to understand our current and future needs,” explained Carla Fonte, Chief Information Officer of Wooster Community Hospital and Chairman of the eLINCx Board. “GE’s eHealth team helped us to translate our goals into an implementation road map that will drive short term success for eLINCx and the community. By sharing health information, laboratory results and radiology reports, our clinicians will be able to make more informed decisions at the point of care and improve patient outcomes, which is our top priority.”

eLINCx will first implement GE’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) to support physicians when viewing patient clinical summary data from across the provider community. The HIE will provide data to GE Healthcare’s own Centricity® EMR, as well as non-GE clinical software products. The data will be made available directly in the various screens of electronic medical records (EMR), making it a seamless part of the physicians’ regular workflow. When a patient’s care is transitioned, the HIE will support an automated and digital flow of clinical information from one EMR to the next. This helps ensure a continuity of care across multiple providers and improves the patient’s experience.

Electronic personal health information is subject to the same privacy and security laws as the information found in a patient’s paper chart. eLINCx is committed to educating patients of their participation options and ensuring the secure exchange of electronic health information.

This first phase also includes giving hospital and referring doctors more timely and easy access to lab results and radiology reports, as well as an integrated referral management process. “Developing a seamless referral system completely within the GE HIE is another key element of our success,” said Carla Fonte. “This system will help automate referral processes, reducing inefficiencies that cost time and money and helps to make sure that our patients in this community are not getting lost in the system.”

Earl Jones, Vice President and General Manager of GE Healthcare eHealth, added “eLINCx has a clear vision of improving patient outcomes by enhancing care team collaboration. eLINX will enable better information sharing, workflow collaboration, and insight – providing better information at the point of care for better care decisions.”

Wooster Community Hospital is a 150-bed full-service acute care hospital that offers a complete range of inpatient and outpatient services. The Hospital has been named one of the top 100 hospitals in the United States for three years running by Thomson Reuters.

Dunlap Community Hospital is a critical access facility that has been serving Orrville and the Wayne County area for more than 50 years. The family-centered care hospital creates partnerships among healthcare practitioners, patients and families that enhance the quality of health care and result in the best patient outcomes.

ABOUT eLINCx:

Created in 2010, eLINCx’s vision is the development and implementation of a sustainable health information exchange partnering local hospitals and healthcare providers. The electronic exchange of secure health information will improve patient safety, improve the quality of clinical care, reduce duplication of services, improve clinical and administrative efficiency and effectively identify potential threats to public health. eLINCx is collaborating with state and national data exchange efforts to accomplish these common goals.

ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE:

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.

Our “healthymagination” vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employees are committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.

Through this integrated solution, the medical facility looks to improve operational efficiencies, redefine patient care and provide a complete view of the electronic record across the continuum of care. Streamline Health will assist the acute care facility by providing convenient electronic access, including secure web-based access, to all forms of patient information anytime, anywhere. The use of Streamline Health’s enterprise solutions will lead to improvements in regulatory compliance, reduction in operating costs, as well as enhancements in the coordination of care.

“We are pleased to deliver integrated solutions offering improvements in operational efficiencies to enhance patient care,” saidJ. Brian Patsy, president and CEO of Streamline Health. “The seamless integrated workflow solutions will offer the medical facility a flexible, automated process that increases productivity and reduces costs.”

Mr. Patsy continued, “We are particularly pleased with the traction that we are gaining in our sales and marketing efforts to this point in the fiscal year. We are approaching the lower end of our sales goal for the entire year while still operating in our third fiscal quarter. We hope to finish the year on a strong note.”

About Streamline Health

Streamline Health is a leading supplier of document workflow and document management tools, applications, and services that assist strategic business partners and healthcare organizations to improve operational efficiencies through business process optimization. The Company provides integrated tools and technologies for automating document-intensive environments, including document workflow, document management, e-forms, connectivity, optical character recognition (OCR) and business process integration.

Streamline Health’s solutions create a permanent document-based repository of historical health information that is complementary and can be seamlessly integrated with existing disparate clinical, financial and administrative information systems, providing convenient electronic access to all forms of patient information from any location, including secure web-based access. For additional information, please visit our website at http://www.streamlinehealth.net.

EHR systems are hospital data systems that continuously collect and classify large volumes of patient information, process patient data faster, reduce paperwork to improve physician communication and clinic workflows, and thus result in the delivery of more efficient and higher quality care. Electronic data management is increasingly an important topic in hospitals worldwide, especially larger centers serving significant patient populations. It is also a critical issue in government policy, due to its potential to increase efficiency, reduce errors and cut costs.

“One facet of BIOTRONIK’s therapy development strategy is to offer advanced patient management capabilities to our customers,” commented Marlou Janssen, Global Vice President of Marketing & Sales at BIOTRONIK. “BIOTRONIK EHR DataSync offers sophisticated digital data integration – and therefore a new dimension in the care that can be provided to patients. This is just the beginning of a series of EHR solutions that BIOTRONIK will be bringing to physicians and hospitals in the future.”

BIOTRONIK has been a key contributor to the industry-wide EHR data format standards established in mid-2010. BIOTRONIK has already completed pilot EHR integration projects in the United States and successfully participated in interoperability testing at the IHE Connectathon 2010. The Connectathon independently confirmed interoperability of BIOTRONIK Home Monitoring^® and the BIOTRONIK device programmer (ICS 3000) when aligned with major information technology (IT) service providers.

The publication, entitled “The CIO’s Guide to Implementing EHRs in the HITECH Era”, tackles the important steps healthcare organizations must take in successfully implementing electronic health records, from the initial planning through the final documentation of results.

Based on research involving nearly 170 CHIME members who provided information on real-world experiences of planning for and implementing electronic health records in their organizations, this guide provides new direction on the best practices for successful EHR adoption.

CHIME’s initiative for the guidebook is an extension of a collaborative effort involving the American Hospital Association (AHA) earlier this year. CHIME and the AHA worked together to produce the Healthcare Leader Action Guide on Implementing Electronic Health Records which was unveiled at this summer’s AHA and Health Forum’s Annual Leadership Summit. The CHIME-AHA joint publication provides important information for CEOs and other senior executives in hospitals.

Now CHIME has produced its companion, a CIO-oriented publication providing additional details on how organizations should focus their efforts to implement EHR systems that will qualify for stimulus funding payments through the HITECH Act.

The 80-page guidebook is available free to the public and can be downloaded here:http://www.cio-chime.org/advocacy/CIOsGuideBook/CIO_Guide_Final.pdf.

“As the nation’s leading professional organization for healthcare IT executives, we felt it was important to gather the collective wisdom of our members and produce a guide that could help the nation’s providers through the next few years,” said CHIME Board President Timothy Stettheimer, Ph.D., FCHIME, CHCIO.

The guide is CHIME’s latest effort to shape the future of healthcare through IT leadership, which the organization is doing by assisting CIOs and senior healthcare IT leaders through education, collaboration and advocacy.

“The guide provides just a sample of the experience that CHIME’s members have in implementing these complex systems,” Stettheimer added. “CHIME offers a variety of professional and educational support to its members, which is crucial to IT executives embarking on the EHR journey.”

On Wednesday, August 25 at 1 p.m. EST, CHIME will conduct a public webinar, highlighting some of the principal building blocks of a successful EHR implementation shared within the guide and how organizations can use it to support their IT efforts to achieve meaningful use. The webinar will feature insights from guidebook author Fred Bazzoli, CHIME Director of Communications, and contributor Edward Marx, CIO of Texas Health Resources, who will be on hand to discuss key premises and answer questions. To register now, click here.

About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 1,400 CIO members and over 70 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit www.cio-chime.org.

Maryland has approved a bill making it the first state to require commercial health plans to offer doctors incentives for adopting electronic medical records.

Starting in 2011, when physicians adopt EMRs, health plans will have to pay them higher reimbursements, pay out a lump sum  incentive or offer in-kind services that have financial value. This ties in with the state’s timetable for getting physicians online; by 2015, physicians who don’t adopt EMRs will face penalties.

For the rest of the article please go to fiercehealthcare.com here.

Walk though a typical Kaiser Permanente doctor’s office or hospital, and you won’t find a paper chart lying around. Kaiser, with 450 hospitals and offices around the country, is almost entirely paperless.

But as the rest of the health care industry rushes to follow in Kaiser’s digital footsteps, Kaiser’s paperless success story–a 10-year, $4 billion effort–might actually serve as a cautionary tale.

By no means has the Kaiser e-health project failed. In fact, besides some hiccups, it has gone well: Kaiser said it has seen more satisfied patients and a slight dip in emergency room visits and hospital stays, which cuts costs. Even the doctors grumbling the loudest beforehand don’t know what they would do if they were forced back to paper.

Unfortunately, the rest of the health care system looks nothing like Kaiser.

Kaiser is a rare beast: both an insurance provider and medical provider. Investing in digital technology was projected to create efficiencies in its medical services and boost the bottom line.

Most hospitals don’t operate like that. They provide a service, bill the insurance company or the government, and move on to the next patient, efficiency be damned.

For the rest of this fabulous article please see the news.com website here.

A report recently issued by the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Health Research Institute concludes that government incentives intended to spur the use of health information technology are a “small carrot” when compared with the amount of money it will cost hospitals and physician practices to implement and maintain electronic health records, or EHRs, during the next five years.

The recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or ARRA, makes funds available to hospitals and physician practices that implement government-certified EHR systems between 2011 and 2015. According to the ARRA, the federal government will pay individual physicians as much as $44,000 to upgrade their practices from paper-based records to EHRs. 

However, the report “Rock and a Hard Place: An Analysis of the $36 Billion Impact From Health IT Stimulus Funding” estimates that a three-physician practice could spend anywhere from $173,750 to $296,000 for an EHR package complete with software, implementation, training and software maintenance. 

For the rest of this enlightening article and some great information on the “penalty phase” of the stimulus plan please see the AAFP.Org website here.

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA – The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit research firm based in Plymouth Meeting, Penn., has released its top 10 list of health technologies for hospital c-suite executives for 2009.

ECRI compiled the list taking into account the convergence of critical economic, patient safety, reimbursement, and regulatory pressures that hospitals face today.

“Prioritizing is a tough but essential job for executives who face a squeeze on their capital budgets, insistent demand from clinicians concerned with patient care and personal income and the well-being and strategic directions of their institutions,” said Jeffrey C. Lerner, president and CEO of the ECRI Institute. “This difficult-to-compile ranking of 10 critical technologies will help them to pay close attention to technologies and issues that have a significant impact.”

To read the complete article as well as the list of ten top technologies please see the HealthcareItNews website here.