Health Care It Scope

Going to electronic records is more than flipping a switch. Practices must determine what do with old charts -- and how long to hang onto them. During the change to an electronic medical record system, the focus for many practices is on how data will...

In the "real" world, people expect to pay more for something if it's of higher quality or offers superior performance. That free-market standard promotes higher-quality products and services. The healthcare industry, however, generally does not operate...

With Medicare's push toward shared savings and accountable care organizations, healthcare business models are getting more complex, said Shahid Shah, software IT analyst and author of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy. The industry needs software to...

Physicians understand the potential of health information technology to help improve patient care, and doctors are willing to work with the federal government through incentive programs designed to encourage more practices to go paperless. But the...

Confusion over vendor qualifications and federal guidelines slowed somewhat the projected growth rate of electronic medical records systems to 13.6% in 2010, a value of $15.7 billion, according to a study by the healthcare market research firm Kalorama...

Physicians who fail to tackle quality improvement, adopt electronic medical records and embrace teamwork risk being at a competitive disadvantage with doctors who join the modern era of health care, federal officials warned physicians at the AMA...

Seventy-eight percent of Americans favor the use of electronic medical records, according to a recent study by NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research organization. The study was published in the February edition of the journal...

Electronic medical records appear to have varying effects on different types of primary care physicians based on whether they do more information review or information entry, according to a UC Davis study. The study, one of the first to measure the...

A bill to accelerate states' ability to opt-out of parts of the national health reform law could give states more flexibility to continue working on their own brands of health system reform. Beginning in 2017, the little-discussed opt-out provision in...

JOEL HOOD, Chicago Tribune CHICAGO -- Richard Ready had been a drinker most of his life, but by the time he became chief resident of neurosurgery at a prominent Chicago-area hospital, it was drugs, not alcohol, that kept him going. Ready took...

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the American Hospital Association said it has found that hospitals have significantly less flexibility when it comes to demonstrating "meaningful use" of electronic medical...

For most of my career as a family doctor, I kept track of my patients' health histories by scribbling hand-written notes in a paper chart. For a healthy child, I'd include dates when vaccines were given; for an adult with, say, diabetes, I'd make sure to...

By Neil Versel The first anniversary of the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act–Irvine, Calif.-based research firm SK&A published a report saying that 36.1 percent of physician offices have some form of electronic medical...

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology is about to lose its monopoly on EMR certification, as a final HHS rule establishing a temporary certification program requires testing organizations to earn government approval as...

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, The technology you adopt for your practice, including electronic medical record systems and smartphones, could become subject to Food and Drug Administration scrutiny. Experts are trying to discern what that level of examination...