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Technologies Hospital Leaders Should Watch

Courtesy of non-profit research house the ECRI Institute, here’s some of technologies that they believe hospital C-suite execs should be watching this year. This list was generated by ECRI’s in-house analysts, reports HealthLeaders. Not all of these are directly related to EMR/EHR technology, but we’ve included a few that might be of interest on the broader HIT level.

* Electronic Health Records: This is so obvious it hardly bears mentioning, but yes, EHRs are number one on the list. ECRI notes that execs should beware of possible patient harm in the effort to achieve Meaningful Use, as some HIT-related errors are emerging that can lead to serious care issues.

* mHealth:  Mobile applications are becoming an increasingly commonplace part of health IT infrastructure, but managing them effectively isn’t as simple as download-install-use.  This is likely to be the year hospitals need to get it right.

* Alarm Integration Technology:  Alarm fatigue has been and continues to be a major issue for clinicians, with some critical care docs experiencing 350 alarms  per patient per day.  Increasingly, alarm integration systems are being implemented which send alerts to phones or pages, leading to more controllable alerts and quieter environments.

* Imaging and Surgery:  ORs are increasingly hosting full-scale angiography systems to help guide high-risk minimally invasive surgery, as well as guiding combined open and minimally invasive surgery and verifying successful surgical completion. These hybrid ORs are expensive but have arguably improved results.

* PET/MR:  The PET/MR scanner is beginning to emerge as a new mainstay in oncology, improving on the results delivered for years by the hybrid PET/CR. The PET/MR offers greater detail, helping physicians detect cancers and tumors.

I would have expected to see something on the data analytics technology front to appear this year, but it was absent from the list. I might also have expected to see cloud solutions turn up, but again, not this year.  What technologies would you add to this list?

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March 29, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Cloud EHR  Hospital EHR  Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  Hospital IT Systems  iPad/iPhone  Medical Devices  Mobile Technology
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Mobile Tech Advancing Among Providers

We all know hospitals and medical practices have been heavily impacted by the use of mobile technology. What’s interesting to learn, however, is that the nature of that use is shifting — and that the number of healthcare professionals who rely on mobile apps should shoot up this year.

According to research by IT trade group CompTIA, providers are gradually shifting their use of smart mobile devices from business functions like e-mail and scheduling to a much wider range of activities. These include medication monitoring and management, remote access to EMRs and helping patients manage insurance claims, CompTIA reports.

Right now, only one in five doctors with a smart mobile device supporting apps use medical or health apps every day.  However, three out of four providers surveyed believe that mobility is having a positive effect on healthcare. So it’s not too surprising to learn that during the next 12 months, healthcare providers expect to increase their medical app usage to the point where 62 percent are relying on these apps at least a few times a week.

It’s worth noting, however, that healthcare institutions don’t seem to be keeping up with the pace of change, at least where security is concerned. The survey found that only 17 percent of healthcare providers reported having a comprehensive mobile device policy in place (though 20 percent more did have partial policies implemented).

By the way, CompTIA also shared some stats regarding EMR acceptance that are worth a look.  According to the survey, providers had a more positive attitude towards EMRs this year than last year, with a net satisfaction rate in the low 60s.

That being said, the rest of the users surveyed have serious concerns in several areas, including ease of use, greater compatibility and interoperability, speed, and better remote access and mobility features.

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March 5, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Hospital EHR  Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  Hospital IT Systems  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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Homecare Firm Dispatches 4,000 Android Tablets With Nurses

Could Android gear be sneaking up on Apple? Here’s one case where a national healthcare organization decided to go with the Android technology for a very large and clearly mission-critical purchase.

A national homecare agency has bucked the iPad trend in tablets, picking up 4,000 Android-based units to send with its personnel to patient homes. The company, Philadelphia-based Bayada, issued the Samsung 7-inch Galaxy Tab 7.0 plus to its therapists, medical social workers and other home health professionals.

In issuing the tablets, Bayada hoped to make its homecare professionals more efficient, especially when visiting Medicare home health patients who only get one hour each.

The tablet deployment followed a 20-person pilot in which it found that the typical nurse reduced his or her typing by one-half hour every day if using a tablet during visits instead of paper or a laptop.

Not only do workers use the tablets to document care within patient homes, they also pull up patient data before they head out on their patient visits.  This spares the nurses having to report to a central office to get their appointments before they leave in the morning.

To make clinical data entry simpler, Bayada has loaded the tablets with SwiftKey Healthcare’s keyboard software, an app which is preloaded with medical terms. It uses artificial intelligence to anticipate which words will be typed next and “learns” over time what words healthcare workers use most often.

Since implementing the SwiftKey software, 69 percent of Bayada’s nurses said they preferred using a tablet for taking clinical notes.

Given the large price difference between the iPad/iPad mini and Android tablets — with Android, obviously, at a lower price point — I’d be surprised if other large healthcare organizations didn’t follow in Bayada’s footsteps.

After all, Apple fan though I am, I have to admit that as the suite of apps available for the Android platform matures, there’s less and less reason for institutions to pay the premium Apple demands.  I wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of a major shift in Android investment by healthcare organizations.

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February 27, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Hospital EHR  Hospital EMR  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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NY RHIO Brings EMRs To Ambulances

Even with a well-connected RHIO in place, and a healthy EMR on site, most hospitals have to content with paper records when ambulances pull up to their door. But in Rochester, they’ve changed things up.

The Rochester Regional RHIO has partnered with area EMS agencies to put technology in place allowing EMS workers to securely share data with EDs or primary care doctors, reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

The RHIO itself seems to be a hit — 850,000 people, or half of the Rochester-area population, have agreed to have their records shared with authorized medical providers, the paper notes. It embraces 40 healthcare organizations in the 13-county greater Rochester area, providing links to hospitals, reference labs, radiology practices, eldercare agencies and health plans along with the ambulance teams.

To communicate patient information, the EMS workers create an “electronic pre-hospital care document” which can be uploaded to the patient’s medical record (even if the patient declines to go to the hospital). The ePCD technology is available to EMS crews for no cost.

While there’s scattered use of this approach, mobile EMR connections for EMS workers are unusual, as far as I can tell. But with mobile healthcare apps and EMR front ends growing more sophisticated every day, the time is coming soon when anyone who touches the healthcare process in any way, including EMS personnel, will have a wirelessly-enabled tablet loaded with the software they need to report on the patient.

Frankly, I’m surprised all EMS techs don’t have such a tool already. It just makes too much sense.

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February 20, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Health Information Exchange  HIE  Hospital EHR  Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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Physicians Like EMR-Connected Apps

A new survey by vendor eClinicalWorks has concluded that the vast majority of physicians like EMR-connected apps, and many cases, believe that apps can improve patient care.

Of course, the research is a bit self-serving. The study announcement comes alongside news that the company plans to invest $25 million on patient engagement tools over the next 12 months, starting with a free mobile app for patients available on iOS and Android. Still, it’s worth a look anyway.

The study, conducted online, collected responses from 2,291 healthcare professionals in mid-January, reports SearchHealthIT.com.  Of that total, 649 respondents were physicians.

Researchers found that nearly all doctors responding (93 percent) think it’s valuable to have a mobile health app connected to an EMR, the site reports.  The same number of doctors said that mobile health apps can improve a patient’s health outcome, and 80 percent said they were likely to recommend a mobile health app to a patient.

So what do physicians hope to gain from such apps, specifically?  According to SearchHealthIT.com:

* 58 percent of physicians were particularly interested in the ability to provider automatic appointment alerts and reminders. (Six out of ten physicians said that at least half their patients would like getting appointment reminders from an app, too.)
* Almost half of doctors felt giving patients access to their medical records was a key benefit
* Many suggested that using apps to make appointment scheduling easier would be very helpful

The study also concluded that apps could help with patient wellness. Sixty-five percent said they could improve medication adherence, 54 percent diabetes care and 52 percent preventative care, the site reported.

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February 18, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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Remote Patient Monitoring Going Mainstream

This week I read a piece of news which suggests to me that we’re seeing a turning point in the use of remote monitoring technology to manage patients.  It looks like AT&T is taking a major public position in support of remote monitoring via the cloud, via a partnership with a  hot new startup that just raised funding, according to a report in mobihealthews.

According to the mobile health news publication, cloud-based patient monitoring company Intuitive Health just got a $3.4 million investment in what appears to be the company’s first public round of investment.

Intuitive, which completed a pilot with health system Texas Health Resources and AT&T last year, offers cloud-based remote monitoring software which can interface with any device.

The pilot involved monitoring CHF patients remotely for 90 days using wireless pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs and weight scales, plus tablets and apps feeding the data to the  patients’ EMR records. During the pilot, THR reduced hospital readmissions for chronic heart failure patients by 27 percent, mobihealthnews reports.

According to a press release from AT&T, Intuitive’s software has since become a key component in the telecom giant’s own SaaS patient monitoring product.

Remote monitoring has been a hot topic of discussion and an emerging approach for several years, but hasn’t found an established place in day-to-day care for most institutions.  With AT&T and Intuitive offering a device-agnostic model, however, I believe they will give a boost to the use of remote monitoring generally.

Personally, I’ve been cheering for remote monitoring to succeed for some time; after all, given how mobile-device-oriented people are anyway, it just makes sense to leverage those capabilities to improve their health.  I hope this represents a turning point for this type of technology and that we see news of more successful pilots this year.

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January 31, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Cloud EHR  Hospital EHR  Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  iPad/iPhone  Medical Devices  Mobile Technology
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One Vendor’s Take On Building Usable Health IT

Virtually anyone reading this blog has strong opinions on how to build usable health IT and what it the final product should look like. Now and then, though, I still think it’s worth tossing out somebody else’s version to see whether it adds to the conversation.

In that spirit, via Healthcare IT News, I bring you some of the views of  Joe Condurso, president and CEO of health IT vendor PatientSafe. Condurso, whose company works to marry consumer mobile trends with enterprise clinical IT, offered the following recommendations on building usable HIT:

*  Responds to context: A good system must “run on contextual analytics,” Condurso told HIN. “It’s connected to the back end, connected to all of the policies and procedures [an organization] is trying to implement, but were stuck in a three ring binder.”

*  Slips into existing processes:  If health IT goes with, not against existing workflow, that makes it easier for it to generate documentation for clinicians. In his view, well-designed technology “fortifies and creates all of t he documentation on the back end,” saving physicians time and effort.

* Is mobile:  This one’s a no brainer: since physicians these days have a mobile workflow, health IT needs to go mobile.  He notes that mobile tech doesn’t just allow clinicians to compute on the fly, it also means that when, say, a nurse needs to find a doctor, they don’t need to go on a safari to find them physically.

* Starts from mobile design:  Condurso believes health IT UIs should start from mobile designs, then move up from there.  ”The UI has to be able to yield important information and synthesize that in a small screen format,” he says. “You have to start with mobile and build up.”

So there you have it: a few more UI ideas to toss onto the conversational fire. I particularly liked Condurso’s notion that UI design should start mobile and work upward. What about you?

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January 29, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Hospital EHR  Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  Hospital IT Systems  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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iPad App Helps Patients Understand Inpatient Care Process

During an inpatient stay, patients have usually contact with a large number of professionals, including doctors, nurses, x-ray techs, phlebotomists and more.  Without help, however, patients often lose track of who’s delivering their care, forget to ask key questions and generally fail to understand the process of helping them get well.

At Boston Children’s Hospital, they’re hoping to solve the problem with a new iPad app that guides patients through their care process and makes it easy for them to communicate with clinicians. The app, MyPassport, pulls data from the hospital’s Epic and Power Chart apps and displays it in a way which helps patients stay on top of their care process.  It also prepares them for discharge and arms them with home care instructions.

The idea for MyPassport came from a paper booklet which the hospital assembled manually, adding pictures and titles for every care team member as well as pages for lab test results and summaries.  The paper book, which also offered a place for patients to write questions for their providers and information about discharge, was helpful to patients, but took a lot of effort to maintain.

The notion of transforming the paper booklet into an iPad app was spearheaded by urologist Hiep Nguyen, MD, who won a Boston Children’s FastTrack Innovation in Technology award from the hospital’s Innovation Acceleration program to create it.

Not only does the app make it easier for patients to ask questions of clinicians — or in this case, parents of patients — through an instant message-like utility, it also displays lab values in a simple format understandable by caregivers/parents. MyPassport also offers a list of goals a given patient should meet to be ready to go home.

I don’t know about you, readers, but I think this is an excellent idea. Helping patients and caregivers understand and coordinate the process of care, know their clinicians and plan for discharge is a really great use of iPad technology. While the app is undergoing a small pilot now, expect to see MyPassport or other apps like it turn up elsewhere soon. Good show, folks.

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January 14, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Community Hospitals  Hospital EMR  iPad/iPhone  Medical Devices  Mobile Technology
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AthenaHealth Grabs Mobile Footprint With Agreement To Acquire Epocrates

Practice management and EMR vendor athenahealth has signed a definitive agreement to buy mobile health information giant Epocrates Inc., in a move which emphasizes the importance of mobile channels to the the future of EMRs.

athenahealth has agreed to pay $11.75 per share for Epocrates, a hugely popular mobile point-of -care app which is very broadly adopted across the U .S. physician base.

The EMR vendor must have really wanted Epocrates badly; the deal, which values Epocrates at $293 million, represents a 22 percent premium over the closing price per share on Friday, January 4, 2013.  What’s more, athenahealth is tapping out its entire existing credit facility to offer an all-cash deal.

As for why athenahealth is so hot for Epocrates, I’ll let them explain. They say Epocrates ofers the following:

  • Better Information Access for Health Organizations — By combining Epocrates’ mobile expertise with knowledge and data from athenahealth’s cloud-based network, the combined company will be uniquely positioned to introduce new mobile applications that deliver high-value information to the clinical community when, where, and how they want it.
  • Advanced Mobile Workflows — the combined company will seek to pioneer new mobile workflows to improve provider efficiency and support care delivery outcomes; initial efforts will focus on care coordination, provider-to-provider communication, and patient engagement tools.
  • Accelerated Awareness and Growth Across the Physician Market — athenahealth would expand its current provider base of 38,000 to include the more than one million health care professionals on the Epocrates network, allowing athenahealth to build upon the highly favored Epocrates brand, recognized today by approximately 90 percent of practicing U.S. physicians.

You know what, all of the above makes a whole lot of sense. It seems far smarter to buy your way directly into phyician workflows with a trusted product like Epocrates than to compete against hundreds of me-too physician EMRs out there. Expect to see more deals like this in the future.

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January 8, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Cloud EHR  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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Hospital Aren’t Supporting Nursing Smartphones

Here’s one more example of where Bring Your Own Device is causing security problems for hospitals. A new report by Spyglass Consulting Group suggests that while most nurse use personal smartphones on the job, few hospital IT departments support these devices.

According to Spyglass, 69 percent of hospitals said that their nurses use personal mobile devices, often to fill in gaps left by the technology the hospital provides for communication. This is no surprise. While there’s an armada of personal nursing devices which allow nurses to communicate with other staffers, smartphones do a better job, as they’re light, boast an easy to use interface and unlike VoWiFi devices, unaffected by local network ups and downs.

It’s worth noting that 25 percent of care providers interviewed by Spyglass weren’t happy with the quality and reliability of the wireless network within their facilities.  That’s further evidence that VoIP devices commonly used for nursing communication aren’t riding on a solid base.

So, nurses are driven to use the smartphones they bring in from home.  Those phones become the basis for mission-critical communications around day-to-day care. But at the risk of repeating myself — OK, I’ve already repeated myself often on this subject — these unsupported, vulnerable devices can be hacked or stolen quite easily. If a phone is left in a public area, not only are nurses deprived of a critical communications channel, the e-mail or texts or voicemails they’ve sent regarding patient care has just walked off as well, offering bunch of private data in the clear. Plus, there are free solutions to this communications, privacy and security problem like docBeat that are much much more functional than what’s on the nurses’ personal devices anyway.

According to the Spyglass researchers, who conducted 100+ interviews with nurses working in acute care, hospital IT personnel are concerned about the increasing dependence of clinicians on personal mobile devices.  But I note that at least in the report summary written up by Healthcare IT News, you don’t hear about a stampede of hospital IT departments rushing to establish support policies and deploy enterprise-class mobile management tools. I must say, I’m not sure what they’re waiting for.

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December 11, 2012 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Healthcare CIO  Hospital EHR  Hospital Electronic Health Record  Hospital Electronic Medical Record  Hospital EMR  Hospital Healthcare IT  iPad/iPhone  Mobile Technology
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