Top 10 Health Technology Threats and Hazards
ECRI Institute engineers, scientists, clinicians, and other patient safety analysts rank the top technology-related threats that healthcare providers are likely to encounter in the coming year.
Cyberattack That Shut Down Internet Traffic Is a Wakeup Call to Hospitals
A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack crippled New Hampshire-based Dyn, one of the major domain name system hosts that monitors and reroutes internet traffic, October 21 and raised concerns about the healthcare industry’s ability to function in the face of a widespread outage.
How Automated Calls Can Significantly Improve Patient Follow-Up Initiatives
Four years ago, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) began and officially started penalizing hospitals for excessive 30-day readmission rates. Since then hospitals have begun implementing programs aimed at reducing readmissions, especially for high-risk patient populations.
Surveillance Monitoring: Current Challenges and Solutions
Failing to recognize early signs that a patient is deteriorating and respond with effective treatment—“failure to rescue”—has long been a challenge for hospitals, particularly among low-risk patients in low-acuity care delivery areas. Failure to rescue often affects postsurgical patients on opioids, though it is not limited to this narrow patient population. To reduce its occurrence, hospitals have primarily adopted rapid response teams.
Digital Documentation: More or Less?
Remember the blue book? Starting as early as junior high school, teachers would hand out that pale blue 8” x 8” booklet, giving each student 50 minutes to handwrite everything they knew about a particular subject. Urban legend suggested teachers issued grades based on the number of pages filled rather than the contents of the illegible scribble. Because handwriting did not allow for cutting and pasting, there was no verbatim insertion of multiple Wikipedia pages to “enhance” a test-taker’s spontaneous brilliance. The essay length was determined by the knowledge of the student and the quickness of the pen.
Vendor Error Leads to Breach
Medicare Compliance Watch CHI Franciscan Health Highline Medical Center (Highline) in Burien, Washington, is notifying more than 18,000 patients of a data breach affecting protected health information (PHI) stored with a vendor, Highline said in a statement. On July 22, R-C Healthcare Management, a vendor that performed services for Highline prior to 2014, informed the … Continued
INFOGRAPHIC: The Real Cost of Paper-Based Informed Consent Processes
Check out this infographic from FormFast to learn more about the real costs of a paper-based consent process and how the right Mobile Bedside Consent Automation Solution can benefit your organization. Can your hospital afford to keep this process paper-based?
Health IT and Diagnostic Safety: Promise and Peril
By Susan Carr When it comes to information technology (IT), clinicians and hospitals might advise, “Be careful what you wish for.” Embraced as the answer to many of healthcare’s safety problems, technology provides useful tools that may improve but in no way guarantee safety. In fact, health IT can introduce as well as prevent or … Continued
MACRA Targets Meaningful in Meaningful Use
By Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH The 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) opened the way for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to streamline the quality improvement and healthcare information technology programs it built over the past several years. Since the passage of the 2009 HITECH Act, the quality … Continued
An EHR Tailored for Pediatricians Closes Some Gaps
Modifying electronic health record software can help catch early signs of childhood obesity, problems with oral health, vision, and hearing, and the risk of developing autism, expert says.