CMS has released care quality data reported by physician groups, hospitals, and ACOs. This information is available on Physician Compare, Hospital Compare, and cms.gov websites. The intention is for a more informed consumer to be able to use this information to make better informed decisions in selecting hospitals and clinicians.
Will you be using this information? How?
After the New Year’s champagne has been toasted, where will 2015 find us in regards to health IT? Some food for thought:
1) New companies playing in the healthcare sandbox such as Google and Apple. Will Siri take on healthcare next in addition to directions to dinner?
2) Quality vs. Quantity of Data
3) Engaging the consumer more and more with tools to do so
4) Increasing use of Telemedicine
What are your predictions for 2015? What would you like to see take off?
As some of you may have already heard, Watson was created by IBM to have human-like cognitive processing abilities. In short, a computer that can process mass amounts of data and it’s nuances in order to make a decision. (Remember the Jeopardy episode where two human players played against Watson?) In healthcare, clinicians face a daunting challenge everyday where they have to take in a lot of data, make quick decisions that could cause harm (or even death to their patients), and do that in increasingly short encounters in hospitals and outpatient settings. While Watson was pretty cool to watch answering obscure questions about say Russian history, the application in the clinical workflow to aid clinicians could be a game changer. The VA is in fact doing this by deploying Watson for a “clinical reasoning system”.
What are your thoughts about this? Is this too much too soon or will this truly help us all in the end?
As 2015 is nearly upon us, it’s time for us to reflect on the past year and what has occurred throughout the year. For healthcare, it’s been quite a bit of a ride. Since I’ve been exclusively on an ICD-10 implementation since 2010, the major story of the year was the delay of the ICD-10 compliance date that was snuck into the SGR bill in March. I would argue to say that blindsided all of us no matter what side of the provider/payer/vendor fence you are on.
According to Govhealthit.com, here are some of their top health IT stories of 2014 outside of the ICD-10 compliance date delay:
1) Prescriptive instead of predictive analytics
2) ONC 10 year operability roadmap
3) Epic is more interoperable than conventional wisdom allows
4) Apple/IBM partnership
What are your top health IT stories of 2014?
As mentioned in the previous post, those of us working on ICD-10 breathed a huge sigh of relief when we heard there was not another compliance date delay inserted into the final bill. But what else is in this $1 trillion dollar bill that still affects health IT? Most affect some regulatory and funding for portions of the Affordable Care Act. Read more here.
