Want to boost physicians' CPOE compliance? Put nurses in charge

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"We have different liaisons assigned to different specialties and different service lines that really understand how the nursing process integrates with the physician and vice versa."  Read More

Mississippi emerges as leader in telemedicine

Mississippi has a sickly reputation.
A doctor using telemedicine is shown. | AP PhotoThe Magnolia State ranks at or near the bottom in most health rankings: worst infant mortality and most kids born with low birth weight; second-to-highest rate of obesity and cancer deaths; second from the last in diabetes outcomes.
But the state is a leader in one aspect of health care: telemedicine. The state’s only academic hospital has remote connections with 165 sites, providing specialized services to some of the state’s most far-flung, medically deprived cities and towns. Mississippi’s telemedicine program, ranked among the seven best in the country, has inspired neighboring Arkansas to take bigger steps in some areas of the field, and the impact of its success is making waves in Washington as well.

Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) launches Guroo, price transparency website

guroo.comThe Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI), a non-profit organization, has launched a price transparency website, called Guroo, to help consumers find national, state, and local pricing information for common health conditions and services. The data is collected from 40 million anonymized members of four health insurers: Aetna, Assurant Health, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare. Read More 

Study: Decision Support-Enabled Mobile Apps Help Nurse Diagnoses

A study published in the Journal for Nurse Practitioners finds that nurses who used a mobile device preloaded with an application with evidence-based decision support tools were far more likely to diagnose patients for certain health conditions than nurses who used mobile apps without such tools. Clinical Innovation & Technology et al. Read More

The app that lets deaf people 'hear' phone calls

The Pedius app was created to help deaf people speak to friends, family and businesses on the phone using voice recognition and real-time speech translation.
Pedius (pictured)  uses voice recognition and speech translation to make calls more natural. When a call is made using the app the user types a message on the screen. This is translated to speech in real time, so the recipient can 'hear' them. The recipient's spoken response is then immediately translated into textScroll down for video 
Pedius (pictured) uses voice recognition and speech translation to make calls more natural. When a call is made using the app the user types a message on the screen. This is translated to speech in real time, so the recipient can 'hear' them. The recipient's spoken response is then immediately translated into text

Dr. Prakasam’s Excellent Social Media Adventure

It was inspiring to read the interview that HCI Senior Editor Gabriel Perna conducted recently with Gnanagurudasan Prakasam, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist based in Sacramento, California. What Dr. Prakasam has achieved goes beyond a surface “win” do a deeper type of accomplishment, and should be widely noted. And the results speak for themselves: the children whom Dr. Prakash cares for—all 1,500 of them, whto whom he is available 24/7—have a hospital readmissions rate of 5 percent, while the nationwide rate is between 9 and 15 percent. That is a huge breakthrough. Read More

How Miami Telemedicine Helped Haiti

The earthquake disaster in Haiti gave rise to improved trauma care in the western hemisphere’s poorest country. And a big reason for that change can be found 700 miles away in Miami, inside a conference room at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center. Read More
Dr. Shailesh Garg (foreground) in Miami advises Dr. Kathleen Charles (on video screens) in Haiti. Credit Tim Padgett / WLRN

Ochsner’s O Bar connects patients with more than 200 health apps

A room in the Ochsner Center for Primary Care and Wellness has a fleet of five iPads locked to a bar, each one loaded with all the apps the health system has vetted and approved. The O Bar is staffed by a technology specialist that can help patients find out what’s available and help teach them to download and use the available apps.
“The apps are out there and people are going to get them,” Ochsner’s Chief Clinical Transformation Officer Richard Milani told H&HN Magazine last year. “The smart thing for us to do is get our hands around what we think are pretty good apps and make them more helpful to patients.”  Read More

Google Revamps Results Pages for Health-Related Searches

Google is launching a new search function that will display a box with relevant health information at the top of the search results page for health-related queries. The data displayed are pulled from trusted medical websites and have been vetted by a team of doctors at Google and another team at the Mayo Clinic. MedCity News et al. Read More

Telemedicne: The Missing Link

There's a lot of hype and excitement about telehealth, but for it to be the healthcare revolution it promises to be, it needs a more fully executed connected care delivery model. 
We as an industry are not yet ready for this sea change. But this is coming and it is fundamentally unstoppable.
In fact, it will be a boon. It’s terrifically scalable. It’s terrifically efficient. And when provider compensation is fundamentally tied to outcomes (that’s coming too)...  Read More

Tablet, app system boosts nurse-patient interaction, treatment experience

A Florida healthcare provider is tapping a mobile app and tablets to foster better communication among caregivers and enhance its patients' hospital experiences.
Several hospitals within the Tampa-based BayCare Health System are deploying a mobile software-tablet solution to nurse managers who visit patients daily to capture patient feedback and manage patient-related tasks. Read More

Philly's Thomas Jefferson University Hospital turns to telemedicine to boost quality

The hospital has built a program to allow physicians to perform consultations using video apps so that patients with less-critical needs are treated in other settings besides the emergency room.
A telemedicine call center helped reduce the rate of readmissions among patients after hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction, according to a study in which a nurse could dispatch a mobile intensive care unit or make other recommendations while consulting with the physician on call.
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network is involved in a pilot project that allows patients to speak directly to ER physicians via an iPad connection.
The University of California-San Diego Health System also has a telemedicine pilot program in which on-call physicians who are outside of the hospital remotely link to a telemedicine station to see patients.  Read More

ONC Unveils Plan To Realize Basic Interoperability by 2017

January 30, 2015, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a draft of its 10-year nationwide interoperability roadmap, which calls for achieving basic electronic health data interoperability by 2017. In addition, the draft outlines four short-term actions and 10 guiding principles for meeting ONC's goals. Healthcare IT News et al.Read More

Other Nursing Informatics & HIT Blogs of Interest

Nursing Informatics & Technology: A Blog for All Levels of Users

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AHRQ Research about: * Telemedicine * School Health * Health Maintenance

Ethics and HIT

Challenges...
http://jamia.bmj.com/site/icons/amiajnl8946.pdf
  • patient safety should trump all other values; corporate concerns about liability and intellectual property ownership may be valid but should not over-ride all other considerations;
  • transparency and a commitment to patient safety should govern vendor contracts;
  • institutions are duty-bound to provide ethics education to purchasers and users, and should commit publicly to standards of corporate conduct; and
  • vendors, system purchasers, and users should encourage and assist in each others’ efforts to adopt best practices.

e-Behaviorial Health


Benefit from new technologies... enable people to have remote access to CBT

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