New CPT Codes Approved for Telehealth

By: Marlene M. Maheu, Ph.D.

In Medicare’s 2014 physician fee schedule, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services outlined several new telehealth services and service regions that will be reimbursed by the federal government starting 2014.  These changes include new services for mental health providers. …More

8 Notes About Changes to EHR Stage 2/Stage 3

CMS and ONC recently extended Stage 2 of the EHR meaningful use program, delayed the start of Stage 3 by a year until 2017, and tweaked the EHR certification program. But the actions aren’t as much of a reprieve to providers as they might appear; there are tradeoffs. Here’s a look at the changes. HDM Resources
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Care Beyond Walls and Wires: Telemedicine Home-Health Monitoring Program is Changing Patient Lives

Care Beyond Walls and Wires, it’s a telemedicine-based, home-health monitoring program that has significantly improved the health of most participating patients, while reducing emergency room visits and hospital admissions and readmissions, and decreasing the length of stay for those who still require hospitalization.

Qualcomm funded the Care Beyond Walls pilot study. When it ended on April 1, 2013, Northern Arizona Healthcare took on the costs of continuing Care Beyond Walls and Wires.  More

FDA Regulation of Mobile Health 2013

FDA at last has published its final guidance on mobile medical apps. Further, the mHealth industry has morphed several times over the last couple years. Consequently, in this second edition, more than 80 percent of the content is new. Download here Not only have I updated the regulatory analysis, but I’m also covering a few new topics like FDA regulation of pharmaceutical apps.  More

Home telehealth helps specialists reach Parkinson’s patients

In a study published this month as an open-access article in the journal Neurology: Clinical Practice, 100 percent of the 55 patients who participated in a virtual house call with a neurologist said they were likely to recommend telemedicine to a friend. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the University of Rochester (N.Y.), found patient satisfaction levels topping 90 percent for most aspects of remote consultations.  More

Meaningful Use Portal Updates in USHIK

The Meaningful Use Portal in the AHRQ-funded United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) has been updated with new functionality. The portal is a one-stop shop for Meaningful Use Stage 1 and Stage 2 Clinical Quality Measures, their computation logic, their data elements, and the vocabularies and codes the data elements may take on.

What is USHIK?

The United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) is an on-line, publicly accessible registry and repository of healthcare-related data, metadata and standards. USHIK is funded and directed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) with management support in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  More

Text message interventions work best when they’re tailored

Text messages have been proven several times to be a positive medium for improving health outcomes. Text message intervention studies for smoking cessation, medication adherence and weight loss have all come back with positive results.

While all of the studies focused on tailoring messages, the researchers agreed that a good next step for texting studies is a three-way texting system, which is helpful to adding an even more human element to the intervention.

“In other studies that we’ve done we’ve created three-way messages, send out, come back in and receive a tailored message based on your response,” .... “And we found that patients sometimes think that it’s their doctor texting back. So we’ve used it as a communication tool, to really think that they’re being cared about.”  More 

6 regulatory and procedural hurdles for multistate telemedicine

For the most part, the laws that govern the practice of medicine in the United States are state laws. One of the few things Federal law does say is that jurisdiction of those laws is based on the patient’s location, not the doctor’s. That’s tough news for a mobile health company that wants to establish any sort of multi-state telemedicine practice, whether it’s evaluating moles and blemishes via store-and-forward dermatology or doing virtual video consultations on an iPad. More

EHR Use Boosts Diabetes Care, Federally Funded Project Finds

	A study by the Western New York Beacon Community finds that the use of electronic health records and other health IT helped improve the care of patients with diabetes and reduce costs. The study was funded through a $16.1 million Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT grant. Buffalo News, FierceHealthIT. More

The Transparency Tipping Point

Patients are engaged and participate in their care when they can view their medical records. 

The Issue:
With the increasing use of electronic health records (EHRs), patients have more access to their lab and medical records. What is less often seen by patients, however, are the notes doctors enter in the medical record. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded OpenNotes initiative sought to find out how patients would use and feel about open access to doctors’ notes. Others now are experimenting with OpenNotes and exploring how they might change doctors’ practices.  More

AHRQ’s Innovations Exchange Focuses on Mental Health Care in Rural Settings

The latest issue of the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange features three innovation profiles describing programs that increased access and improved mental health care for individuals living in rural areas. One of the featured profiles describes a program at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, in which psychiatric fellows and residents use videoconferencing to serve children and adults with mental illness who live in rural parts of the state. More

Mayo’s iPad study had 98 percent engagement among seniors

“Patient participation is completely dependent on usability,” Cook said at a session at the mHealth Summit near Washington, DC. “Healthcare technology and tools are not meaningful unless they’re integrated with care plans and expectations, and that’s dependent on delivering knowledge to patients. Once you have a usable tool, you can help self-assessment and reporting, data acquisition and aggregation is meaningful, and clinically meaningful algorithms can impact patient outcomes.”  More

Home Runs in Telemedicine and Telehealth: The Season is Always Right!

The First Telemedicine Service Home Run

MGH in the late 1960s and early 1970s: The first telemedicine service home run was teleradiology, a component of the MGH-Logan Airport telemedicine program.
Teleradiology had been deployed in Canada, around 1959, and then adopted by the MGH program in 1968.
Home run status was achieved decades later.
Today, teleradiology is quite ubiquitous, sustainable, cost effective, and is regarded by many to be mainstream medicine. Thus, a home run!   More

Want to Improve Diabetes Management? Send Texts

Researchers study the effects of text messaging on glycemic control in patients with diabetes in a new study.  Text messaging is a practical, cost-effective way to engage and motivate low-income patients with type 2 diabetes to improve their long-term management of the disease... Research has shown that even in poor communities, where costly smart phones are inaccessible, most patients have and use text messaging as a means of communication, making it the ideal platform on which to deliver an effective and automated diabetes management solution.

Source: “Trial to Examine Text Message–Based mHealth in Emergency Department Patients With Diabetes (TExT-MED): A Randomized Controlled Trial” Article in press in Annals of Emergency Medicine http://bit.ly/HScCV

Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Expands Telehealth Coverage

The final Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for 2014 recently released by CMS expands Medicare coverage for telehealth services to rural areas defined by the Office of Rural Health Policy. The American Telemedicine Association called the telehealth provisions included in the fee schedule "good news." MedPage Today et al.
More

Telehealth Innovations & Spotlight

AHRQ :
Videoconferencing Enhances Access to Psychiatric Care for Children and Adults With Mental Illness in Rural Settings 12/4/2013

Psychiatric fellows and residents at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville provide care via videoconferencing to patients in rural parts of the state who otherwise would likely not have had access to such care. 

 

New Expert Commentary
Academic Telepsychiatry Programs Enhance Access for Rural Populations
by Ana Maria Lopez, MD, MPH, FACP, Medical Director, Arizona Telemedicine Program and Professor of Medicine and Pathology, University of Arizona http://www.innovations.ahrq.gov/content.aspx?id=3945&tab=2

Changing Behaviors to Improve Health

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Do you want to change your behavior to improve your health? According to the Fogg Behavior Model, behavior change happens when three factors—motivation, ability, and triggers—come together at the same moment. http://rwjf.ws/IGk6e

Biggest Communication Challenges

More

51 digital health metrics in 2013

95M Americans used mobile for health in 201395M Americans used mobile for health in 2013
Pew: 35 percent of US adults are online diagnosers 
Seven in ten doctors have a self-tracking patient 
Survey: 31 percent of doctors make Rx decisions from smartphones 
Manhattan: 72 percent of physicians have tablets 
Survey: 43 percent of doctors use mobiles for clinical purposes 
Pew: Caregivers are top digital health users, but only 59 percent find online tools helpful

More 

High-tech home care for children

Children who need complex care can receive it at home

Home & Community Programs have experienced an increase in home care volume as medical advances have allowed premature and other medically needy children to survive longer with a better quality of life. Bringing the child home despite needing complex care reduces the risk of nosocomial infection and often is easier on the family than continued hospitalization.  Nurse.com

READ MORE

Rural ED Doctors Make Fewer Errors When Using Telehealth

A new study published in the journal Pediatrics finds that physicians in rural emergency departments made fewer medication administration errors when they consulted with a pediatric critical care specialist via telemedicine technology than when they consulted with a specialist over the phone or not at all.  More

Involving patients in nurses' shift change improves outcomes, prevents errors

When incoming and outgoing nurses actively involve their patients in shift changes--a practice known as bedside handover--it can reduce medical errors and improve outcomes and patient experience, according to a new study published in the Journal of Nursing Care Quality.

No docs on staff, no ER but happy hospital patients

TriHealth Evendale Hospital in Cincinnati doesn't have an emergency room or any doctors on its staff. Normal business hours are 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Yet month after month, the 29-bed hospital consistently scores high marks for patient satisfaction, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier.   FierceHealthcare

Healthcare on the move: Four UK NHS mobility deployments

The use of smartphones and tablet computers is delivering tremendous benefits in healthcare but comes with some challenges, whether mobile devices are issued by the organisation or are owned by employees:

• To secure the devices and data against loss or theft;
• To maintain compliance with internal and external security and confidentiality mandates, especially with respect to Patient Identifiable Data;
• To simplify initial provisioning and on-going configuration - ensuring the users have immediate access to their data and apps, especially when devices are shared between users.

This report shows how the ICT teams of four NHS organisations are using MobileIron Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions to manage mobile device proliferation, including smartphones, tablets, mobile application usage, and demands from employees for greater mobility; and enabling user-driven innovation while maintaining security over their mobile estates.

Download the whitepaper

Telehealth is key in healthcare future

Healthcare IT News, 11/21/2013

Telehealth has transformed the way healthcare services are accessed and provided. Virtual consultation and remote diagnosis offer incredible potential to shape the surgery of the future and increase access to specialist services from within the primary care system. In the UK, this technology could significantly reduce the burden on secondary healthcare provision. Telehealth could see the complete transformation of primary care, for example, with the creation of remote diagnosis and observation rooms, allowing patients to be diagnosed via video link and subsequently seen remotely by specialists. Click here to access full text  MDLinx Nursing

Alarm Fatigue Still Leading to Dangerous Overrides

A recent study by Boston-based Partners HealthCare shows that the problem of alarm-fatigued clinicians overriding clinical decision support system alarms that may be legitimate persists, iHealthBeat reports.

The web site reports researchers analyzed more than 157,000 CDS alerts involving more than two million medication orders and 1,718 outpatient providers and found that 52.6 percent of the alerts were overridden. Further, they found that 53 percent of those overridden alerts were clinically appropriate — meaning that the particular drug combinations or patient factors, if overlooked, had the potential to cause patient harm.
For the full story, click here.

EHRs Can Impair the Patient Relationship

Medscape Nurses: Some doctors see electronic health records (EHRs) as a giant headache and a barrier to good relationships with patients, whereas others are convinced that it can assist in efficiency and accuracy and still allow doctors to relate well with their patients. Medscape's recent article, Do Your EHR Manners Turn Patients Off?, provided a springboard for doctors to air their strong reactions to this challenging issue...."Documentation has become more important than human interaction. We are becoming more and more like the machines that we use, or rather, the machines that use us."More

EHRs can't do everything

Healthcare IT News, 11/18/2013

Like many other industries, healthcare is becoming more consumer–focused. As Eric Wicklund and Mike Miliard have recently documented for Healthcare IT News, patients and doctors alike have spoken out against EHR solutions for interfering with rather than facilitating doctor–patient interactions. While thorough data collection and analysis, where EHRs offer great value, feeds research at the population level, it seems that the apparent failure of current EHRs to accommodate patients as unique cases has sparked this shift in attitude in the health IT industry. More

New Era in Long-Term-Care Begins

john Knox Village in Pompano Beach is building the first "Green House" in Florida and will build another next year in Jacksonville. It transforms the typical nursing home into a cluster of home-like settings for small numbers of patients. More

Mobile health apps – opportunity for patients and doctors to co-create the evidence

Mobile health apps – opportunity for patients and doctors to... healthpopuli.com

There are thousands of downloadable apps that people can use that touch on health. But among the 40,000+ mobile health apps available in iTunes, which most effectively drive health and efficient care?

To answer that question, the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics analyzed 43,689 health, fitness and medical apps in the Apple iTunes store as of June 2013. These split into what IMS categorized as 23,682 “genuine” health care apps, and 20,007 falling into miscellaneous categories such as product-specific apps, fashion and beauty, fertility, veterinary, and apps with “gimmicks” (IMS’s word) with no obvious health benefit.  More

Infographic: Population Health Management

Another hot topic, intensively discussed in the healthcare community: Population Health Management(PHM). This HIN Infographic shows the benchmarks of their study. It’s no surprise to read the conclusion that successful PHM starts with the data and the data analysis. 

Here is one of many ways to improve medication adherence and the PHM approach; the PICO medication adherence support system….

 

Source: HIN

15 apps from the Department of Veterans Affairs

The programs, developed with technology backed by the National Science Foundation, combines web-based peer support with self-help therapy and offers veterans access to new mental health resources remotely. 

The programs will be available for free on the web into 2014, according to the company.
The VA has been producing mobile health apps for iPads and iPhones since for many years now, many of which have had a mental health focus. A year after the VA first started launching apps, they announced a pilot for family caregivers to receive iPads loaded with apps created by the VA to test before they create a special app store for veterans.  More

Better Access Through Virtual Visits

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announces the November 6 issue of the Health Care Innovations Exchange (http://www.innovations.ahrq.gov).

• The featured Innovations describe three programs that used virtual visits to increase patient access to health care. The programs include one in which a solo practitioner provided year-round, 24-hour-a-day access to care for her patients through liberal use of “virtual” or e-mail visits and telephone calls; another that used an online clinic to diagnose and treat minor health problems with a protocol-based treatment plan; and one that allowed patients with skin conditions to submit their medical history and photographs through secure, Web-based applications for review by a dermatologist.
• The featured QualityTools include a Web site that offers resources on using technology to assist care coordination and improve the independence of older adults, a guide for developing a remote diabetic retinopathy screening program, and a toolkit for developing telehealth activities.
• To access more innovation profiles and tools related to virtual visits and telehealth, go to http://www.innovations.ahrq.gov/innovations_qualitytools.aspx?categoryID=54553&taxonomyID=54617.

Study finds surgical residents sour on iPad for clinical, educational use

“Though not addressed by this study, disparity may exist due to differences in clinical rounding styles as well as the working life of medical vs. procedural-based residents with different emphasis on data use and interpretation,” the researchers wrote.

Overall, about 40 percent of respondents indicated the iPad facilitated better patient care, though medical residents were twice as likely as surgical residents to say so.

The iPad fared significantly better as a reference tool.  More

New CMS Tool Facilitates Users' Access to Federal Health Data

CMS has made available to researchers a new online tool that allows registered users to access and manipulate federal health care data from a secure desktop computer. CMS said the tool will help eliminate long wait times for data requests and provide better access to up-to-date information at a lower cost. Modern Healthcare's "Vital Signs," Government Health IT.  More

Improving Care for Those with Complex Healthcare needs Through HIT

A new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that providing patients and clinicians with information and support using health IT (HIT) was effective in improving outcomes and quality. “Findings and Lessons from the Improving Management of Individuals with Complex Health Care Needs Through Health IT Grant Initiative” documents the findings of more than 10 research projects that investigated how health IT applications can support shared-decisionmaking, communication during care transitions, and facilitate secure exchange of information across multiple settings of care. Multiple studies showed positive impacts on process, intermediate, health, and economic outcomes.

To access the report, select: http://healthit.ahrq.gov/asqmcpreport (PDF, 3 MB).

mHealth improves risk profile in cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes patients

A provisional article published in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Public Health suggests that mHealth technology supporting exercise prescription interventions can be effective.

The findings are based on a Canadian study of 149 adults with at least two metabolic syndrome risk factors, one group using the intervention and one control group.
"Mobile health technologies have proved to be a beneficial tool to achieve blood pressure and blood glucose control in patients with diabetes,"....More

Free one-year program for type 2 diabetics to leverage text messaging

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is offering a free 12-month mHealth program to support individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, according to an announcement.
Called Living With Type 2 Diabetes, the year-long program will provide information and offer free guidance at regular intervals to help people learn how to manage the disease. According to the ADA, approximately 26 million children and adults have diabetes in the United States, of which nearly 95 percent have type 2 diabetes.  More

Interactive Computer Program Helps Boost Depression Treatment

A new study published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that patients are more likely to ask for information or receive treatment for depression when they view a tailored, interactive computer program about the condition before an appointment with their doctor. Medical News Today. More

Alarm Fatigue Tops ECRI's List of Top 10 Health Technology Hazards

An ECRI Institute report finds that alarm fatigue is the biggest health care technology hazard facing hospitals. Other hazards include data integrity failures in electronic health record systems, infusion pump medication errors and robotic surgery complications. Healthcare IT News et al. 

In an April 2013 Sentinel Event Alert, the Joint Commission cited 98 alarm-related events over a three-year period, with 80 of those events resulting in death and 13 in permanent loss of function. The organization subsequently issued a National Patient Safety Goal for 2014 to compel healthcare providers to address alarm hazards. ECRI Institute has developed resources and tools to help providers meet the provisions of this new goal.

E-Health Tools Could Decrease In-Person Doctor Visits, Study Finds

Based on an analysis of recent trends in health IT and a review of the scientific literature, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Commonwealth Fund estimate that in-person patient visits will decrease as community-based physician offices adopt electronic health record systems. CNET, Health Affairs. More

Patient portals pose new security issues

As healthcare facilities launch their own patient portals, technology is only the first step. Administrators are learning that decisions need to be made on everything from patient login protocols to support for patient record revisions. HIPAA regulations, always a primary concern when patient records are involved...More

Navigators and Assisters

http://www.healthaffairs.org/healthpolicybriefs/brief.php?brief_id=101

A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation discusses the challenges facing so-called navigators and assisters as they help consumers understand and select health insurance policies from the Affordable Care Act's new exchanges, or Marketplaces. The enrollment process is complex, and navigators and assisters have been trained to both enroll people and assist consumers with subsidy applications. However, some critics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have raised concerns about insufficient training and privacy safeguards.

Some of the topics covered in this brief include:

• What's the background? The brief outlines the functions of navigators and assisters, who provide one-on-one help by explaining how the Marketplace and its federal premium subsidies work.
  
• What's the debate?
• What's next?

Health Care Providers Override More Than Half of E-Rx Alerts

A study published this week finds that health care providers override more than half of clinical decision support alerts when using electronic prescribing systems. According to the study, only 53% of those overrides are medically appropriate. FierceHealthIT, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.More

Study finds text messaging effective for weight loss

People in a Weight Watchers program who received motivational and reminder text messages lost an average of 4.5 pounds more in a 12-week period than those who were left to their own volition, a newly published study found. Text messaging also showed promise for increasing exercise and promoting other healthy behaviors, according to researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, Richmond, Va.  More

95M U.S. Adults Using Mobile Health Technology

A Manhattan Research Cybercitizen Health study finds that 95 million U.S. residents are using mobile health applications, representing a 27% increase from the number of people using such apps last year. In addition, the study found that mobile health IT adoption varies among patient audiences. Healthcare IT News. More

Most Parents Want Option To Email Child's Physician

A new University of Michigan poll finds that most parents want the option to email their child's physician regarding minor illnesses. Forty-eight percent of parents say that such online consultations should have no cost, while 50% say they should cost less than an office visit. News Medical et al

Infographic with some useful statistics about mobile health

 

Study shows FaceTime with iPhone is successful in teaching Cardiac Ultrasound remotely

Pocket sized ultrasound devices (PUDs) have  potential to  improve global health care delivery due  to their potential role in areas with limited resources.   Although theoretically  they have much promise, their use has been limited due to a lack of imaging protocol and trained users.

This particular study, titled — “Feasibility of remote real-time guidance of a cardiac examination performed by novices using a pocket-sized ultrasound device” looked at the cardiac limited ultrasound exam (CLUE)  to screen for  left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction, left atrial (LA) enlargement, ultrasound lung comets, and elevated central venous pressure (CVP).   More

Best Hospitals 2013–14: Overview and Honor Roll

U.S. News & World Report publishes annual rankings of the nation's Best Hospitals. The rankings, now in their 24th year, cover nearly 5,000 medical centers across the country and span 16 medical specialties, from cancer to neurology & neurosurgery. Hospitals that rank near the top of at least six specialties earn a spot on the Honor Roll. More

"Note bloat" putting patients at risk

Healthcare IT News, 10/14/2013

Healthcare organizations with long–established electronic health records run the risk of "note bloat" and compromised patient safety unless they standardize physician documentation procedures and limit the amount of cutting–and–pasting doctors have to do...More

HDM Readers React to New Blog on Mobile Medical Apps

With the industry generally supporting recent Food and Drug Administration guidance on medical mobile applications, an HDM blogger warns that the guidance carries some consequences and could unlevel the playing field.  More

Marketplace Health Plans for Florida

By Health News Florida Staff
Floridians don’t have to wait until the crowds and glitches diminish on the federal website to see which local plans are available. They can view a PDF with all of the plans available in Florida and can also download information about the plans and prices for Florida and other states at this site.
The data don’t include information about premium subsidies. To get a better idea on the actual price,  use this calculator. 

Research in Action: EHC Program Tools Help NYC Clinicians, Patients Review Treatment Options

Urban Health Plan (UHP), a network of New York City health centers that serves more than 54,000 patients in the Bronx and Queens, is a leader among the many organizations that have partnered with AHRQ’s Effective Health Care (EHC) Program. Learn how UHP uses plain-language EHC Program publications to help patients and their families explore the benefits and risks of treatment options for various health conditions.  More

4 apps for better personal safety

If you go walking/jogging most mornings. . You can never be too careful,  you need to protect yourself just in case... Here are some personal safety apps to give you and others peace of mind.

System: Android, iOS

Click Here to Learn More >>

Long-term Care for You or your Love Ones Information from DHHS

Long-term care for your loved ones

If you have aging parents or grandparents, then you probably worry about them. Even independent people need a hand now and then.

You might be planning for the future, and what kind of care they may need. But if you haven't, then I recommend this site from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a great place to start.

Click Here to Learn More >>

Reimbursement for home monitoring gradually expands

By Neil Versel

Barriers to reimbursement for telehealth services are falling, slowly.

One of the most recent victories came in Massachusetts, where lawmakers this summer approved a general appropriations bill that included Medicaid reimbursement for remote monitoring services in patient homes. This action, passed over a veto by Gov. Deval Patrick, makes Massachusetts the 12th state to approve Medicaid payments for home monitoring, according to the American Telemedicine Association.

In fact, the Massachusetts legislation has a bit of a catch: it applies only to home health agencies, not hospitals or physician practices, which is why the Massachusetts Medical Association declined to comment. The Home Care Alliance of Massachusetts, however, was ecstatic.  More

Johns Hopkins launches mHealth Evidence reference site

The mHealth Evidence site brings together sources and research related to feasibility, usability and efficacy of mobile healthcare technologies, though Boncana said there still remains limited data on health outcomes. It includes a searchable database and what Boncana said is a way to help researchers know where there are gaps in the literature.

mHealth Evidence currently contains close to 4,400 records, and will automatically pulls in new, relevant citations from PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s index of medical literature. More

Slideshow: 10 Patients Apps from US Children’s Hospitals

One trend that emerged while researching MobiHealthNews’ most recent report, 205 Hospital-branded apps for patients, was that children’s hospitals are far and away the most creative and ambitious of healthcare providers in the United States using mobile apps for patient engagement.

Click Here for mobile apps from US Children's Hospitals

FDA’s final guidance for mobile medical apps

The two broad categories of apps that the FDA regulates, according to the final guidance, are:

1. are intended to be used as an accessory to a regulated medical device – for example, an application that allows a health care professional to make a specific diagnosis by viewing a medical image from a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) on a smartphone or a mobile tablet; or
2. transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device – for example, an application that turns a smartphone into an electrocardiography (ECG) machine to detect abnormal heart rhythms or determine if a patient is experiencing a heart attack.

• The FDA also published an important guidance document for mobile health devicemakers — the hardware side of the industry — in August. The guidance on device interoperability had been in the works even longer than the mobile medical apps document.
  
  Read the FDA’s final guidance for mobile medical apps here. (PDF)
   

Telehealth powers Population Health Management

Population Health is one of the three cornerstones of healthcare’s “Triple Aim” – which includes

• Improving the experience of care
• Improving the health of populations
• Reducing the per capita costs of healthcare 

Briefly, Population Health looks beyond the health outcome of an individual. It looks at outcomes across a group as well as the distribution of outcomes within that group. 



The Healthcare Intelligence Network has put together a nice infographic that summarizes how telehealth powers Population Health Management.

It covers:

• How people are using telehealth for clinical vs. non-clinical purposes
• Top clinical areas targeted for telehealth
• The top technologies being employed for telehealth
• Top types of clinical applications for telehealth
• How they are tapping the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) provisions that support telehealth

You can use this infographic to

• Determine if your telehealth solution is aligned with where others are going
• Determine how you can tie telehealth into the ACA’s provisions
• Determine your best clinical options for implementing telehealth 

 

(Hands On Telehealth) Nirav Desai via aweber.com

Medication Adherence: Getting America to Take Its Medicine

The Healthcare Intelligence Network is the leading online source of healthcare business information.
Complex patients remain the top targets of programs to improve medication adherence (MA), but more than half now also zero in on MA levels during transitions in care — up from 37 percent in 2012.
This HINfographic on Medication Adherence illustrates a wealth of data on current programs, including the most likely targets of MA programs, the most common barriers to medication compliance, the most influential tools, and the conditions that respond most favorably to efforts to improve MA.
This Medication Adherence HINfographic is derived from data published in 2013 Healthcare Benchmarks: Medication Adherence.  

More

Patient and Family Engagement

The Patient and Family Engagement module of the CUSP Toolkit focuses on making sure patients and their family members understand what is happening during the patient's hospital stay, are active participants in the patient's care, and are prepared for discharge.  AHRQ   More

FL Patients Too Poor to Enroll: DOH

© Health News Florida Floridians who use county health departments for primary care are mostly too poor to qualify for enrollment in a health plan through the online Marketplace to open Oct. 1, 2013, the Department of Health says.  More

Final FDA Rule Out for Medical Device Unique Identifiers

Six years after authorizing legislation was enacted, the Food and Drug Administration has issued a final rule to establish a unique device identifier for medical devices.
Read More »

HHS Site Aims To Educate About Health Information Exchange

Yesterday, HHS launched a website aimed at helping health care providers educate their patients on making informed decisions about health information exchange. Meanwhile, two Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT officials explained the decision to launch the website in a Health Affairs Blog post. The Hill's "Healthwatch" et al. More

Electronic Nursing Documentation: Charting New Territory

Medscape Nurses

• Nurses Speak Up About Electronic Charting
• Advantages of Electronic Charting
• EHRs Take Too Much Time
• Perception, Reality, and Learning Curves
• Too Many Check Boxes, Too Little Narrative
• Changing Nurses' Workflow: Real-Time Charting
• Point-of-Care Charting
• Whose Chart Is It, Anyway?
• From User-Unfriendly to Nurses' Best Friend
• More

5 ways to link health information technology, quality measurement

A new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) summarizes the comments it received on its July 2012 request for information and from focus groups on how to enhance quality measurement through health information technology.    More

Consumers Spend 52 Hours Online Annually Searching for Health Info

A new study finds that U.S. consumers each spend about 52 hours online annually searching for health information. WebMD is the most accessed online source, and personal computers are the preferred tool to conduct such searches, according to the report. FierceHealthIT.  More

EHRs Associated With Fewer ED Visits, Hospitalizations, Study Finds

A study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that the use of electronic health record systems is associated with a modest decrease in emergency department visits and hospitalizations among patients with diabetes. Medical News Today et al. More

EHR adverse events data cause for alarm

MDLYNX NURSING: Healthcare IT News, 09/09/2013

Software default values, though implemented for safety, are proving in many cases to be harmful for patients if not used properly. After analyzing more than 300 event reports related to EHR software default values, more than 3 percent were found to result in unsafe conditions or prolonged hospitalization for patients, according to a new report by the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority. More