Health Information Technology includes diverse systems used by health care providers, patients and health plans to capture, store, exchange, display and analyze health care data, and, more importantly, to facilitate, coordinate and improve health care processes.
There is a popular adage for information technology professionals: “Don’t pave the cow paths.” I recently worked with a client from Texas, and they were fond of this adage. They said it with the most excellent drawl, giving it extra credibility, as if they may have actually learned it the hard way on their own
Don’t pave the cow paths: The challenge of re-conceptualizing health care processes Read More »
Trinity Health – Michigan and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) recently announced that they signed a three and a half year agreement under which BCBSM will provide some funding to support a collaborative effort of Trinity Health and its affiliated physician organizations to make improvements in infrastructure designed to improve clinical integration and support
Guidelines for the use of mammograms to screen for breast cancer have been the topic of one of the fiercest and longest-running debates in medicine. Back in the early 1990s, I participated in that debate as the leader of a guideline development team at the Henry Ford Health System. We developed one of the earliest
Few things in my work life are better than finding mind-blowing information from other industries and figuring out the implications for healthcare. I recently read a set of slides by Paul Adams, a user experience designer that worked at Google and Facebook. Although Adams’ presentation had 224 slides, the main thesis was relatively simple and
Ron Klar, MD, MPH is a health care consultant with a long history of involvement in federal health care policy and health plan innovation. He published a recent series of three posts regarding the draft rules for the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) in the Health Affairs Blog, an influential forum for debating health policy issues.
Klar 4: Why is it important for CMS to Share Claims Data with ACOs? Read More »
Presentation entitled “Developing the Economic Model for Success” from day 2 of the American Medical Group Association’s Accountable Care Organization Learning Collaborative, at the Swissotel in Chicago. Attended by approximately 60 leaders of AMGA member physician organizations and other interested parties. Full page PDF format. Hand-out PDF format.
Dr. Ward’s Slides from AMGA ACO Learning Collaborative, Chicago, July 14, 2011 Read More »
Ron Klar, MD, MPH is a health care consultant with a long history of involvement in federal health care policy and health plan innovation. He published a recent series of three posts (post 1, post 2, and post 3) regarding the draft rules of the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) in the Health Affairs Blog, an
According to an article in Healthcare IT News, an advisory panel that is shaping measures for the next stage of meaningful use has suggested delaying Stage 2 by one year, until 2014, as an option to give vendors and healthcare providers more time to update and roll out more advanced technology. The panel is chaired
Possible one year delay to Stage 2 Meaningful Use? Read More »
Today I attended a webcast sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, an organization “committed to the art of principled compromise.” The webcast featured Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, the newly appointed National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He was joined in a panel discussion by Senators Tom Daschle (Democrat, South Dakota) and Bob
I went to the huge HIMSS’11 convention in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. When visiting the bewildering number of vendor booths, I focused on a few key questions relevant to the challenges facing physicians and hospitals working to establish successful Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs): 1) What is the current state of clinical data exchange
Why many clinical leaders prefer Registries to EHRs: Actively Structured Information Read More »
