There’s a new trend in HIEs–image sharing. Universal viewers are linking physicians with images to allow review anywhere. It’s time to take a look.

Many feel that the EMR is central to the health of the enterprise and promises to meet many needs. However, as stakeholders drill down into individual departments, there are areas where the EMR may fail to address the specific workflow of the caregivers in those specialties.

Septicemia continues to pose a challenge to hospitals: A statistical brief1 released recently by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality indicates not only that 47.1% of aggregate hospital costs incurred in 2011 were related to the 20 most expensive conditions to treat, but that the top five such conditions, septicemia among them, accounted for nearly a fifth (18.5%) of the total aggregate costs of all hospitalizations. Perhaps it’s even more significant that the brief identifies septicemia as the most expensive condition treated in hospitals in fiscal 2011, with an aggregate cost of $20.3 billion (or 5.2% of the total aggregate cost for all hospitalizations) required to cover its remediation.

With cost containment driving many health-care decisions, the temptation exists for hospital executives to judge a service line on speed and efficiency (and to overlook quality). In a service line such as radiology—for which accuracy is not easily assessed and quality measurements are not consistently reported—the inclination might be even stronger.

A carefully managed electronic data warehouse is a key component of improved patient care in any health-care practice and is surprisingly easy to build on and improve, once you begin the implementation process. Those were the key points of “Use of Registry Tools to Improve Care,” presented by David Howes, MD, in San Diego, California, on October 7, 2013, at the annual conference of the Medical Group Management Association. Howes is president and CEO of Martin's Point® HealthCare (Portland, Maine), a nonprofit health-care organization.

For many years, in health care, patients in the United States got what we all thought was high-quality care: well-trained physicians delivering as much health care as patients wanted, much as restaurants serve food. The value revolution in health care means that care providers can no longer wait for patients to access care: Too many of them access too little care; others overuse it. Clinical analytics, in the hands of caregivers, is proving to be a potent enabler.

After working in health IT (HIT) for 30-plus years, no one could accuse Charles Christian of being a Luddite. However, as a participant in a half dozen health information exchanges (HIEs) at his former post in Indiana—and even more transitions in federal health policy—Christian is not naïve about what HIT can and cannot do when it comes to managing population health.

Non-profit hospitals have to do it every three years to comply with the requirements of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), but probably any hospital or clinic would benefit by conducting a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA).