Weekly round-up: News runs the gamut
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| Beth Walsh, Editor, CMIO |
For example, this week we published an article based on a presentation at the 2012 Healthcare IT Connect Summit. Two state officials shared their decision-making process to take to the cloud for health information exchange (HIE) efforts.
John Lekich, project director for the State of Illinois, discussed how the state is in the initial HIE participant recruiting phase, building a master patient index and providing ongoing enrollment of providers into Direct. The HIE hopes to accomplish emergency department, specialist referrals and public health reporting use cases, he said.
Kim Norby, state health IT coordinator for the State of Iowa, explained that the state decided on a hybrid cloud model with both private and community type attributes where Iowa e-Health, a collaboration of consumers, healthcare providers, payors and others, contracted the tool as a combination of both platform and infrastructure as a service environment and is provisioned for use by Iowa and surrounding partners and citizens as end consumers.
Meanwhile, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that making patient records available in the emergency department (ED) through a health information exchange (HIE) could boost adherence to guidelines and reduce unnecessary CT and MRI exams among patients who present to the ED with chronic headache.
The researchers mined data from a regional HIE connecting 15 major hospitals and two regional clinic systems and focused on 2,101 repeat visits for 1,252 adult patients, with a primary discharge diagnosis of headache disorder. They determined any HIE use, HIE use by a physician or nurse practitioner and HIE use by administrative/nursing staff.
HIE use was concentrated among administrative staff at 71 percent of access. Physicians and nurse practitioners accounted for 29 percent of HIE use. The researchers surmised that the fairly low rate of HIE use is related to system factors and time constraints.
The researchers estimated that HIE use resulted in the avoidance of 163 head CTs in a two-year period. “If HIE had been used in all cases, we estimate that as many as 748 CT scans could have been avoided,” they wrote.
Is health IT helping your organization realize any of these benefits, such as reduced utilization? Please share your experience.
Beth Walsh, CMIO Editor
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com
Beth Walsh,
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.