EMR
Allscripts dominating mobile electronic health records in North Carolina – over 3,300 individual physician practices
Allscripts, the EHR company that was one of the first to enable mobile phones to access EHRs from remote locations continues to gain in popularity, especially in North Carolina. A recent press release detailing how MedWest Health Systems chose Allscripts shed some light onto the gains Allscript has made in the state of North Carolina:
“Allscripts clearly has superior features and functionality, but what really tipped the scales in their favor was their demonstrated ability to implement and support the technology across a large physician enterprise,” commented Steve Heatherly, Chief Strategy Officer and Vice President of Ambulatory Services for MedWest. “In addition, we’ve always planned to share the electronic health record with our non-employed community doctors as part of our physician integration strategy, and Allscripts has significant experience with similar deployment models.”
MedWest adds to the Allscripts market-leading client footprint in North Carolina, where the company provides solutions to more than 3,300 individual physician practices.
Allscripts allows it’s electronic health record to be accessed off site via the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows mobile phone. We spoke with Allscripts executives during our coverage of HIMSS – currently we’re still waiting on Android compatibility for the EHR.
Source: Press Release
Verizon enters health information technology with cloud based information exchange
Verizon is planning a cloud based services for clinical providers to securely exchange health information. Features will include a clinical dashboard, record locator service, cross-enterprise patient index and clinical messaging.
GigaOm makes the point:
… by delivering what is essentially medical records as a service for hospitals and physicians, Verizon is not only trying to get a chunk of federal money, but also trying to provide the type of cloud service that will fill up its networks.
Why Apps are the Future of Mobile Health
 and Electronic Health Records
Preface: Albert Santalo is Chairman and CEO of CareCloud, an innovative web-based practice management software and electronic health record technology startup. Care Cloud integrates a fluid and attractive user-interface with an efficient revenue-cycle engine, and has attracted positive attention as well as $2.3m in series A funding. Mr. Santalo is an inductee of the Florida International University Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame and was recently recognized by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce as Best Up and Coming Technology Innovator. He was previously chairman of Avisena, a revenue cycle management company. CareCloud was covered recently on this site along with an interview with Albert Santalo. We are excited to bring you a guest post by this industry leader.
By Albert Santalo
There seems to be a lot of discussion these days regarding the turbulent nature of mobile platforms and how the differences between them will impact the kind of software that will be available to physicians and other healthcare professionals.
I want to take some time today to step outside of the deep technical details and discuss why I feel that the concept of the “App” is such a revolutionary step towards empowering physicians with effective, accessible and omnipresent tools.
While most of the smartphones on the market today offer exceptional browsing experiences (it’s amazing how far we’ve come in the last 3 years), the majority of browser-based web apps don’t provide the deep functionality and usability that native apps excel at. That means they can’t properly translate the desktop experience into the palm of your hand.
I’m not saying there isn’t a plethora of amazing utilities and tools available through the mobile browser today, but most lack the ability to fully capitalize on a particular device’s features to deliver a truly compelling user experience. There are some really amazing capabilities that developers can tap into if they build a native app, because native apps can work directly with the hardware and software of the mobile device.
Is an electronic health record (EHR) a good business decision for a physician practice?
As many readers are aware, the 2008 HITECH act included a $44,000 incentive for any qualifying physician who implements an approved EHR and puts it to “meaningful use”. The tenets of meaningful use are mostly known* but the final list is not due to be published until this Summer. Our senior editor, Iltifat Hussein is working on more detailed analysis as part of his MPH program but two published analyses shed a little light, or at least numbers, on this question.
What many people, myself included, wondered is where did this $44,000 number come from ? It turns out that it came out of a single published paper which surveyed the implementation costs of an EHR, averaged across fourteen family practice groups [Miller, et al, Health Affairs, 2005] and arrived at an average cost of $44k.
Aside from the marvel of setting far-reaching national legislation on such a small sample size, the next question is what is the financial benefit of implementing an EHR and is there a business argument in favor of it ?
Voice controlled electronic health records – Nuance could make it happen
As part of our coverage of HIMSS 2010, we had the opportunity to check out a series of apps being introduced by Nuance Communications. Physicians who are familiar with Nuance generally know them as a company that provides dictation services. What many physicians may not know is that Nuance has some of the most advanced speech recognition technology on the market and ambitions that go well beyond transcribing dictation summaries and clinic visits.
In Atlanta, they announced Medical Mobile Search and Medical Mobile Recorder, in addition to the Dragon Medical Mobile dictation iPhone app. These two apps were essentially voice-enabled search, with the former searching a variety of medical databases for reference information and the latter searching previous recordings for patient names. What these apps tell us is that Nuance’s aim is to move beyond clicks and taps, and allow users to interact with computers through voice. And a recent announcement from Nuance and T-Mobile suggests that Nuance could be bringing much more to the medical world.
Wouldn’t It Be Great if EHRs (medical records) Supported Plug-Ins and Were More Like Firefox?
I am currently migrating from one electronic health record (EHR) to another in my practice and feeling very sorry for myself.
There ought to be a way to do this easily, I keep thinking to myself. Despite all the talk of interoperability and health information exchanges (HIEs) that is all the buzz right now in health IT circles, it seems that some basic functionality that could help make doctors’ lives easier is still missing from EHRs.
While being able to exchange standardized XML formatted documents between hospitals when transferring patients is critical to safe and effective transfer of care, what about the doctor who wants to archive some patient records for later retrieval? Or for the practice that wants to switch from one EHR to another without paying an over-priced consultant to change column-names in an exported spreadsheet or to write a scripts to rename exported attachments.
Here is a list that my friend Jim O’Connell, a physician who is starting a company to address even more fundamental issues of aggregating EHR data for research and other purposes, came up with:
Nuance Brings Medical Dictation and Search to your iPhone: Dragon Medical Mobile Apps [Video]
In this video we check out two of the Dragon Medical Mobile Apps (releasing later this year) for the iPhone, Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation and Medical Mobile Search. We recorded this video from Nuance’s booth at the HIMSS conference
Nuance, the makers of Dragon Medical Dictation, a favorite dictation service among many physicians, announced at HIMSS they are bringing the same medical transcription service to the iPhone.
Many readers may have noticed the recent arrival of a free Nuance “Dragon” app in the App store. This simple app allows the user to speak directly into the iPhone and receive a nicely transcribed text document 15-30 seconds later, ready for email or for copy and paste.
At that time, Nuance did not specify their future intentions, but many speculated a medical version would be forthcoming. Indeed, at HIMSS, Nuance announced three new iPhone medical apps: Mobile Dictation, Mobile Search, and Mobile Recorder, all named with the prefix Dragon Medical (i.e. “Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation”, etc).
Epocrates’s recently announced Electronic Health Record will utilize many iPhone features
I interviewed Robert Quinn, Senior Vice President of Engineering and CTO of Epocrates at HIMSS 2010, and he spoke candidly about the many features Epocrates electronic health record will have, especially related to the iPhone.
Yes, that’s correct. Epocrates, the mobile medical app that nearly has the distinction of being the one “indispensable” application for every physician’s smart phone, is going to have a big brother soon.
The ten year old company, based in San Mateo California, believes its base of more than 900,000 clinicians worldwide and its experience with mobile medical development gives it the wherewithal for understanding what physicians need and expect from a mobile Electronic Health Record (EHR).
They are targeting solo and small physician practices and with a price point that is expected to be very competitive. “This was a logical next step for Epocrates,” said Rose Crane, chief executive officer of Epocrates, when making the announcement.
Integration with the iPhone
I had the opportunity to speak with Robert Quinn, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer about the forthcoming product. They are planning a shipping target of Fall 2010. The product will have both a mobile iPhone app and web interface. They plan on integrating the features of the iPhone, such as the camera, as well as dictation directly into the app, an interesting feature especially in light of the announcement today by Nuance that they will be shipping a medical transcription application for the iPhone.
Microsoft HealthVault Community Connect and the compelling results from their study with the Cleveland Clinic
This is part of iMedicalApps coverage of the HIMSS 2010 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia
A common cause of annoyance for patients is filling out the same forms over and over again. While just about every adult has experienced this issue, the deeper problem is a single patient will almost always have more than one physician or caregiver. This means the repetitive form filling is really the tip of a much more serious problem of data in silos, with each physician and hospital treating the patient from scratch, exchanging information via faxed notes or (mostly missed) phone calls.
Patient Case Example:
Take the simple example of a female middle aged patient who suddenly experiences chest pain after dinner one night. She goes to the nearest emergency room and has a rapid and extensive evaluation. Let’s say the results did not point to a heart attack, but there were indeed some abnormalities on the ECG. The patient ends up being discharged home with the ED physician writing gastroesopheageal reflux as a possible cause, and instructing the patient to follow up with a cardiologist and their primary care physician. The next morning the patient will call the cardiologist and show up in his office that afternoon. In their hand is…..nothing, but they do remember the abnormal ECG they had in the ED.
