MedCity News
EHR vendors, health systems frequently engage in information blocking, study shows
According to a national survey of health information exchanges, EHR vendors and health systems commonly engage in information blocking. Insights from the survey can help the HHS enforce its soon-to-be implemented information blocking rules, researchers say.
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With a little over two months to go before federal rules prohibiting information blocking take effect, a new study has found that the practice is prevalent among EHR vendors and providers.
The Department of Health and Human Services will implement its long-awaited interoperability and information blocking rules in April. This move will provide patients with unprecedented access to their health data.
A group of Israeli scientists published a paper in the
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association this week showcasing how a machine learning model can predict the illness trajectory of COVID-19 patients by using individual characteristics.
The model predicts the patient s disease course in terms of clinical states – moderate, severe or critical – as well as hospital utilization. Given the danger of unprecedented burden on healthcare systems due to COVID-19, there is a need for tools helping decision-makers plan resource allocation on the unit, hospital and national levels, wrote the researchers.
WHY IT MATTERS
The researchers aimed to track how hospitalized COVID-19 patients might transition between clinical states. Such evolution, they note, does not always travel in a linear manner: a patient might, for example, spend five days in the hospital in a severe state before deteriorating to critical and eventually recovering.
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The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has published a series of guides and tool kits to help tech developers get a jump on compliance with its 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule.
WHY IT MATTERS
The compliance dates for ONC s information blocking rules may have been pushed back due to the COVID-19 public health emergency, but they still draw nearer by the day.
ONC has provided these new resources meant to help the health IT developer community build products that meet the new certification requirements for standards-based APIs that can be used without special effort.
Among these new resources, the 2015 Edition Cures Update Key Dates compiles the timelines developers need to adhere to in the work to develop certified systems, and help them keep apprised of the requirements they must meet along the way.
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Like em or hate em, electronic health records are here to stay. Now it s just a matter of making them work to the best of their ability for patients and clinicians.
Some recent efforts are afoot to rethink the approach to these glorified billing systems from the bottom up. Others are focused on refining and streamlining their user experience to combat the scourge of burdensome charting and alleviate burnout.
In the meantime, with more than 18 million COVID-19 cases and counting so far in the U.S., it s never been clearer that interoperable, ideally telehealth-connected digital records are essential for quality care and public health going forward.
Report: COVID-19 Telehealth Risks and Best Practice Privacy, Security healthitsecurity.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from healthitsecurity.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.