Florida State University News
Faculty and Staff Briefs: February 2021
Published:
HONORS AND AWARDS
The FSU Alumni Association was recognized with a 2021 CASE District III award and received Grand Gold in the category of Alumni/General Interest Magazines produced two times per year for its biannual alumni publication, VIRES magazine.
Mackenzie Alston, Ph.D. (Department of Economics) was selected for a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to support diversity in economics. The one-year fellowship is open to early-career economists from historically underrepresented demographics within the economics profession and to researchers studying diversity issues.
Alex Meyer, Ph.D. (Department of Psychology) received an award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiological Research.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found that policy experts underestimated the impact of widespread electronic health record use on clinician burnout at the time of the HITECH Act s passage in 2009.
The retrospective look examined the discussions at the AMIA s 2009 Annual Health Policy Meeting, which focused on the unanticipated consequences that could occur with the large-scale, national implementation of health IT – especially EHRs – following the HITECH Act.
That policy meeting included many fellows from the American College of Medical Informatics, which met in the winter of 2020 to discuss those 2009 predictions (among other issues). The collective opinion of the ACMI fellows participating in this session was that, while many consequences of the HITECH act were foreseen in 2009, the magnitude of the current burnout crisis largely was not, wrote the
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association this past week found that, while electronic health record vendors have demonstrated promising levels of advancement, EHR usability continues to be a major hurdle after implementation.
The paper – authored by MedStar Health s Dr. Aaron Z. Hettinger and Raj M. Ratwani, along with Yale School of Medicine s Dr. Edward R. Melnick – examined the usability practices of four unnamed EHR vendors. Implementation processes such as healthcare-facility configuration and customization choices, training and policy all impact usability of EHR technology, noted Hettinger, Melnick and Ratwani. The difference between EHR products pre- and post-implementation, called the EHR usability reality gap, continues to be a significant challenge, they continued.
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.