City Health Care Partnership CIC (CHCP CIC) has implemented a patient flow management solution by Cayder to enable healthcare providers to manage patient care more effectively. Providers at CHCP CIC will be able to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time with patients.

Big data:  None

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The Amari Medical Clinic and Integrated Health Centre in Surrey, B.C. has tapped Cloud Practice Inc., to make test results, appointments, and healthcare states available to patients. Patients will be able to integrate their health data with their mobile devices.

Big data:  None

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Much of healthcare reform involves changing the relationship between providers and patients. But for providers, efforts to deliver more accountable care necessarily involves changing the way they manage their practices and keep abreast of near-constant developments across healthcare.

Lumeris, an operations, technology and services company, recently released what it has dubbed the "9 Cs" framework to help providers transition to accountable care models. Not surprisingly, nearly half those "Cs" focus on the business end of healthcare delivery.

Big data:  None

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Idaho State University will pay $400,000 to the U.S. Department of Health Human Services to settle alleged violations of the HIPAA Security Rule. The settlement comes after ISU’s Pocatello Family Medicine Clinic disabled server firewall protections for a period of at least 10 months, resulting in the breach of electronic protected health information for 17,500 patients. 

Big data:  None

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Intermountain Heathcare has launched a program that measures cumulative radiation doses patients receive over their liferime for medical treatment. Intermountain hospitals and clinics are first in the country to compile the cumulative radiation patients receive from about 220,000 higher-dose procedures and imaging exams each year, starting with exams performed in the last quarter of 2012.

That information is now readily available to both physicians and patients.

Big data:  None

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The Beacon Communities proved that organizations can advocate changes to how healthcare is paid for by working with payers and providers, while  improving quality and safety at the same time — lessons learned locally but applicable to the entire nation, said Farzad mostashari, MD, national coordinator for health IT.

Big data:  None

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They never said navigating the electronic medical record landscape would be easy — at least not at first. And as new regulations from both federal and state spheres begin to tighten their hold around the industry, the valleys of EHR adoption and EHR mastery are sure to only become more congested and therein, even harder to get a handle on.  

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Healthland, which develops information technology for rural hospitals and care facilities, announced Tuesday its acquisition of Jackson, Miss.-based American HealthTech, which specializes in electronic health records for post-acute facilities.

Each company will continue to operate under its own brand, serving its traditional markets, officials say, but the two firms have already begun the process of linking resources to expand their offerings.

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More than half of all eligible providers nationwide have received federal incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful use of electronic health records, rates that have more than doubled since last year alone, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.

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Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has notified the Department of Defense that it will look for an electronic health record system available on the commercial market rather than develop its own based on the Department of Veterans Affairs VistA system.

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Healthcare providers and industry IT professionals have expressed concern over their ECG technology's lack of bidirectional communication and poor interoperability with electronic medical record systems, according to a KLAS report released Tuesday

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One month after six Republican Senators published a white paper calling for a new approach to the federal meaningful use incentive program, the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association has drafted a point-by-point response.

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Maine’s HealthInfoNet, a  nonprofit that operates the statewide health information exchange, has announced that all acute care hospitals are now under contract to connect to the query-based HIE. HealthInfoNet has 34 of the 38 hospitals connected already and expects the remaining four hospitals to connect by the end of the year.

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The California Health eQuality program is offering $1 million in grants for physicians, clinics and hospitals in rural California to add health information exchange technologies and meet federal meaningful use standards.

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Transparency is a touchy subject in healthcare. It’s one of the last market strongholds desperately clutching to its principles of price secrecy, and it won’t go down without a fight. 

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VHA, a nationwide healthcare network of 1,400 not-for-profit healthcare organizations that work to boost clinical performance while reducing costs, has cut a deal with Phytel to help its members tackle population management.

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The healthcare IT applications market continues to grow, according to a new Research and Markets report, which projects that by 2017 the global market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 7.0 percent .

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There are buzz phrases, and then there are buzz phrases.  And if there’s one phrase that has permeated the healthcare sector more thoroughly than all the others, it’s probably “accountable care.” But what exactly does it mean?  Or, more to the point for healthcare providers, how do you know when you’re actually providing it?

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Ever since the updated HIPAA rule took effect last March, some hospital IT departments see themselves as “the HIPAA police,” clamping down in ways that the rule doesn't require, says one industry expert. 

“Suddenly everybody is a judge, and that’s very dangerous. It’s a huge obstacle, and it slows down progress,” says Abraham Gutman, founder of AG Mednet, the provider of software used by more than 17,000 customers in 60 countries to automate the process of quality control, including pixel de-identification and DICOM de-identification.

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Siemens Healthcare and Louisiana State University are notifying 8,330 patients of a HIPAA breach following a database mishap that resulted in billing and treatment information being mailed to the wrong patients. 

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