CDS Coalition requests FDA rescind final decision support guidance

CDS Coalition requests FDA rescind final decision support guidance

The CDS Coalition is asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to pull back on its clinical decision support guidance in order to ensure that the agency better balances its regulatory oversight with the healthcare sector’s need for innovation, while comporting with the statutory language of the 21st Century Cures Act. ‘Flagrant’ disregard for Congressional law and intent
The coalition’s stakeholders – clinical decision support software developers, patient advocacy organizations, clinical societies, healthcare providers and healthcare payers – say the FDA’s guidance exceeds Congress’s statutory definitions of what is considered CDS and threatens to undermine lawmakers’ goals.
“The Office of the National Coordinator for…

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Why NLP can only succeed in healthcare if it caters to caregivers

Why NLP can only succeed in healthcare if it caters to caregivers

Natural language processing, or NLP, is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables machine understanding of human language. In recent years, NLP has become part of consumer products and performs with a sometimes surprising degree of accuracy.Virtual assistants use NLP to understand spoken questions like, “What’s the weather like today?” They can contextualize the meaning of the question, and then use data from online sources to reply with a meaningful response.
Medical NLP has long been a topic of research and development, since it contains significant potential for uncovering meaningful insights from unstructured medical text. This presents huge opportunities for healthcare providers, clinical…

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How Technology Streamlines Referral Management, Specialty Care Access

How Technology Streamlines Referral Management, Specialty Care Access

– On paper, the patient referral process can sound almost like a prescription. One biopsy. One second opinion. One visit to a specialist. In reality, referral management is a logistical and patient experience challenge, one that requires streamlined care coordination from start to finish. Getting a referral isn’t uncommon. According to a 2018 report from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the National Patient Safety Foundation, there are nearly 100 million subspecialty referral requests made from ambulatory centers each year. Despite referrals being common, they can still be jarring for the patient. Patients receiving referrals for mammograms might not be focused…

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Community Clinics Look to EHR Implementation to up Patient Experience

Community Clinics Look to EHR Implementation to up Patient Experience

– Texas-based Legacy Community Health Clinic has announced it will transition from its outdated legacy system and move forward with an EHR implementation that will drive the patient experience while improving patient data access. The project, funded by a $1 million federal grant, will connect the health clinic’s 55 locations through one system and provide over 200,000 patients with continual data access. Providing patients access to their medical records was challenging for the community health providers, who previously had to fax health information. Faxed patient health data often sits on the fax machine for hours or even days before it gets…

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4 technologies shaping the future of healthcare

4 technologies shaping the future of healthcare

Technological innovation is the key to improving human living standards.
This is especially true in healthcare, which is why research is constantly being done to discover ways that up-and-coming technology can be implemented.
In this article, we’ll explore four technologies that are shaping the future of healthcare.

Artificial intelligence

Machine learning is being increasingly applied across a wide variety of industries, including healthcare. With the ability to quickly and accurately extract patterns from data using algorithms, artificial intelligence is able to sift through information more efficiently than healthcare professionals.
Moreover, artificial intelligence programs can process symptoms and patient information to suggest possible diagnoses. A…

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Epic remains Best in KLAS for overall software suite for 13th year

Epic remains Best in KLAS for overall software suite for 13th year

In addition to winning overall, Epic was named top Overall Physician Practice Vendor based on provider feedback in this year’s Best in KLAS awards. The health IT giant also earned plaudits in 13 other categories, the research firm announced Wednesday.Of note, Impact Advisors and Nordic are tied as co-winners of the Overall IT Services category. 
Impact Advisors also took top placements in ERP Implementation Leadership, Financial Improvement Consulting and Security & Privacy Consulting Services categories while Nordic won for HIT Core Clinical Implementation Leadership.
The KLAS announcement noted that Nordic also scored above 90 in four separate services segments, which is detailed in 2023…

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Florida ACO achieves value-based care goals with real-time patient data platform

Florida ACO achieves value-based care goals with real-time patient data platform

Achieving value-based care goals remains a difficult challenge for many providers who also are trying hard to provide equitable care. Pathways Health Partners, an accountable care organization that works with more than 280 providers across multiple clinical specialties, works with organizations to address these issues.THE PROBLEM
“Ensuring access to patient records in real time, regardless of where patient care is delivered, was an ongoing hurdle for our organization,” said Ricardo Matos, CIO at Pathways. “It was a significant limitation with regard to our providers making timely, informed care decisions.
“And we knew from our experience working with partners over the years that trying…

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Leveraging EHR Audit Logs to Inform Clinician Burnout Interventions

Leveraging EHR Audit Logs to Inform Clinician Burnout Interventions

– Healthcare organizations are continually looking for ways to tackle increasing clinician burnout with documentation burden at the forefront of their concerns. To better understand clinician workflow challenges, practices can leverage EHR audit logs to capture documentation behaviors and inform clinician burnout interventions, according to an ONC HealthITBuzz blog post. EHR audit logs are automated tracking features that monitor clinician activity within the EHR. Specifically, the automated tool can track the time clinicians spend documenting and carrying out certain tasks, such as chart reviews and messaging. Continuous monitoring of the EHR burden is needed to address any upcoming burnout challenges and…

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Epic MyChart Patient Portal Racks up 6th Best in KLAS Award

Epic MyChart Patient Portal Racks up 6th Best in KLAS Award

– KLAS Research has once again named the Epic MyChart patient portal Best in KLAS, but the rest of the annual report highlights the numerous software solutions in the patient engagement technology market. While other healthcare market segments have dominant vendors—Epic Systems within the EHR space, for example—no single vendor came out on top across the numerous areas of patient engagement. Once again, the health IT vendor giant has come in as the top-rated patient portal solution, getting a score of 88.7 out of 100. Epic was followed by athenahealth, Greenway Health, Veradigm, Oracle Health (Cerner), and NextGen Healthcare. The annual…

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