Lack of healthcare interoperability is making it difficult for health systems to use healthcare apps, tap into unstructured data, and reduce the cost of care, according to a survey of 100 IT and business professionals at U.S. hospitals by the Center for Connected Medicine.
Only 27 percent of respondents said their hospital’s work to improve...
The state of Illinois is investing $420 million in broadband infrastructure to bring telehealth, education, and economic development to rural areas, Governor JB Pritzker announced August 15.
The initiative, called Connect Illinois, will centralize state agency resources, collaborate with private-sector experts and state legislators, and break down...
IT interoperability problems were cited as the top technology frustration among 600 non-hospital healthcare providers recently surveyed by Updox.
Other technology frustrations named by respondents were service downtime or interruptions, number of different logins, poor design of systems, and lack of features.
Close to 60 percent of...
St. Louis-based Mercy health system, through its Mercy Technology Services arm, has launched a health data network to pool clinical data from across the United States.
Mercy plans to partner with healthcare providers, who will contribute data to the pool for analysis using advanced data analytics.
The health system will build on its current...
Reports of vulnerabilities in healthcare IT infrastructure increased 341 percent between 2017 and 2018, according to a recent study by Bugcrowd.
The study, the State of Healthcare Cybersecurity 2019, is based on vulnerability reports submitted by security researchers.
“As the healthcare industry continues to move into the digital age, each...
Partners HealthCare will contribute its health IT infrastructure, data, and clinical expertise to a partnership with Fujifilm SonoSite to develop AI-powered portable ultrasound devices for emergency medicine use.
The organizations will work together to boost portable ultrasound technology with AI to enable clinicians to perform scans at the...
The FDA is providing funding to the Critical Path Institute (C-Path) and the Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) for a centralized and standardized health IT infrastructure to support rare disease research with the goal of accelerating therapy development.
The IT infrastructure will include a platform for a cooperative scientific approach...
Half of hospitals plan to invest in robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) for non-clinical uses by 2021, a recent survey of 115 hospital leaders by Sage Growth Partners and Olive found.
In addition, close to one-quarter of hospital leaders are planning to invest in RPA and AI for non-clinical uses today.
Hospitals...
The Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance (PHDA) is teaming with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use its cloud computing services to improve patient care by enabling healthcare AI research.
The PHDA will use cloud computing power to promote innovation in precision medicine, medical imaging, and cancer diagnostics through machine learning.
The...
IBM is teaming with Chainyard to launch a blockchain network to boost supply chain management for pharmaceutical companies, as well as firms in other industries.
The new blockchain network, called Trust Your Supplier, is designed to improve supplier qualification, validation, onboarding and life cycle information management, IBM explained in a news...
Healthcare blockchain could save the industry up to $100 billion per year in costs related to IT, operations, support functions, personnel, and health data breaches by 2025, estimated a report by BIS Research.
Pharmaceutical companies will benefit from using blockchain to track drugs, thus reducing the around $200 billion these companies lose from...
An upgrade of a VA medical center’s operating system to Windows 7 led to the transfer of sensitive information using unsecured means for four years, an audit by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) concluded.
The Windows 7 upgrade in 2013 resulted in incompatibility between the medical...
Colorado is set to receive $64 million in federal funds to invest in health IT infrastructure and to implement the state’s Health IT Roadmap, Governor Jared Polis announced recently.
Polis explained that investment in healthcare IT infrastructure enables clinicians to have timely access to health information about their patients. This will...
Arizona Care Network (ACN) decided to deploy healthcare blockchain technology to alleviate administrative burdens associated with processing transactions in a secure manner, explained Jami Berger, ACN’s executive director of operations.
“Arizona Care Network is on a journey to innovate around healthcare and really address those...
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce reaffirmed their commitment to healthcare interoperability, particularly the HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) framework, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference held July 30 in Washington, DC.
Healthcare...
CMS unveiled on July 30 a new pilot program called Data at the Point of Care (DPC), which is based on an industry-standard API designed to give clinicians easier access to a patient’s health data contained in the Blue Button claims database.
CMS explained that claims data will fill in information gaps for clinicians, giving them a...
University of California, Berkeley, has received a five-year, $47 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use brain imaging in the Alzheimer's Association's clinical trial, the U.S. Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk (U.S. POINTER).
The grant from NIH’s National...
Government Accountability Office (GAO) auditors were unable to determine the reliability of cost estimates for health IT infrastructure, data hosting, and system sustainment for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ legacy VistA electronic health record (EHR) system.
The VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT) estimated that $343...
HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has awarded close to $42 million in funding for health IT infrastructure improvements at federally funded health centers throughout the United States.
The funding will go to expand 49 health center-controlled networks (HCCNs) at 1,183 health centers, which were established to increase...
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center successfully tested the integration of an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered clinical trials screening system into the clinical workflow at a busy pediatric emergency department.
By using the AI technology, clinical research coordinators were able to recruit patients for six different pediatric...
