Health Informatics Forum

I attended the EU-US Health IT Cooperative Assembly event during eHealth week 2013 in Dublin. There were some excellent presentations from Alex White from the Department of Health, Ireland, Karel de Gucht, EU Trade Commissioner, Dr Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health IT, US Department of Health, Peter Zilgalvis, Head of Unit, Health and Well-being, DG CNET, Enda Kenny, Taoiseach, Therese Murray, President of Massachhusetts Senate, Chandra Brown, Deputy Assistant Secretary, US Department of Commerce and Edwin Poots, Minister of Health N. Ireland. Other speakers included Mary Cleary, ICS, Stathis Konstantinidis, CAMEI, Robyn Tamblyn CIHR-IRSC, Nicole Denjoy, COCIR and Jean Roberts, UKCHIP. The chairs were Frank Cunningham DG CNECT, Doug Fridsma, ONC/HHS, Benoit Abeloos, DG CNET and Gerard Hurl, National Director of ICT, HSE, Ireland and also in attendance was Dr James Reilly, Minister for Health, Ireland.



Dr Farzad Monsashari gave us a sense of where they are in the US and some lessons learned after 4 years of the HITECH act and "Meaningful Use".



Karen de Gucht explained how the trade agreement between the US and the EU in eHealth would create growth and jobs in both economies and announced the call to action on the roadmap to implement the Memorandum of Understanding.



Peteris Zilgalvis announced the call to action under two work streams; 1) Interoperability of EHRs and 2) workforce development. He called for pilots and demonstrations to inform international collaboration and informed the audience they could be early contributors to the roadmap.



Robyn Tamblyn shared the Canadian experiences on marshalling the workforce to deliver on the promises of eHealth.



The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny agreed that eHealth would bring additional prosperity and applauded the ecosystem approach to eHealth. He mentioned…

By Kim Phan, Program and Marketing Coordinator, The Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2)

Health care enterprise content management (ECM) is beneficial to the health care industry and is the critical framework behind collection, storage, analytic tracking, reporting, and securing clinical data for electronic health records (EHR).  As we move through the stages of meaningful use, organizations want to make sure that they are implementing, covering, and facing each of the challenges as each health system moves forward.  The meaningful use incentive program has resulted in more physicians implementing EHRs. The benefits of having the best ECM software are improved interoperability, consistent EHR data, and an efficient framework to manage unstructured patient data.

In a recent interview with Search Health IT, Barbara Walters, senior business analyst at the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, shares the process switching from IBM’s FileNet to On Base’s integration with Epic for EMC.  Over a ten month period, Walter’s team converted 29 million clinical and revenue documents. They had to break down 22 million clinical images, 9 million revenue cycle images and they also had over 3,500 different document types. Her team wanted to be as specific as possible and their goal was to shrink down to 700 document types, which began by taking all data fields and creating new keywords in OnBase.

According to Walters, they still have daily challenges in the system. She states, “Now, registration, revenue cycle, base applications and Epic ambulatory are converted, with inpatient coming next. But, what’s the best way to do inpatient transitioning? We want to narrow it down based on time sensitivity.…