Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

The oldest electronic HIE protocols, being widely adopted in the 1980s, are billing exchange standards based on electronic data interchange (EDI) protocols.

Computers are good at representing text, but not good at understanding what the text means. Computers are also good at breaking text up into component parts, which can make it easier for them to understand what certain pieces of information are. The computational process of breaking up text into smaller parts is called parsing. Symbols that are int

whether they are sick or not. In theory, capitation incentivizes providers to keep patients healthy, thereby reducing the amount of money spent on their healthcare over the long term.

Similarly, health IT vendors lack motivation to properly support interoperability standards. If the data for a single patient can easily be exported from an EHR, then the data for every patient can also be exported easily. True interoperability means that it is much simpler for one EHR to replace another, and therefore one EHR vendor to be replaced

even the paper chart (i.e., the whole bundle, not just a single form) is not just a paper record of a patient’s healthcare history and current status. It is also a token in a clinical workflow.

Finally, the newest problem introduced by meaningful use compliant EHR systems is known as alert fatigue.

With the demographics collection and intake paperwork completed there is almost always an interaction with a nurse, medical assistant,

Having received the EOB or ERA, a facility must reconcile the information provided with the balances they billed out on the claim and figure out the patient’s responsibility for any remaining amount owed.

At least three of the most important health IT systems still available are based on the MUMPS programming language: MEDITECH, Epic, and VA VistA.