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

It was widely known that fewer than 20% of small practices in the United States had purchased an EHR before the HITECH act.

When you deploy an EHR system, you are developing software. Your chosen EHR is simply your programming substrate. If you are thinking of your deployment of an EHR as a minor software development effort you will be better prepared for the level of engineering you will need to do in order to replace a paper-based data and workflow system.

With the data that an EHR provides, an ACO could actively seek out difficult patients, like diabetics, knowing that they would be compensated more for a patient with diabetes. By using smart information systems to customize care, they could treat the diabetic more effectively with

The healthcare system in the United States is easily one of the best in the world, until you need more than one doctor. A single doctor in the United States has met one of the highest standards for medical education in the world, but the system as a whole has been operating in a disconnected fashion for decades. Patients have been forced to coordin

Capitation means that providers are paid a set monthly fee for covered patients,

Healthcare providers in the United States, for the most part, are paid for their time. EHR typically slow doctors down, ensuring that they are paid less for the same work.

The lesson of this chapter is simple. For the clinician it is to recognize the value of normalized or structured data. For the technologist it is to recognize that structuring of EHR data is a clinical issue. Healthcare ontologies represent the practice of bounding healthcare data.

Data linking is all about the way data in one part of a patient’s record relates to data in another part of the record.

An HMO meddled with doctors’ methods, whereas an ACO focuses only on the doctors’ results. How will an ACO accomplish this? By leveraging data from meaningful use certified EHR systems.

appear arrogant to the clinical staff, who understand perfectly how effective the paper forms can be.