SVFS Health IT Blog

CPOE and Reducing Errors Top 2010 CMIO Priorities

By Song on March 8th, 2010

The CMIO magazine website published a 2010 CMIO Compensation Survey in February. If you are a CMIO, it is a chance to compare your compensation to others. If you are not, it maybe interesting to note the median compensation falls around $180k to $200k per year. For other health IT professionals, I think the attention should fall on the list of IT and Business priorities that these CMIOs have voted on.

According to this report, the top two IT priorities are

Reducing Medical Errors
Delivering Clinical Knowledge to Physicians

The top two Business priorities are

Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE)
Electronic Medical Record (EMR)

As Fierce Health IT said, there is a lot more detail in the article that you should read for yourself. I am glad to see that the IT and Business priorities are aligned. This maybe an indication that the adoption of CPOE is no longer at issue and full implementation of EHR or EMR continues on its uptick.

Enterprisewide Clinical Information Sharing is number 8 on the IT priorities list, which I take as a sign that there continues to be silos in information and problems in connecting the disparate clinical systems in the hospital. There really needs to be not just encouragement but probably stronger nudges towards information exchange. We need not just enterprisewide sharing but also sharing across practices (and enterprises) to achieve better care delivery.

Digital Medicine, Meaningful Use No comments yet

Epocrates, a new EHR vendor

By Song on March 2nd, 2010

Epocrates announced its entrance into the EHR market today at HIMSS 2010 with a press release. A few points that the press release stressed were

Easy, Accessible and Affordable
Mobile and Web-based
Targeting small or solo practices
Meets Meaningful Use software requirement
Meets HIPAA compliance requirement

The twitterverse is abuzz with this new announcement. The small ambulatory practices are behind on the adoption curve compared to larger practices and hospitals. This is partly because most vendors have not offered something that speaks to the need of small practice physicians. Initial commentaries, however, indicate that watchers are hopeful that Epocrates will succeed, including those from mobihealthnews and iMedicalApps.

Digital Medicine No comments yet

Natural Language Processing in HIT

By Song on February 23rd, 2010

In recent discussions with other colleagues in the health informatics or health IT space, we found that there are many researchers and papers in this space but few actual notable applications deployed in the field. One example that I heard about is the NC DETECT application developed and deployed in the state of North Carolina for early event detection and public health surveillance. There is an online article about IBM and Mayo Clinic releasing their research technology into open source but no follow up new after the initial PR in April 2009.

Following is a list of research projects or conferences into utilizing Natural Language Processing to make narrative clinical notes more “computable” and “analyzable”. Since most doctors will not convert clinical note taking from free text to coded entry any time soon, there is tremendous value in having the computers make sense of these free text not just for epidemiological studies, but also for clinic decision support.

If you know of applications of NLP in healthcare, please feel free to comment on this post so we can share the knowledge. Until then, following are the research papers and conferences that I can find on NLP in health IT: