FEATURED CONTENT

• Are Your Clinicians Fed Up Don't Blame Your Technology (Yet)

  8/13/2015

  If your clinicians are raising pitchforks over your hospital’s technology, don’t panic and spend big on brand-new applications and systems, expecting a quick fix. More often than not, buying your way to greener pastures is impossible. Why? Well, your hospital’s technology usually isn’t the problem at all. When user adoption is poor and clinicians constantly complain, every issue feels like a technology issue, especially in resource-strapped community healthcare organizations. In reality, though, most of the technology problems that your clinicians complain about are actually process problems in disguise. Here’s a crash course on identifying and categorizing common hospital workflow issues. By Phil Stravers, ICE Technologies

• Serving The American Healthcare Revolution

  12/21/2015

  In my ritual of year-end reflection, I am struck by an unshakeable parallel between the general healthcare climate today, and the atmosphere surrounding the late stages of the American Revolution and the start of our fledgling nation. I’ve found myself returning to this construct as a way to organize my efforts in alignment with a sincere desire to bring about lasting improvements in the way we care for each other and promote health in our country. By Matt Patterson, MD, President, AirStrip

• Retained Surgical Sponges: A Black Mark Against Whiteboards

  8/2/2016

  Erasable whiteboards are useful for the classroom, where lessons change and teachers need the ability to erase old notes and write new ones with ease. By Dylan Crotty, vice president and general manager, Stryker Surgical

• UPMC Scales Its Network With SDN

  3/6/2020

  Healthcare provider and insurer, UPMC is the largest non-governmental employer in the state of Pennsylvania. It operates 40 academic, community and specialty hospitals, 700 doctors’ offices and outpatient sites and offers an array of rehabilitation, retirement and long-term facilities. For UPMC’s IT department that means a lot of add moves and changes to administer and, with a 12 percent average annual growth rate, a lot of new users and branch offices to add. Before adopting SDN in its data centers and SD-WAN for branch connectivity, scaling UPMC’s network was a costly part of the business.

• Could RFID Help Support Electronic Health Records?

  11/10/2010

  Electronic health records EHRs would provide healthcare professionals with electronic access to an individual’s medical history, even when that history has been recorded by multiple providers. Therefore, the EHR system necessitates inter-operable communication of standardized data between hospitals and physicians. In our view, RFID could play a potential role in the development of these health records, particularly given the tight timeframe that needs to be followed. The Department of Health and Human Services needs to issue its Interim Final Rule by December 31, 2009 and legislative incentives begin in 2011. By Reik Read, Robert W. Baird & Co.
• The Future Of HIEs

  10/17/2018

  The United States government passed the 21st Century Cures Act in December 2016 that paved the way for a more streamlined device and drug approval process. The objective of this act was to bring new treatments to the market faster. While the debate in mainstream media focused on the merits of approving drugs based on weaker evidence and bypassing randomized, controlled trials, there were other provisions in the law that were truly remarkable.