November 09, 2012
This video showcases several Cerner associates as they explain why health care is personal to them. From a daughter born with heart problems, to a grandfather who lost his life due to a medication error, these associates share how health care has impacted their lives.
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November 17, 2011
Kansas City is feeling the weight (or lack thereof) of healthier lifestyles and happier citizens. Through the KC Slimdown Challenge, nearly 10,000 people worked together to lose 38,187 pounds. In the Community Challenge, players weighing out lost an impressive average of 9.7 pounds per player and 28% moved to a better BMI category, quite a feat for a ten week competition! The estimated cost savings to KC through this initiative is a stunning $1.5 million.
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November 15, 2011
Well, the final Medicare Accountable Care Organization (ACO) regulations are out, and reaction from providers is much more positive than it was when CMS initially offered up its proposed rules (here are my thoughts on the initial version of the rules). For the most part, issues that were non-starters months ago have been addressed to varying degrees by CMS: no requirement for financial risk, enhanced eligibility, better incentives, better waivers, fewer measures and more organizational flexibility.
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November 10, 2011
You may not know it, but you’re likely already experienced with a new type of computing growing in popularity and application: cloud computing. If you have Web-based email, like Gmail, you’ve used cloud computing. If you’ve ordered an online movie from Netflix, you’ve used the cloud. With a cloud-based service, instead of purchasing and running a program on your computer, you log in to a Web account and use what you need. The software and/or hardware doesn’t exist on your PC or in your data center, it’s on the service’s ‘cloud’. So it’s stored on a server and delivered to you – on demand – via the Internet.
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November 03, 2011
As EHR adoption continues to accelerate, more and more physicians will have access to a computer (desktop, laptop, tablet, etc.) when they engage in patient care. Ideally, having such a device in the exam room should benefit the patient more than the physician. The idea is to engage them with their care and their health data.
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November 01, 2011
Back in June, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) published the proposed rule for implementing perhaps the most challenging of the requirements of ARRA HITECH related to updating the HIPAA Security and Privacy rules. The proposed rule addressed the requirements found in Section 13405(c) of ARRA HITECH for a patient to have the right to an accounting of disclosures for disclosures made from the electronic health record of the patient’s electronic personal health information (ePHI).
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October 28, 2011
Sepsis, or blood poisoning, is a life-threatening disease that arises when the body’s response to infection injures its own tissue and organs. It affects nearly 750,000 Americans annually, resulting in a mortality rate of almost 29%. Recognition of potentially septic patterns within the first two hours of their appearance is vital to the survival of the patient. Cerner developed the St. John Sepsis agent in order to help clinicians recognize these patterns and get patients the treatment they need. Heartland Health in St. Joseph, Mo., was one of the first health care organizations to begin using the agent. Joe Boyce, CMIO at Heartland Health, recently shared some insight on why his organization decided to use the agent, and the benefits they’ve seen to this point.
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October 26, 2011
At Indiana University Medical Group, we’re really proud to have eight sites that have achieved level 3 Medical Home certification from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. A Patient-Centered Medical Home is an approach to providing comprehensive primary care. It facilitates partnerships between individuals as patients and their personal providers while providing better access to health care and increasing satisfaction. A medical home is a sophisticated primary care practice where technology is utilized with services to enhance the doctor-patient relationship and bring additional teammates into the care of patients.
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October 20, 2011
Cerner Chairman and CEO Neal Patterson used a series of pictures to lay out his vision for the future in his CHC 2011 keynote address — at a time when Cerner clients face one wave of change after another. Federal deficits are forcing systemic changes because over the last 50 years, the cost of health care has increased faster than our gross domestic product.
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October 20, 2011
During the annual Cerner Health Conference last week, several clients came up to discuss my previous post and associated essay on de-identified health data. In my essay, I basically agree with Marc Lappé and others who have asserted that medical ethics as it exists and is practiced today is different from—and historically antagonistic toward—public health ethics (‘communitarian ethics’). This point of view is covered at some length in a paper by Eric Meslin and Ibrahim Garba in the September issue of Human Genetics.
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October 11, 2011
Blogger, mother and pediatrician Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, said doctors must start using social media to reach out to patients and parents in her General Session address Monday at the Cerner Health Conference. Citing the Pew Research Center, Dr. Swanson said 65 percent of Americans participate in a social network and 80 percent of Internet users look up health information.
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October 10, 2011
Cerner board member Denis Cortese, MD, offered both a diagnosis and a prescription for health care in the opening address of the 2011 Cerner Health Conference Sunday evening. Dr. Cortese, the emeritus chairman and CEO of the Mayo Clinic, argued that three domains within health care — knowledge, care delivery and payers — are largely disconnected.
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