Typical medical laboratory reports could hardly be less personal. Whether they're for basic blood work or a battery of tests for serious disease, the black-and-white printouts of results--presenting a sea of cryptic abbreviations and numbers--remain largely indecipherable to the patients whose health depends upon them.
In the bucolic Upper Connecticut River Valley in New Hampshire an academic medical center is working to rewrite the book on healthcare with the help of predictive analytics, wearable devices and the cloud.
Senior officials in the healthcare sector took aim at the tech companies that provide electronic health records (EHR) yesterday, saying that many of those vendors employ proprietary standards and deceptive strategies to lock providers into their products and keep systems from communicating with one another.
The healthcare industry is in need of IT security experts to help manage the fast-paced growth of technology in the field. With the implementation of electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHR), data analytics, wearables, and health-monitoring devices, healthcare facilities are scrambling to catch up with the demand for staff to manage and support these technological advances.
Security has long been a primary challenge in the health IT market, and two new reports help illustrate the vulnerabilities surrounding some of the most sensitive consumer data.
Healthcare is continuing to experience a shortage of qualified health IT staff that, in the view of some observers, is growing worse. But few healthcare organizations believe that the solution is to lure IT pros away from other industries. In fact, most hospital systems and large physician groups would prefer not to hire any IT person who doesn't have extensive health experience.
More than six years after a bill aimed at spurring the development and adoption of electronic health records (EHR) became law, many observers complain that the technology has failed to live up to its promise.
Federal regulators are weighing reforms to widespread workplace wellness programs that could affect how personal data from consumer-grade fitness bands and smartwatches is kept confidential.
WASHINGTON -- If health technology is ever going to achieve the goal of lowering the rates of prescription drug abuse, developers and policy makers will have to do more to encourage adoption of electronic prescribing systems among healthcare providers.
With a bit of help from Microsoft and the Internet of Things (IoT), Swedish medical device company Aerocrine is helping doctors around the world diagnose and treat millions of asthma sufferers more effectively.
CIOs in every industry play tug of war with their executive peers. For healthcare CIOs, the game's often even more one-sided. In addition to pulling against the marketing, operations and finance departments, among others, they can face opposition from the medical side of the business.
Improving healthcare isn't always about state-of-the-art facilities or systems that bring patients through your doors. Sometimes, it's about meeting the patients where they live and work.
Telehealth stands among the healthcare industry's few technology success stories. It brings virtual care to underserved or remote locations. It gives facilities an opportunity to export expertise or, conversely, outsource costly operations. It cuts costs for healthcare systems as well as patients.
Samsung, WebMD, Apple and Google are all getting into the health application game. The aim is to help consumers see all their health and wellness data in one place – but will all that information be too much of a good thing?
Survey results from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's analytics arm says more than 80 percent of organizations use cloud services, primarily to host apps and data. Concerns remain, particularly around security and uptime, but most users seem optimistic.