Follow the Twitter discussion about the Cleveland Clinic #pesummit

If you're not in Cleveland, you're missing The 4th Annual Patient Experience: Empathy and Innovation Summit at the Cleveland Clinic.
May 19-21, 2013
Intercontinental Hotel & Conference Center, Cleveland

The Patient Experience: Empathy and Innovation Summit is a three-day, multidisciplinary conference devoted to exploring patient experience as a key differentiator essential to the future of healthcare delivery.

On Twitter, you can follow the discussion by following the Twitter hashtag #pesummit
There are some very interesting tweets coming out of this conference. For example:

Time spent on mobile apps exceeds the time spent browsing the web and will soon exceed TV watching - @smartpatientceo #PESummit #hcsm
— Cleveland Clinic (@ClevelandClinic) May 19, 2013

Patients that viewed Emmi had better HCAHPS scores.@ Cleveland Clinic #PESummit twitter.com/EmmiSolutions/…
— Emmi Solutions (@EmmiSolutions) May 20, 2013

Definitely agree "@tmerrick32711 By focusing on patient experience we can change healthcare overall!#PESummit"
— Garry Choy MD (@GarryChoy) May 20, 2013

The Physician's Evolving Role in Healthcare: Lead or Be Led

This is a guest post by Wen Dombrowski, MD

During medical school and residency I realized that individual physicians can choose to Lead or Be Led. Each of us can try to design and manage the systems of care we would like to see (whether care models or technology that enables them), or physicians can be victims of what others decide we should do (such as administrators, sales reps, or well-intended developers without user experience insight).

I recall over a decade ago there were critics who lamented the rise of HMOs and Pay For Performance would end the Practice Of Medicine as we know it. Various medical organizations encouraged physicians to run away from these changes so they could continue business as usual. But while many physicians had their head in the sand and academic faculty were often shielded from practice management realities, the business world continued to evolve with new budgets, rules, and technology.

There are parallels to then and now : physicians are facing unprecedented changes -- some embrace or at least reluctantly accept change as inevitable, but many physicians have told me "I don't understand what any of that ACA/ACO/PCMH/MU/ABCDEFG is about, so I'm just going to ignore it and just be a doctor." Then they are surprised when their hospital, state, and federal policies don’t reflect what they would want.

Read more »

Hospitals Slow to Go Paperless Despite Benefits

Guest Post: Hospitals Slow to Go Paperless Despite Benefits

If you are walking into an ER, you better have a reliable memory of your last doctor's visit, the medications you have taken, and any x-rays you've had in the last year. Unless you are walking into one of the very few hospitals in the United States that has gone paperless, your wait could be very long. This is because hospitals are still using an outdated method of managing information: paper.

Healthcare is far behind other industries when it comes to information technology and document management. Hospitals and patients could greatly benefit from the conveniences an upgraded IT system could provide. This isn’t wishful thinking or guesswork. The benefits for hospitals and patients have been proven.

In 2009, Johns Hopkins released a now famous statewide study that demonstrated the benefits of hospitals using paperless technologies. The study included over 40 hospitals and 160,000 patients and found a correlation between computerizing records and overall hospital safety and effectiveness.

The hospitals with the top paperless technologies in the state showed a 15% decrease in the odds of patients dying while hospitalized. Imagine if we could see this kind of decrease throughout the rest of the healthcare industry. Assuming this decrease would hold true for all US hospitals, going paperless across the country could save more than 100,000 lives every year.

Read more »

RP-VITA telemedicine robot may be coming to your hospital

The next time you go to the hospital, you may run into a telemedicine robot like the RP-VITA.  At ATA 2013,  InTouch Health & iRobot announced the first hospitals and medical centers that will be using the RP-VITA telemedicine robot. Here's a snippet from their press release:


Austin, TX (May 6, 2013) -- Top academic medical centers and leading healthcare systems across North America are now introducing their patients to RP-VITATM, the first FDA-cleared telemedicine robot that combines state-of-the-art telecommunications and AutoDrive technology. InTouch Health, the leader in acute care telemedicine, today announced at the 18th Annual American Telemedicine Association’s International Conference the first hospitals to integrate this new telemedicine platform into their TeleStroke, TeleICU, TelePsych, and TelePediatric programs. RP-VITA, jointly developed by InTouch Health and iRobot Corp. (NASDAQ: IRBT), a leader in delivering robotic technology-based solutions, is a class apart from any other telemedicine device available, providing a new level of ease of use and independence that frees doctors and nurses to focus solely on patient care and to forget the technology.

The first hospitals that will get RP-VITA include:



Dignity Health
Sacramento, CA

Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian
Orange County, CA

Instituto de Salud del Estado de México
Mexico City, Mexico

Ohio State Wexner Medical Center
Columbus, OH

Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center
Burbank, CA

Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center
Los Angeles, CA

St. Mary’s Medical Center
Huntington, WV

Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum

Don't miss the Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum
June 4-5, 2013
Washington DC

Healthcare IT News and HIMSS Media, the industry’s leading sources for news and leadership in healthcare information technology, have joined forces to present the Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum. This two-day event in the nation’s capital will gather leading providers, industry experts, solutions suppliers and key government officials.

As reimbursement shrinks and risk sharing grows, analyzing data to improve decision-making may well determine the winners and losers in this new healthcare landscape. That’s where the forum comes in. Through interviews with hospital CIOs and other providers, we know that questions abound about how to deploy analytics in a fashion that meets an organization’s business and clinical goals. With that in mind, we have designed the Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum to provide answers to those questions. Sessions will focus on peer-to-peer learning, case studies and best practices—practical, actionable information that can be taken home and put to use.

http://www.bigdatahitforum.com/

Pediatrics 2040: Trends And Innovations for the Next 25 Years

Don't miss this exciting event this fall:

Pediatrics 2040: Trends And Innovations for the Next 25 Years
October 3 - 5, 2013

Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa
Anaheim, CA


The current myriad of challenges such as cost containment, care fragmentation, healthcare reform, access to subspecialists, escalating costs and knowledge escalation face today’s pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists as well as hospital administrative leadership.

The emerging medical and technological advances as well as trends in the care of children in the coming era is covered in a comprehensive three-day academic program for all involved in the care of children for the next 25 years.

Learn more about this conference here.

ONC is hosting the Million Hearts Webinar on May 7

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is hosting the Million Hearts® Webinar on May 7th in honor of National High Blood Pressure Education and Stroke Awareness months.  Leading experts will discuss how they are using the latest health IT tools to standardize and improve the delivery of care to reduce the number of people with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, both leading causes of heart disease and stroke.


Tuesday, May 7, 2013 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM EDT

Register here.