Tues., February 26, 2008 | DigitalHCP.com | Archives | Advertising | Your Account | CHI Conferences | Subscribe |

Editorial Contacts

John Russell
Executive Editor

Allison Proffitt
Associate Managing Editor
 

Sales Contacts
For advertising information contact:

Alan El Faye
VP, Advertising Sales - CA, Western US, Canada, Pacific Rim
213-300-3886 

Kay O. Christopher
Regional Sales Manager, Advertising Sales -New England, North Eastern US
860-693-2991

Tom Loughran
Regional Sales Manager, Advertising Sales -Midwest, South Eastern US, Europe
781-972-5482

Link to Us! 
You are welcome to link to articles on our website. Contact Catherine Varmazis for details.

e-Prints & Reprints 
To post a full article from Digital HealthCare & Productivity or Bio-IT World on your website (not just a link), or for paper reprints, please contact:
Becky Mullaney
The YGS Group
717-399-1900 ext.110

 IN THIS ISSUE
Frist Argues for Health-IT and Market-Based Solutions 
Federal Privacy Framework Announced for Health-IT
CIO Survey Finds IT Implementation a Lower Priority
Managing Costs with Metrics
Deals, Deployments, and Short News 
 
 
 

HIMSS 2008 Keynote
Frist Argues for Health-IT and
Market-Based Solutions

By John Russell, Digital HealthCare & Productivity Staff

ORLANDO, FL — Former U.S. Senator Bill Frist (R, Tennessee) mixed politics, humor, and a call for health-IT advocacy in his opening keynote to HIMSS 2008 yesterday. Not surprisingly, he also championed market-oriented solutions to the current health care problems. More than 20,000 health-IT professionals are expected to attend the annual conference being held this week in Orlando.

“Politics matter,” he told the audience. Frist said he thought Senator Barack Obama (D, Illinois) would face Senator John McCain (R, Arizona) in the general election — “though I’ve changed my mind two or three times up to now” — and suggested their alternative visions for health care and voter reaction to those views will be important in determining who wins the general election. More...

 

HIMSS 2008 Keynote
Federal Privacy Framework Announced
for Health-IT

By Neil Versel, contributing editor

ORLANDO, FL — The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is developing a framework for healthcare organizations to follow in protecting the confidentiality, privacy, and security of individual health information, in an effort to foster the trust federal officials believe is necessary to spark widespread data sharing.

Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Mike Leavitt often talks of an interoperable “National Health Information Network” (NHIN) in which complete, relevant health records flow seamlessly between care settings, with the patient firmly in control of access to the data. “None of that will happen unless people are confident that the privacy and security of their health information are protected,” Leavitt told the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society on Tuesday morning. More...

 
 
 
 

CIO Survey Finds IT Implementation
a Lower Priority
By Neil Versel, contributing editor

ORLANDO, FL — Hospitals and health systems are looking at electronic medical records (EMRs) and other clinical systems more than most other components of health-IT as their organizations sharpen their focus on quality of care, according to an analysis of a survey of hospital IT professionals.

Of the 307 people — mostly chief information officers — who participated in the 19th annual survey of health-IT leaders by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), 40 percent named inpatient clinical information systems as a current IT priority. Nearly as many listed reducing medical errors and implementing EMRs as priorities, though the numbers for all three categories fell by 8 to 15 percentage points from last year’s survey. More...

 

Executive Q&A
Managing Costs with Metrics

By Cindy Atoji

John Distefano thinks he has a cure for what ails health care organizations, particularly health plans and payors. In a tough environment of increased medical costs, regulatory requirements, and competitive pressures, Distefano believes that business intelligence and informatics hold the key to improving operational efficiency. Distefano, vice president and executive director of health care payer services at BearingPoint, a management and technology consulting firm, says that for many payors, rapid consolidation has resulted in multiple, disparate information technology systems — systems that deliver vast amounts of data, but often fail to provide system administrators with the insights they need to make strategic decisions about the state of their businesses. Digital HealthCare & Productivity spoke with Distefano about using quality metrics to help drive down health care costs and using non-traditional data to measure outcomes.

DHP: What steps should health plans take to improve performance metrics?
DISTEFANO:
Part of transforming health care is not only the quality side but also the cost side. As a health plan, this means focusing on understanding their own value proposition to the marketplace; understanding what they could be doing to transform their own core administrative costs. This includes intelligently looking at what processes could be potentially outsourced, which is a very delicate decision that needs to be made on a case-by-case basis. Many organizations believe that outsourcing is a good way to accommodate an improved cost profile and at the same time potentially means losing an important connection point with their constituency or membership. So I think organizations need to look seriously at their own administrative cost structure from a process standpoint. More...

 
 
 

Deals, Deployments, and Short News
By Allison Proffitt, Digital HealthCare & Productivity staff

News, products, and deals from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting being held in Orlando, Florida, February 24-28. More...

 
TOP STORIES FROM AROUND THE WEB
 
Electronic Health Records for Non-owned doctors -- Managing the Project
Halamka Blog
 
Mayor Bloomberg Urgest Doctors of Adopt Electronic Health Records System
NY1 News
 
NYC Unveils State-of-the-Art Electronic Health Record Technology
Government Technology
 
Web Surfer, Heal Thyself
Newsweek
 
Cleveland Clinic and Google Collaborate on Health Record Pilot
Government Technology
 
Microsoft Launches Health IT Product Suite
e Health Insider
 
Therapeutic Associates to Leverage athenahealth's On-Demand Services and Network Platform
HealthNEWS Direct
 
Healthcare Costs to Double to $4 Trillion a Year
MyFox Kansas City
 
Philips to Restructure Healthcare Business
Healthcare IT News
 
Microsoft, SAP Join on Healthcare IT
Healthcare IT News
 
 

LIFE SCIENCE JOBS

Unilever - Mathematical Modeller (Research Scientist)
The ability to work in multidisciplinary teams alongside biologists, chemists and statisticians plus enthusiasm for learning new science is critical for the role.   For a complete job description and to apply, please visit:
https://unilever.recruitmax.com/

Intrexon Corporation - Software Developer
The software developer will work in a close-knit team to build, develop and deploy advanced bioinformatics systems in concurrence with advancements in our gene-based technologies.  For a full description and application:
http://www.dna.com/intrexon/careers.aspx.

GNS Biotech - Software Engineer, User Interfaces and Visualization
Candidate will work closely with the internal applications team and external customers to design and develop novel visualization approaches for ensembles of biological networks and to integrate GNS solutions with existing visualization tools.
  http://www.gnsbiotech.com/careers/openings/

GNS Biotech - Software Engineer, Platform Development
Candidate will work closely with the algorithm development team to add newly developed algorithms into the production platform and the biological applications team to define and implement new functional requirements for the platform.
http://www.gnsbiotech.com/careers/openings/

GNS Biotech -
Computational Scientist, Biological Applications
Candidates must have a combination of experience in the following areas: bioinformatics, microarray data analysis, algorithm development, statistics, machine learning, and network inference or reverse engineering methods.  
http://www.gnsbiotech.com/careers/openings/

GNS Biotech - Computational Scientist, Discovery Biology
Candidate will reverse engineer models from large coherent data sets.  In addition, candidate will complete genome-wide association analysis of disease and drug-response and develop methods to deal with population genetic structure, pedigrees, missing data and computational scaling.
http://www.gnsbiotech.com/careers/openings/

Software Engineer, Bioinformatician-  - ISB - Job #07-052
The Institute for Systems Biology’s (ISB) Computational Core seeks qualified candidates to join its growing bioinformatics team.  For a full description and application instructions, please visit
http://www.systemsbiology.org/careers.  ISB is an M/F/D/EOE.

Bio-Informatics Scientist -Van Andel Institute
Qualified candidates will have Ph.D. in molecular biology or related discipline.  Two years post-doctoral training and experience in bioinformatics analysis of high throughput biological datasets.
http://www.vai.org/employment/opportunities/881.

To have your job openings featured here, contact Lynn Cloonan for more information.

 Email to a Friend
PRESCRIPTIONS

Your Forum

Digital HealthCare & Productivity would love to receive your feedback and ideas for contributed commentary. Please contact John Russell for editorial Inquiries.

MARKET TREND REPORTS

Battle Between Best-of-Breed and Sole Source Continues
Given all the consolidation among health-IT suppliers in the last few years, more than a few big guns have assembled true, end-to-end integrated clinical and management systems. You want single source? You got it. Yet the ongoing national push for data and interoperability standards means it easier than ever to knit together best-of-breed solutions in Lego-like fashion. More

IT Outsourcing: A Game of Specialization and Global Reach
The low hanging fruit was harvested in the first wave of healthcare-IT outsourcing. Now, national and global companies report the biggest opportunities lurk in niches. Moreover, traditionally entrenched players like EDS and Oracle are ceding ground to new global companies, say observers. More

EHRs Forge Links to Practice Management S/W
Electronic health records are gaining ground, but slowly. Conversely the practice management software market, though unexciting, is steady. Efforts are now on to fuse the two. More

Trends in Medical PCs, PDAs, and Portable Workstations
Do healthcare professionals in your organization want laptop computers? Tablet PCs? Plain old desktop machines? Personal digital assistants? Sure. All can work just fine in clinical environments. More

Wireless Technology Use Jumps in Hospitals
While adoption of many health-IT technologies has stalled, the use of mobile and wireless technology has soared and the choices are proliferating. More

Does Asset Tracking Live Up to the Hype?
Asset tracking has become a hot technology. Indeed, makers of RFID systems – just one of the technology choices – claim to provide near instantaneous ROI. What’s the real state of the market? More

EXCLUSIVE WEBCAST

NEW! Life Science Webcasts from Bio-IT World and Cambridge Healthtech Media Group

Bio-IT World proudly introduces Life Science Webcasts -- a series of informal conversations with leading researchers and executives in the bio-IT and biopharma arena. This week, Dr. Jerald Schindler (VP, late stage clinical development statistics, Merck) discusses e-clinical research with Bio-IT World's Kevin Davies.

View the Webcast Now

 
 
 
 
 

Published by Cambridge Healthtech Media Group, division of CHI, Copyright 2008; All rights reserved. Digital Healthcare & Productivity may not be reproduced, electronically or in print, by any means, mechanical or electronic, in whole or in part, without written permission of Cambridge Healthtech Media Group, 250 First Ave., Suite 300, Needham, MA, 02494.
For reprints and/or copyright permission, please contact The YGS Group, 1808 Colonial Village Lane, Lancaster, PA 17601. Phone: 717-399-1900, ext. 110. Email: becky.mullaney@theYGSgroup.com