Content about Medical informatics

WASHINGTON — More than half of all healthcare providers who are eligible have received Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments for electronic health records, the Department of Health and Human Services said.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the department had exceeded its goal for 50% of doctor offices and 80% of hospitals to have EHRs by the end of the year. By contrast, the percentage of physicians using EHRs in 2008 was 17%. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 contained incentive programs for adoption of EHRs that went into effect in 2011.

NEW YORK — Retail-based health clinics, urgent care clinics, telehealth and traditional physicians may be increasingly competing to serve the healthcare needs of Americans but the real winner is the patient, suggests a recent article in The Economist.

BERLIN — The global market for mobile health app services is expected to reach $26 billion by 2017 as smartphone applications allow the mhealth industry to successfully monetize its services, according to a new report.

Global Mobile Health Market Report 2013-2017, announced Friday by Berlin-based mobile market research firm Research2guidance, found that top mhealth publishers manage to generate more than 3 million free and 300,000 paid downloads in the United States on the Apple iOS platform.

CAMP HILL, Pa. — Rite Aid has expanded its telemedicine service to 58 more stores, the retail pharmacy chain said Friday.

Rite Aid said the NowClinic Online Care service were available at stores in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The service gives customers access to care, via a secure online video connection, from OptumHealth doctors and nurses. The company originally unveiled the program at nine stores in Detroit in 2011.

Telehealth is expected to experience a sharp rise in the number of patients, according a new report by health market research firm IHS, which projects that telehealth will reach 1.8 million patients around the world by 2017.

NEW YORK — Telehealth is expected to reach 1.8 million patients around the world by 2017, according to a new report by healthcare market research firm IHS.

Widespread reliance on telemedicine to electronically deliver health and pharmacy services to hard-to-reach patients in remote locations is getting closer to reality. And in a fast-evolving health care system struggling to improve access to health services at a lower overall cost, that’s a good thing.

The potential breakthrough for remote-site dispensing and health counseling came in the U.S. House of Representatives. California Democrat Mike Thompson is sponsoring legislation that would eliminate barriers to telemedicine services for all federal health programs.

WASHINGTON — New legislation aims to increase access to telemedicine services through government-sponsored health programs.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., recently introduced H.R. 6719, the Telehealth Promotion Act of 2012, which would establish that "no [medical] benefit covered shall be excluded solely because it is furnished via a telecommunications system," allowing greater access to telemedicine services through Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Tricare, Department of Veterans Affairs and federal employee health plans.

ANDOVER, Mass. — More than 10% of Americans consider Web-enabled, mobile health apps a part of their health care and key to living long lives, according to a new survey by a division of electronics manufacturer Philips.

Royal Philips Electronics commissioned Opinion Research to conduct a survey of 1,003 adults, finding that 11% said that were it not for Web-based health information, they might already be "dead or severely incapacitated."

E-prescribing offers many well-known benefits to physicians, pharmacists and patients alike. Beyond the well-known patient benefits, real-time transactions with automated requests and responses promise to create efficiencies by speeding the medication ordering process, reducing or eliminating the back-and-forth communications between pharmacists and clinicians commonly associated with handwritten prescriptions.

New applications based on advances in telemedicine and mobile health technology are proliferating as pharmacy providers, physicians and health plans find new ways to connect with patients who are homebound or in remote locations. The result is to extend access to care, improve convenience and lower health delivery costs.


ATLANTA — McKesson on Tuesday announced it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Emendo, whose CapPlan Predictive Capacity Planning solution equips healthcare providers to optimize operational performance by intelligently forecasting patient demand. 

CapPlan also supports clinicians in their delivery of quality patient care by using a patient-centered, enterprisewide view of activity to make real-time adjustments for patient flow and staffed capacity allocations.