Healthcare IT News - September 2007 - (Page 28)

28 Healthcare IT News September 2007 ■ PHYSICIAN PRACTICES & AMBULATORY CARE www.HealthcareITNews.com believes that physician practices should be equipped with such systems. He said that evidence suggests CPOE systems seem to support adherence to guidelines that have the potential to influence costs and safety. “Implementing CPOE systems contributes to a culture in which computerized systems are accepted and [may] have a positive effect on various outcomes,” Eslami said. “We believe that the main aim of CPOE is increasing the quality of care and for that we should be prepared to pay the associated costs.” ■ More at eslamI Continued from page 24 at the University of Amsterdam’s Academic Medical Center and the paper’s lead author, says that the reason such claims cannot be made owes more to the lack of adequate research studies rather than the inadequacy of CPOE systems. “Our finding that there is not enough evidence [to claim] CPOE improves safety is primarily related to the fact that very few studies investigated effects of CPOE on outcomes directly related to safety,” Eslami told Healthcare IT News. Eslami’s team found that only four clini- encouraging more evaluation studies focused cal trial studies have been done that evalu- on outcomes which are more directly relatated safety in the outpatient ed to safety and to identify setting. Three of them mea“The main aim of CPOE and solve the weaknesses sured the number of adverse is increasing the qual- of CPOE systems,” Eslami drug effects and did not ity of care and for that said. “Common sense sugshow significant reduction we should be prepared gests that the net effect of in the number of ADEs. introducing CPOE systems to pay the associated A randomized controlled in outpatient settings is poscosts.” clinical trial is the most effecitive, but there is a need to – Saeid Eslami tive way of proving the value quantify this effect.” of a practice like CPOE, Eslami affirmed that while Eslami said, but there are prohibitive costs some overly enthusiastic claims about the associated with performing rigorous studies. benefits of outpatient CPOE systems cannot “Our research should be interpreted as be substantiated by scientific literature, he HealthcareITNews.com e ●Connect: eSlaMI 0907 Your Map To Community Integration CeNTeR Continued from page 1 Piedmont Medical Care Corporation Our vision: Hospital integration and referral processing with our medical community. What did we get? Physicians at 21 locations sharing single patient records and referrals using NextGen EMR’s enterprise platform. We got connected. We got NextGen. Single patient record Physician loyalty Patient safety e ● Connect: NeXtGeN 0907 nextgen.com/hitn Leading Health Information Technology experts agree that Electronic Document Management (EDM) is a key foundation for the EHR. Combining electronically generated data with scanned records provides an organized, centrally located, legally compliant medical record which is critical to improve efficiencies, patient care and cash flow. Let Alpha Systems help guide you with our safe and trustworthy EDM solutions. e ● Connect: alPHa 0907 The nation's leading healthcare providers trust Alpha Systems for rock solid EDM software and award winning scanning services. Our EDM solutions efficiently manage over 500 million electronic documents with another 1 million added each day. Proven. Secure. Compliant. www.alphaemr.com • 800.732.9644 pharmacists and patients. “We’re very excited to be part of this new center, and there are several quality and efficiency projects we hope the center will work on,” said Steven Waldren, MD, director of AAFP’s Center for Health Information Technology. “We think the center can help encourage the full leveraging of e-prescribing by physicians, rather than just partial adoption of the technology, which has been a problem.” SureScripts has committed $1 million to the project over the first two years (20072008), but Hutchinson said the center would look to other funding sources once its board of directors meets and begins to sketch out a research plan. Additional funding will likely be sought on a project-by-project basis, Hutchinson added. He noted that other groups had already contacted the founders and expressed interest in funding future projects. “We don’t want to do long, drawn-out research projects,” he said. “There are a lot of ‘low hanging fruit’ around best practices in e-prescribing that we can focus on. We would hope the initial projects to come out of this would be shorter, threeto four-month projects.” Discussions are already underway between the RAND Corporation and the center Kevin Hutchinson to develop a project that would demonstrate how certain features of e-prescribing and electronic medical record technology impact medication safety, medication use and labor costs for the physician practices involved. Michael Fischer, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the center offers “huge potential” to academic researchers looking for ways to increase the adoption of e-prescribing technology. “People throughout the healthcare system are recognizing that there is an increasing need to fund this kind of research,” he said. “There are all sorts of patient safety, compliance and cost-effectiveness issues that need to be studied, and the ability to bring diverse industry groups together is really important. The more collaborative an approach one takes in terms of systems improvement, the better the ultimate product will be.” SureScripts, which led the effort to establish the center, was founded in 2001 by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the National Community Pharmacists Association. The organization operates the Pharmacy Health Information Exchange, which facilitates the secure electronic transmission of prescription information between physicians and pharmacists. ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e ●Connect: CeNter 0907 http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=7679 http://nextgen.com/hitn http://www.healthcareitnews.com/eConnect.cms?id=7723 http://www.alphaemr.com http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/eConnect.cms?id=7724 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=7653

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Healthcare IT News - September 2007

Contents Alaska Sweep SiCKO Debate Data Exchange Rx EDITH knows Hold That Script IT in the Sun Breathing Easy IT on the Menu Ambulatory EMRs Identity Crisis

Healthcare IT News - September 2007

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