iNTERFACEWARE – IGUANA HL7 Interface Engine
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

iNTERFACEWARE IGUANA HL7 Interface Engine allows hospitals and clinicians to share electronic medical data via the HL7 data standard. It can map electronic health data between databases and application systems without custom programming.

Read the full product review


Medicare, Medicaid agencies plan IT overhaul
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are gearing up for an IT upgrade in 2011. According to this report in FierceHealthIT, part of the rational behind the upgrade is to improve the agencies' ability to share and exchange electronic medical records .. Read More

HIEs can save castaway electronic medical records and patient data
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

Patient medical records are a lot like castaways. Most are trapped in groups on small, isolated desert islands, the islands being proprietary medical systems, pharmacy software, and old-fashioned filing cabinets.

That’s what makes “trying to pull together an integrated view of your medical history … very difficult,” said Earl Jones, vice president and general manager for GE Healthcare eHealth solutions group. GE Healthcare and other … Read More

Internal medicine docs regain productivity after EHR deployments faster than pediatricians
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

Internal medicine practices enjoyed a slight increase in productivity within months of deploying and electronic health records (EHR) systems, while pediatricians didn’t return to pre-EHR productivity levels over the same time, according to a new study.

Productivity dropped across the board for all doctors after deploying EHRs by between 25% and 33%. But, according to a report in Healthcare IT News, after several months …Read More

Lack of EHR vendor support top meaningful use roadblock
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

That, according to a new Black Book Rankings survey of 4,000 healthcare providers. According to a report in Healthcare IT News … Read More




Patient portals provide near-real-time access to medical records – if clinicians actually input the data first
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

Among the requirements for Stage 1 meaningful use, hospitals and physicians must provide more than half of their patients with electronic patient data within three business days of the request. That may sound reasonable, but it’s a big change for most healthcare providers. Currently, under HIPAA guidelines, doctors have a month to respond to patient-medical-record requests and can provide them by paper.

“This is a huge jump from 30 [days] to 3,” said Steve Emery, director of product management at Alpharetta, Ga.-based healthcare IT vendor Healthport. “The only way this makes sense is if the records are electronic.” … Read More

Electronic health records and WikiLeaks
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

Dr. Westby G. Fisher says WikiLeak’s most recent data dump has implications for the digitization of medical records:

Day in and day out, I type huge volumes of information on my patients on a computer and my fellow physicians do the same. As a result, vast health care information warehouses are at the disposal of the government, insurers, and major health care institutions eager to become … Read More

When it comes to electronic health records, what’s in a name?
Jeff Kelly, Online Industry Editor

Some call them electronic health records, or EHRs. Others prefer electronic medical records, or EMRs. Still others go with patient medical records software, which, I guess, would be PMRS.

“The bottom line is that it’s an alphabet soup,” said Gartner’s Dr. Thomas Handler. And while it may seem trivial, what you call them actually matters, … Read More