195,000 Die in the US from Hospital Errors

The research company HealthGrades Inc. is cited in “this CNN article”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/07/28/health.mistakes.reut/index.html “If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual list of leading causes of death included medical errors, it would show up as number six, ahead of diabetes, pneumonia, Alzheimer’s disease and renal disease,” Collier said. This study is more up to date than the 1999 IOM study showing 95,000 die each year in the US.

Canadian Provincial Medical Association To Use Open Source Platform For EMR Project

The Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association (NLMA) has announced its intention to develop its provincial electronic medical record (EMR) using open source software (OSS). NeLL, as the EMR project is known, will network all the province’s 1,000 physicians. In its first phase, NeLL will include electronic prescribing, billing, and charting. NeLL will run on a Linux desktop, which will be the default and only supported operating system on PCs shipped with NeLL.

The project will take an existing OS EMR and expand the functionality, contributing the results of the work back to the open source community.

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Brailer Hosts NHII Lovefest

Dr. David “Hercules” Brailer, MD, the National Health Information Technology Coordinator, wowed a standing room only crowd with a breathtaking pace of nonstop political and technical star speakers at the opening day of the 2004 NHII Conference. Featured speakers included HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Cisco CEO John Chambers, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. It was an NHII love fest, with successive speakers praising Dr. Brailer ever more effusively. Overflow crowds watched the proceedings on large video monitors in a big room across the hall from the packed main gallery.

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NIH announces a new health information infrastructure

In this announcement, ‘HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson today released the first outline of a 10-year plan to transform the delivery of health care by building a new health information infrastructure, including electronic health records and a new network to link health records nationwide. At the same time, he announced a number of new action steps to help advance health information technology immediately…’
Is Open Source part of the NIH plan?
It includes:
Appoint a Leadership Panel
Private sector certification of health information technology products
Planning the formation of a private interoperability consortium

NHII Tutorial

[NHII Pre-Conference Report]

Tuesday evening July 20th, 2004, the day before the NHII “Cornerstones for Electronic Healthcare” conference at the Washington DC Convention Center, William Yasnoff, MD, PhD, provided a two hour tutorial on the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII). Dr. Yasnoff is Senior Advisor to the NHII project at the US Department of Health and Human Services.

http://aspe.hhs.gov/sp/nhii/

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Continuity of Care Record standards expected by year’s end

Continuity of Care guidelines go to a vote The balloting is set to begin Sept. 1 on a Continuity of Care implementation guide for the healthcare industry, which means the guidelines could be in place before the end of the year. Source: Healthcare IT News / Bernie Monegain The link to the whole story is here This is a very promising attempt to set a standard for the core data of a continuouity of care record. Which includes i.e. “summary of the patient�s health status (e.g., problems, medications, allergies) and basic information about insurance, advance directives, care documentation, and care plan recommendations”