Improving Health Care in Schools: Innovative Program Integrates Electronic Records To Improve Student Health

Earlier this morning, Parmeeth M.S. Atwal, blogging for the Office of The National Coordinator, published an interview with Marie DeSisto discussing her role in implementing electronic health records (EHRs) throughout District 504's public schools. Ms. DeSisto, who is Director of Nurses at Waltham Public Schools, touched on many issues that the schools in her district experienced had when implementing and meaningfully using EHRs to improve student health. This interview sheds some light on the overlooked area of school nurses utilizing health information technologies.

We greatly encourage you to read the full interview, which you can access here.

Empowering Nurses to Implement Technology

Yesterday, Sandra Ng of advanceweb.com discussed how nurses are critical players in the success and meaningful use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). Ms. Ng asserts that nurses should be involved with both the planning and implementation stages of EMR utilization as it will make the system tailored to the needs of frontline workers; many of whom we will be responsible for inputting data.

Click here to read Ms. Ng's fascinating blogpost

Video: Standardizing and Collecting Nursing Data

Yesterday, blip.tv posted a fascinating interview with Peggy White, Program Manager of Canadian Health Outcomes for Better Information and Care, discussing the importance of collecting standardized nursing data for patient care. INQRI benefits from the utilization of improved nursing data which allows for greater scrutiny of nurse practices, and in turn, improved patient outcomes.

Click here to watch the video

Nurses Need Better Technology

Check out the recent guest blog post on KevinMD.com by ICU nurse and pre-med student, Jared Sinclair.  In his post, Sinclair talks about nurses' need for better electronic medical record (EMR) applications to improve efficiency and contribute to patient safety.

"Contemporary EMRs are only contemporary insofar as they are being sold in 2010. As far as the technology they leverage is concerned, they are relics of the 1990s (or worse). They are endless tabs of little grey boxes and drop-down menus without any visual cues to separate the meaningful facts from the JCAHO-compliant fluff. Where are the iPhone and iPad apps? Where is the ability to email one-click-generated PDFs to another provider? What about task-awareness? What about multimedia? Hell, why can’t I paste a simple JPEG into my physical assessment?"

Click here to read the post.

In the News... CMS Tests Impact of HIE on Healthcare Quality

by: Mary Mosquera, 01/31/2010
Government Health IT

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has set up two healthcare test pilots – one in North Carolina and one in Indiana – to show how healthcare quality is affected by the exchange of electronic heath records (EHRs) across multiple payers and providers in the two regions.

Click here to read the story.

Health IT and EHRs - Strategies to Improve Patient Outcomes

"There are lots of great ideas about how to use health IT and exchange electronic health information to improve outcomes and reduce costs in our health care system. The recent, unprecedented commitment of our nation to support the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) has accelerated the pace of conversation."

– David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P.
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

Click here to read David Blumenthal's new blog on health IT.