Health information technology, electronic medical records, and modern surgical procedures that enable faster recovery are but three examples of how technology is changing the health care sector. RAND research has explored many facets of health care technology and advised policymakers and practitioners on best practices for cost savings and improved patient outcomes.
COMMENTARY
Across the country, electronic medical records, designed first and foremost to make health care delivery safer and more efficient, are proving valuable when disaster strikes, write Mahshid Abir and Art Kellermann.
REPORT
This report, by researchers from Partners HealthCare and the RAND Corporation, primarily describes the work associated with Task 4.8 of the Advancing Clinical Decision Support effort, a project intended to accelerate the effective use of computer-based clinical decision support (CDS) interventions to facilitate evidence-based clinical practice. Twenty-two CDS artifacts and 16 value sets were developed that cover the five CDS intervention…
JOURNAL ARTICLE
If consumer-directed health plans grow to account for half of all employer-sponsored insurance in the United States, health costs could drop by $57 billion annually—about 4 percent of all health care spending among the nonelderly.
PROJECT
The performance of health systems is a key determinant of the inclusiveness of economic growth. With Kenya and Tanzania as case studies, RAND Europe is exploring whether potential synergies between industrial development and health systems can contribute to faster and more inclusive growth.
REPORT
The federal electronic health record (EHR) incentive program includes clinical decision support (CDS) as a central requirement of improving health outcomes; however, a process for identifying and prioritizing the most promising targets for CDS has not been established. This report describes a protocol for eliciting high-priority targets for electronic CDS for individual clinical specialties and summarizes lessons learned.
REPORT
For nearly a decade, RAND researchers have studied how health information technology (HIT) stands to change health care.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
The use of dedicated anesthesia providers for routine gastroenterology (GI) procedures is seen as medically justifiable only for high-risk patients. Eliminating these services for low-risk patients could generate $1.1 billion in savings per year.
NEWS RELEASE
Researchers from the RAND Corporation and other institutions have begun pilot-testing a web-based tool designed to help parents and adult caregivers determine whether to seek urgent medical attention for a sick child with flu-like symptoms.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Federal and state agencies are investing substantial resources in the creation of community health information exchanges, which are consortia that enable independent health care organizations to exchange clinical data.
COMMENTARY
Providing physicians with cost data in real time automatically as a part of the electronic medical record could make them better purchasers for their patients and provide better value, writes Robert H. Brook.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Reports the results of interviews with primary care providers and specialist reviewers about the implementation of eReferral, an electronic referral system that creates direct communication between referring and specialty providers.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
In offices where e-prescribing was implemented, prescribers used information about formularies and drug benefits, but missing information reduced confidence in these resources and led to paper-based workarounds.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Natural language processing programs can "read" dictated reports and measure colonoscopy quality in an inexpensive, automated, and efficient manner.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
With or without electronic charting options, nurses spend about 19% of their time completing documentation, compared with all other categories of care.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
A panel of experts highlighted the complexity of issues surrounding development and implementation of a set of high-severity, clinically significant drug–drug interactions (DDIs) for use in electronic health records (EHRs).
PROJECT
A new online tool, called the "Unintended Consequences Guide," is available from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to help hospitals and other health care organizations anticipate, avoid, and address problems that can occur when adopting and using electronic health records.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
The authors develop a natural language processing (NLP) application to measure colonoscopy quality.
REPORT
Limiting the growth of health care costs while improving population health poses important and difficult challenges for policymakers. The paper considers innovation in drugs, devices, and methods of delivering health care, with an emphasis on delivery. The authors argue that policymakers should try to encourage innovative activities that are worth their social costs and discourage activities that are not worth their social costs.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Widespread implementation and effective use of e-prescribing in ambulatory care will require practice transformation efforts that focus on work process redesign while being attentive to effects on patient and pharmacy involvement in prescribing.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Current federal standards for hospital "meaningful use" of health information technology--which requires electronic medication orders for 30 percent of eligible patients--are probably too low to reduce deaths from heart failure and heart attack among hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries.
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