Based on interviews from physicians, academic institutions, hospitals and health systems, this paper details five strategic imperatives for anyone in the health care industry who wants their organization to face the future from a position of strength.

Every patient has a unique story. Dictated narrative reports have long been the preferred approach. As one doctor put it, “One of the most helpful lessons I’ve learned about being a physician is that we’re story tellers. We’re trying to capture the patient’s full story.” Yet the industry has created a crisis of capture around clinical narrative in the move to EHRs and other electronic clinical systems. Pursuing the legitimate need for structured data, a paradigm of template-based data entry has been pushed at the expense of rich narrative documentation. This white paper reveals how cloud-based speech understanding technology and services convert the physician narrative into a high quality and customized electronic record that improves the quality of clinical data, while accelerating and automating the documentation process.

A new era in healthcare IT has arrived! Even when physicians can’t physically be there, new advances in technology allow them to always “virtually” be on the scene to save a life - whether it’s in the middle of the night or on their day off. In this short video, you’ll watch how a cardiologist prescribes a patient the medicine he needs stat at 2 a.m. You’ll see how easily you can access clinical desktops from anywhere and access real-time info about patients as they’re getting wheeled into the ER. In addition, the video will show you how to go mobile instantly with desktops that follow users, review real-time ER caseloads and enable HD face-to-face telemedicine. Also, watch how this doctor uses voice recognition to update patient records and secure patient health information (PHI) on devices. Don’t you love living in the future?

While the HIPAA Privacy Rule covers protected health information (PHI) in all forms, the HIPAA Security Rule specifically applies only to PHI that is maintained, transformed, or transmitted in electronic form (e-PHI). The Security Rule requires covered entities to meet specific objectives and presents major challenges for virtually every covered entity in the HIPAA environment, no matter how big or small. Covered entities include health plans, health care clearinghouses, and healthcare providers. In addition, business partners and associates who interact with covered entities are forced to deal with the same security issues as covered entities. IT professionals, like you, know the amount of work involved in supporting HIPAA compliance. The members of your IT team have enough on their plates without assuming the role of HIPAA police, but the team can also appreciate that adding technologies for HIPAA Security Rule compliance is an opportunity to make improvements in overall IT security that increases the organization’s bottom line. Read this white paper, including results from the HIMSS 2010 Security Survey, to learn how to fulfill HIPAA Security Rule requirements and improve overall control and performance of your IT infrastructure.

Adoption and training are inextricably linked—your community hospital can only achieve the level of adoption you need with effective training. In our latest white paper on clinical system adoption, we address the 10 Keys for Training Success.