Imprivata Healthcare News Watch 2/25/13

A lot of us are participating in Oscar’s related talk this afternoon.  Whether you’re happy for Ben Affleck’s stardom with Argo, or shocked at Seth MacFarlane’s performance as a host, check out this week’s Health IT news below!

This week we are excited about health tech’s relationship with early adopters, the quest for HIT interoperability, and CPOE’s amazing statistics in regards to medical errors.

What are you reading this week?

How Can Health Tech Get Beyond Early Adopters to Reduce Care Disparities Among the Masses? CNNMoney.com - If you keep company with early adopter tech types, it might seem commonplace to book doctors' appointments online or track activity with any of several new wearable sensors. But while digital health is gaining ground, it still has a ways to go before its most innovative applications hit mass adoption. And as bleeding edge individuals and companies embrace new ways of receiving and delivering healthcare, it's critical to consider how new health technology can reach people in all communities – not just the country's elite pockets.

HIMSS Plans New EHR Testing Ground InformationWeek – Online - The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) plans to launch an interoperability innovation center in Cleveland's Global Center for Health Innovation. The HIMSS Innovation Center, set to debut in mid-October, will include an "IT ecosystem" for testing, demonstrating and validating new interoperability applications. The ecosystem will occupy 12,500 square feet in the building. HIMSS will also offer for lease 12,500 square feet for exhibitions in such fields as mobile devices, consumer-driven healthcare and evidence-based care. The exhibit area is expected to double in size by 2016.

CPOE averted 17.4 Million Medication Errors in One Year FierceHealthIT - Electronic prescribing through computerized physician order entry averted 17.4 million medication errors in the U.S. in a single year, according to researchers publishing in the Journal American Medical Informatics Association. But doctors and nurses aren't necessarily wild about the technology--nor are they convinced CPOE improves safety. A study published in JAMIA last fall, for example, found computerized physician order entry remains largely unpopular with doctors and nurses. And although their opinions improved slightly over time, neither doctors nor nurses thought CPOE improved care overall or increased productivity.