Anthony,
First I must applaud your tenacity and focus to appeal to a targeted group. That focus has narrowed the readership in your eyes to “large hospitals and multi-hospital health systems.” I am an avid reader of “Healthcare Informatics” and usually read it from cover to cover, and therein lies the rub. I am a CIO for a mid-sized group practice and find practical insight in the use of technology from reading your magazine. Our practice has been using an EHR/EMR system for over eight years, paperless in all clinical areas with web interfaces for physicians developed in-house, not client server interfaces used by most vendors today. The EHR/EMR is a vendor out of Los Angeles and has been around since the early nineties. The system also includes all billing — done in-house and we use PQRI to maximize Medicare reimbursements. In addition, as in your article “Ready for Primetime” by Daphne Lawrence, written about Hoag Memorial, we at Prairie Cardiovascular use Xcelera from Philips for CT and CATH for a PACS system, moving to ECHO as I write this and have Nuclear planned for the near future. We also have multiple HL7 interfaces to systems like Cerner, Meditech and SoftMed to hospitals we are partnered with. Informatics technology permeates the clinical area to enable the physicians to be better and more efficient with what they do “treat the patients with care, expertise and respect,” while using the technology to eliminate errors. We also use Web based e-prescribing as well as integrate other clinical system like VascuPro, CardioPerfect and other clinical tools from vendors like WelchAllyn. As a matter of fact we have been a beta test facility for some of their software and interfacing to our EMR. My point is, your readership is larger than you might believe and for good reason, your solid reporting and eliminating sales pitches by providing factual, practical insight for those of us working so diligently to use informatics to improve healthcare. Please consider articles in the future that may transcend that “targeted audience.”
On another note, our physicians are extremely progressive recently our group treated an aneurysm on the splenic artery of a patient with a caged coil stent requiring 17 coils to treat the aneurysm. I believe they will publish on this technique soon.
Thanks for listening……jc.
John C. Collins
Chief Information Officer
Prairie Cardiovascular
Springfield, IL
Good publication!
I really enjoyed the article titled, “You Are Not Alone.” I find that in my early career, most of the issues surrounding Integration, funding, and staffing are my biggest challenges. Keeping all applications integrated and functional sometimes requires a great deal of finesse. Funding is exploited though licensing costs, and customization. On top of that, beta testing is going on without total realization of what that means from the customers point of view. Staffing in healthcare is staffing. Whether it's IT pros, therapists or doctors, healthcare can be a frustrating environment to work in and it leaves the final feeling that Healthcare and IT is a perfect storm. Let's just hope that staffing agencies and over regulation does not hurt the patient at the end of the day. Oh wait, too late! Thanks for writing the article it is nice to relate.
Craig Zollner
Director of Information Technology
Care Ventures/Flagship Rehabilitation
Cumberland, Md.
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In reference to: http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/identity
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In reference to: http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/not_alone
