'Back-Door' Base Closures
Biden Talks Loss With Fallen Troops' Families
Neely Out at GSA
More USPS Buyouts
Gimme My Discount! Deals for Feds
Buyout Watch: Who's Offering What
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
John Pulley
John Pulley has written the Health IT Update blog since May 2011. Prior to becoming a regular contributor to Nextgov, he covered technology for Federal Computer Week and Government Health IT magazines. He has written about government for Federal Times and Air Force Times, as well. Pulley has worked in journalism for more than 20 years. He began his career covering local government for regional newspapers. In addition, he served as a writer and senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education for seven years. In 2006, he founded The Pulley Group, an editorial services agency.
FCC Designates Health IT Bandwidth
May 25, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Hospital patients soon will be more comfortable, and perhaps have a better chance of recovery, thanks to a Federal Communications Commission decision to allocate bandwidth to low-power wideband networks that wirelessly monitor patients. The FCC decided on Thursday to designate bandwidth for Medical Body Area Networks (MBAN), which are still ...
Dictation Degrades EHR Accuracy
May 23, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Patient care is “significantly worse” when doctors dictate their notes into electronic health records compared with two other common forms of documenting care, according to a study published online this week by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The findings suggested that doctors “who more intensely interact” with ...
Wireless Medical Devices Pose Security Risk
May 21, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Health-care providers need “robust” security programs to offset risks to wireless medical devices, says the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “The expanded use of wireless technology on the enterprise network of medical facilities and the wireless utilization of [medical devices or MDs] opens up both new opportunities and new vulnerabilities ...
Not-for-profit Hospitals Invest in Health IT
May 18, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Health IT systems sit atop the capital-spending priorities of not-for-profit hospitals, according to a new report from Fitch Ratings. In its May 17 report titled “Capital Expenditure Trends Among Nonprofit Hospitals,” Fitch analysts say health IT investment was considered more important than physician-alignment initiatives, and investments in outpatient facilities, clinical-access ...
Paper Beats Electronic Records at Small Hospitals
May 16, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Size matters when it comes to hospitals’ adoption of electronic health records -- and so does location, according to a study in the journal Health Affairs. The title of the study says it all: “Small, Nonteaching, and Rural Hospitals Continue to be Slow in Adopting Electronic Health Record Systems.” Researchers ...
HHS Seeks Help With Health Exchanges
May 14, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The federal government is calling for suggestions on how to set up and manage a secure national network for exchanging health information digitally. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has developed a draft proposal for the national health information exchange. The request for information by the Health ...
Fast Access to Health Data as a Patient Right
May 11, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The next stage of meaningful-use standards for electronic health records should allow patients to almost immediately retrieve information from their medical records, the Society for Participatory Medicine says in comments submitted this week to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Urging CMS to adopt the mantra “nothing about me ...
National Coordinator Unveils New Health IT Dashboard
May 9, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The latest model of the federal government’s health IT “dashboard,” released today, puts the public in the driver’s seat when it comes to collecting and analyzing information from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. ONC is taking the opportunity to promote its health IT strategy on the ...
Telemedicine Improves Teletraining
May 7, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Telemedicine isn't just for treating patients without local access to specialized care. It turns out the video and data links between major hospitals and rural health-care facilities also can be used to deliver highly specialized training to medical professionals, according to a report released last week by the Kansas-based Midwest ...
Will 4G Catalyze Rural Telemedicine?
May 4, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Wireless 4G networks might be the best way to deliver telemedicine in rural areas, even better than wired broadband, a rural practitioner said this week at the American Telemedicine Association’s annual meeting. But neither is available in much of rural America. Outside of the country's metropolitan areas, broadband access is ...
