Imprivata Healthcare News Watch

Monday always feels like a day of catch-up, doesn’t it? Digging out of the weekend’s emails, revisiting goals, resetting weekly priorities and it seems that 90% of meetings are held on Mondays. Not to mention there are 48 hours of industry news to catch up on. If the digital and social news era have taught us anything, it’s the news cycle never rests.

With that, Imprivata kicks off a new monthly blog feature, our Healthcare News Watch. This weekly post aims to share the news from the past few days that we’re keeping our eye on for the week ahead.

What are you reading this week?

Boston Globe, Steward Reshapes Mass. Health Care Business – Like everything else about for-profit Steward — robotic surgery, fixed-rate insurance contracts, managers working with patients to prevent hospital readmissions — the e-ICU is focused on innovation, efficiency, and finding ways to save money. It's a formula that has been reshaping the way business is done in the state's health care industry ever since Steward was formed by a New York buyout firm in 2010 to take over the struggling Caritas Christi Health Care chain. But whether the makeover will achieve its most important goals — making medical care less expensive in Massachusetts and making a profit for Steward — remains an open question. What is certain is that Steward has become a force in this critical industry.

InformationWeek, Hospital Rooms Get Smart – IBM and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have created smart hospital rooms that use advanced IT tools to make medical and nursing care more intelligent, faster, and safer. These rooms, which are jointly funded and operated by UPMC and IBM, are called SmartRoom and use real-time location tracking devices to bring patient information from the EMR to computer screens in the patient's room. Clinicians are recognized by the room with the help of ultrasound-enabled badges, which then allowed them to access patient data. These smart rooms also promise to speed up workflow. According to Smartroomsolutions, the technology is designed to eliminate between 50% and 70% of the "unnecessary effort associated with documenting routine clinical care."

FierceHealthIT, Federally Qualified Health Centers Not Maximizing HIT Use – Despite a documented potential for health IT to improve the quality of care at Federally Qualified Health Centers, researchers said that such facilities might not be maximizing its use. Their findings were published this week in a provisional study in the journal BMC Health Services Research.