Imprivata Healthcare News Watch 2/11/13

For those of you still digging out of the blizzard from this past weekend and coping without power, heat and adequate parking, here’s one less thing to worry about:  Imprivata has your health IT news covered!

This week, we’re following stories about IBM’s supercomputer being employed to help doctors, even more penalties for hospitals in the future (as if there weren’t enough!), and family physicians’ major head-start in EHR adoption.

What are you reading this week?

IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare, Forbes - IBM's supercomputer, Watson, is being put to use in the healthcare business to aid doctors with clinical decisions. WellPoint's chief medical officer Samuel Nussbaum, Watson's first client, said that health care pros make accurate treatment decisions in lung cancer cases only 50% of the time. Watson, since being trained in this medical specialty, can make accurate decisions 90% of the time. Patients, of course, need 100% accuracy, but making the leap from being right half the time to being right 9 out of ten times will be a huge boon for patient care.

Boomerang Patients to Penalize Hospitals Under U.S. Law, Bloomberg - Fines are being levied against hospitals with high rates of patient readmissions under a provision of the Affordable Care Act targeting $8 billion in Medicare cost savings within six years. That has hospitals across the country going the extra mile to prevent the return of these boomerang patients.

Family Physicians Lead In EHR Adoption, InformationWeek Online - More than two-thirds of family physicians had adopted electronic health records by 2011, and the adoption rate is likely to surpass 80% this year, according to a new study in the Annals of Family Medicine which surveyed all candidates applying for the American Board of Family Medicine's certification.