Dear Healthcare IT Insider,
In the future, with all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave medical records, it seems likely that patients will be notified of actions required to optimize their lifetime health. How Big Brother-esque health maintenance regimes will be able to maintain government objectives of controlling healthcare costs is open to speculation. But automated notification of the need to schedule annual physicals, dental visits, vaccinations, and screening exams seems reasonable and potentially realistic within this decade.
This month's Insider Exclusive describes a computerized breast cancer screening outreach program designed to facilitate mammography screening reminders for patients of a large, multifacility health network. There's a lot to learn about Massachusetts General Hospital's Mammography FastTrack, a program that your organization may wish to emulate -- click here for the rest of the story.
If this subject is of interest, don't overlook a study conducted by Brigham and Women's Hospital that measured the effectiveness of automated reminders to both eligible patients and their physicians in increasing colon cancer screening rates.
Speaking of effectiveness, read about the ability of a pay-for-performance initiative to improve radiology report turnaround time at Massachusetts General Hospital in an article by staff writer Kate Madden Yee.
AuntMinnie.com is always interested in new ideas, and we thought the use of a wiki to provide 24/7 support to a lean staff maintaining a complex radiology IT department was ingenious. If you need a solution to manage every bit of current and historic information about IT operations, click here to read what the University of Maryland Medical Center did.
If you have innovations you'd like to share with the Healthcare IT Digital Community, send me an e-mail at [email protected].
