Imagine a mechanical healthcare system in which each component interacts predictably with another to produce a predictable output that can be adjusted by tweaking a specific component. That system does not exist and treating the existing complex system as such sets it up for failure, according to a July 18 viewpoint published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Hospitals treating a sample group of 780 Medicare patients in October 2008 severely underreported adverse events, despite the fact that the states in which the problems occurred require rigorous reporting. So said Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) in a report released July 19.

A master patient registry could be made available to researchers if an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality request to create such a database is approved by the Office of Management and Budget.

The Community Oncology Alliance has moved a step forward in its development of an oncology medical home model, recently approving a set of 16 quality measures adhering to guidelines outlined by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

The proposed rule released July 6 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) supports long-term goals to reward providers for administering higher quality care at lower costs, according to the speakers of a July 17 CMS open door forum.

Gregory C. Reicks, DO, president of the Mesa County Physicians IPA, chairman of the regional health information exchange (HIE), Quality Health Network and family physician for 24 years, recently attended a White House/Department of Health and Human Services town hall meeting, representing the Colorado Beacon community. Reicks spoke with CMIO about the meeting and his Beacon experience.

The Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) released the results of its annual CMIO survey on June 28 at the Physician-Computer Connection Symposium in Ojai, Calif. Moving beyond the numbers, William F. Bria, MD, chairman of the AMDIS board and director of informatics at Shriners Hospital for Children in Tampa, Fla., shared his thoughts on the survey with CMIO.

Despite the increasing prevalence of EHRs in healthcare settings, automated care quality measurement has yet to become a widespread reality because care guidelines are not always specified, data are not standardized and much of the information required for automation is contained in unstructured formats, according to a research report published in the June issue of the American Journal of Managed Care.